This is the sixtieth episode of Season 2 of The Broke Architect Podcast!

This show is brought to you by the ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Global Architect Alliance (GAA)⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. 

In this episode, we talk to ⁠⁠Valentin Mănăilă, an ex-Architect who studied in the UK but is originally from Romania. He has now pivoted to become a Software Engineer at Schneider Electric. He is fast becoming a digital nomad and as such can work from any location, this year he will work from four different countries. We discuss how easy you can make the switch into TECH.....what are you waiting for?

We discuss why Valentin left the profession and moved into TECH. We talk about the LOW COST training required and how architects have many of the transferable skills required in TECH. We talk about this and much more including how he has now become a mentor to those in architecture who want to GET OUT!

Please REMEMBER the Podcast is supporting the important work of The Architects Benevolent Society, which was founded in 1850 and exists to support the architectural community and their families and can help architects in a range of ways during their working life, or once they have retired. https://www.absnet.org.uk/get-help/ 

FUNDRAISER APPEAL: Please donate to the Broke Architect Podcasts JustGiving page: https://tinyurl.com/637k88se

Links of where you can find Valentin:
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/valentin-manaila/

Mentoring: https://adplist.org/mentors/valentin-manaila

Twitter: https://twitter.com/valMn_cc

This podcast has now been referenced in keynote speeches at RRBHQ, Architects Journal, BD Online and GB News.

Before I start the podcast, I would just like to share some news.

The Brock Architect Podcast is now raising money for the Architects Benevolent Society and I have set a target of

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Are you an architect and Are you f***ing broke?

If the answer is yes, it's what I've suspected for many years as I am indeed an architect myself.

This podcast is about debt in the profession of architecture and I want to hear from you.

Are you just surviving month to month with no extra money for savings?

Or are you seriously broken in debt and stress and worry about your income?

Or does your wife, husband or significant other earn substantially more than you which gives you a great life given the ability to choose your clients when you work and who for?

Or have you attained financial freedom in architecture?

If you're in the first 2 categories surviving month to month or facing financial difficulties?

How is this affecting your mental health?

Are you suffering from depression or even despair?

Please share, subscribe and comment to support the channel.

I have with me today Valentin Menela who was an architect until fairly recently but is now pivoted to become a software engineer at Schneider Electric.

He is also a mentor, but I will let Valentin go into all of this.

Firstly, welcome to the second series of the Brock Architect podcast.

And I just want to ask, how are you today?

Yeah, this is the podcast I wish existed back when I was in high school, you know, when we're making those long-term decisions, very important, your work is very important.

Oh thank you so much, that's good to hear.

Maybe we can start with just, if you could tell me a little bit about your background and firstly why did you want to study architecture?

Sure so I'm from Romania, I lived there until I graduated high school.

So, yeah, when I was 10, I started drawing, I started sketching my favorite characters at the time were Dragon Ball Z and Pokemon.

So I kept drawing through school as a hobby and then with time I started focusing on stuff like graphic design.

I was doing a bit of lithography printing, got into graffiti and competitions around that, mural arts.

So yeah, initially I was going to go into graphic design.

That was about until kind of year 10, 11.

But I then discovered architectural drawings and I was just hooked on those.

For me, they were really expressive and very clear in their communication and then their intent, particularly the, yeah, the perspectives really caught my eye.

I then went ahead and trained during my final year of high school.

So basically outside of school hours and in architectural perspective, drawing, rendering, history, geometry.

And this was with a professor at the University of Architecture in Bucharest, and he was training people to get into it.

A question I ask this question to most guests is, you know, did you know what the pay was like before studying architecture?

I had no idea what the pay was and I didn't really care.

I was totally enamored with drawing, the creative side of things.

And the pay kind of, at least the thought about pay, kind of took care of itself.

So at the time, people around me considered architecture kind of a high status type of profession, like a doctor or lawyer.

So everyone around me kind of implied that architects will make big money.

So yeah, I was ignorant and that was a big mistake on my part right there.

Can you please talk about your journey through architectural education?

What university, I think you might've mentioned that, did you attend and what was your experience like there?

Sure, so initially I trained to get into architecture uni in Bucharest and I did get in with a full scholarship, however a year later circumstances brought me to London where I kind of started over.

So my journey through architecture is a typical 1 for anyone listening here in the UK, which is following the RIBA system or stages to qualification part 1, 2 and 3.

Initially, I did my undergrad at University of East London, and I really loved it.

I had a really inspiring tutor, David Bass, which we're still in touch.

He really motivated me and yeah, I had a great, great time.

Financially, I had to sustain myself throughout.

So I was working part-time in the evenings and on the weekends in the university library so basically I was working Monday to Sunday either for uni or to support myself but nevertheless it was a great time.

Right at the end of part 1 I got my first job and I kept this job for a very long time and I remember I was really happy because I was being paid to do what I really enjoyed.

Yeah, working hard and studying and working, that is tough.

You began working as you said for a private practice in I think it was Wimbledon you know what was it like working there and and can I ask again how was the pay?

It was a small, small practice, local projects, local, yeah, as I said, local practice.

So we got to know each other very well throughout the years.

Initially I started on 20K, that's gross before tax, in 2013, which was considered good for a part 1.

I then worked 2 years there as a part 1 and I was getting involved in all aspects of the business.

So the admin side of things, ordering things to actually running projects.

So yeah, I had my fingers in all aspects of the business.

I was gaining a lot of responsibility and yeah I was pretty much running 2 very small projects kind of house extension type things.

I did that for 2 years as I said I went on to do my part 2 at London Met, London Metropolitan, while working a couple of days as well in the same office.

However, I did not enjoy the part 2 at all.

I felt it was more of the same as part 1 and all I wanted to do was focus on my real projects in the office and by this time I had a good understanding of the difference between academia and actual practice.

So right there I was disappointed with the architectural education.

And I felt like it wasn't preparing me in any, any more, at least in any useful way for the realities of architectural practice.

Again, some of my colleagues had different experiences, so that's just my personal experience there.

What I can say is that I learned more from the 1 of the NHBC standard technical manual than I learned from doing my part 2.

So that right there, I felt was a bit of a waste of time.

So then after this, I went to part 3, again, typical kind of trajectory for architects here in the UK and I did that at University of Westminster.

I really loved learning about the business side of architecture, contracts and law, you know, setting up your legal entity, fee structure and fee proposals and you know the bigger picture was kind of finally starting to click with me.

My experience in practice also helped with that because I was exposed to a lot of these things already and yes I was you know delivering projects on-site for the same practice.

I was working really hard but getting really stressed in the process.

And as I understand it you burnt out in 2019 and you you quit your job and went traveling.

While you were traveling the pandemic hits what what happened next?

Sure so as I said I had this job as a part 1 part 2 part 3 you know stepping stepping stone moving up the the ranks so to speak however yeah I just burned out.

It was my only job, it was everything that I knew about practice and I wanted to take a break, kind of reset and look for something new.

It was summer of 2019 when I decided to take a sabbatical and I was gonna take 6 months off.

And I did this until March, 2020, when I had to stop traveling and return to London because of the pandemic.

And you struggled to find work and many of your friends lost work but you then began to teach yourself code.

Yeah sure I guess this is where my story gets interesting.

So I started looking for a job, it was March 2020.

I actually went to a few interviews, but there weren't the kind of practices that I wanted to join or they were too far from where I was living or for various reasons, you know, I didn't want to just jump into my next role.

However, as time progressed, I think it was April my friends were were being furloughed or losing jobs.

And this kind of gave me gave me a lot to think about, particularly how vulnerable the profession is to large kind of economic downturns, because we're part of this chain that is very fragile.

By now, I had seen the bigger picture already, what it's like to manage clients, to get planning permission, prepare those technical packages that take a long time and deliver projects, all while keeping a positive cash flow, which is hard.

So things like outside of my control were kept changing like timelines slipping, cashflow running low, which really increased the stress.

I could also see that the REBA had set out the pay scales, basically setting my saving as an employee, and that's with the amount of stress and effort it takes to deliver a project against the compensation that is out of you, in front of you, yeah, was a tough kind of pill to swallow.

So for the first time in a decade I had realized that architecture, well what architecture really is like and yeah I did not enjoy what I saw.

So then I started looking back at my travels and how I felt during that time and That freedom really put everything in perspective for me.

And I had to, yeah, I drew a conclusion and that was a simple conclusion for me personally, was that I was trapped in London now because of my career choice.

So basically I had reached the top of the wrong, you know, mountain career-wise.

I now wanted to become fully location independent and now I had to, yeah, basically start over.

It was in September, 2020, I think, when I decided to teach myself how to code.

I also knew that I didn't know what to complete another degree.

I'm still paying for my, you know, student loan, student finance.

And I just checked and the interest rate has gone to

So every month you're not paying for your student loans, it's accruing.

And I'd love what you said there about the RRBA salary pay scales.

It's it really stops people getting greater salaries, it seems, because a lot of practices seem to seem to be using it to say, right, okay, we'll pay you based on this pay scale, this amount, and that's what it's just a blocker really for me.

Then you began to work again, part-time for a friend and continue to develop your software engineering skills, but the familiarity of architecture pulled you back.

Yeah, So after my decision, I took a part-time job and this was with another architect that was growing.

He could, however, not afford to hire someone on a full-time basis And I wanted to focus on teaching myself how to code.

So that was the perfect arrangement for both of us.

We worked together for about a year and a few months.

Initially, I started working on a part-time, fully remote basis, which was great.

I could be anywhere and learn how to code.

I already knew what I was doing at this time.

I was doing a lot of planning applications.

I was familiar with the software, the processes, you know, I was kind of running with it, which was great.

However, 1 of the projects I was working on went live on sites, a really big project in central London.

And yeah, I pretty much fell back into doing architecture full time in order to manage the site pretty much for this architect that was, you know, working on other projects as well.

So unfortunately, I had stopped coding, which is not great.

The pay was good and I wasn't really stressed because I was freelancing, I was not emotionally attached to the project.

However, I could see myself slowly slipping back into architecture and getting that trapped feeling again And I wasn't going to let that happen.

And so to accelerate my learning and my growth into programming and software, I started looking at software engineering boot camps and there are some boot camps that are funded by the department of education.

So I yeah I started looking at those since I didn't want to start another degree.

And I can understand it with your student debt there, but please tell me how you managed to get on a free tech boot camp training course.

So this is where, kind of what you put out there you know the universe gives back so I was actively looking at these boot camps and so on so these alternate alternatives to getting into tech.

By this time, it was over a year since I started working in architecture and I was ready to make a move out of architecture and kind of full-time coding.

It was the Instagram algorithm that presented me with an ad for a full scholarship from a digital skills education provider here in London.

They are called BrainStation, they're a Canadian company.

And yeah, it was that time when they just opened their first campus here in Europe, in London, Shoreditch, where I live.

And I applied, I passed the coding tests, the interview and got in.

The bootcamp started soon in January 2022, so a month later.

I remember After getting in, I remember I had to sit down with myself and pretty much I was afraid to jump into this.

I was comfortable with my architecture job.

But for that evening, I really was about to say no to this, you know, once in a lifetime opportunity.

So thankfully, I said yes, I accepted my role, my spot.

And I went home for Christmas and then and then I started in January.

I put about 700 hours into that bootcamp.

It was full time, Monday to Sunday pretty much, but I wanted to make it happen really badly, so I gave it everything I had and it worked out.

I've been working as a software engineer now for over a year.

Knowing what I know now, I would never have gone to university to be honest.

I would have been so much further ahead in life, in my career and so on.

So if you want to learn have a great career or you know be an entrepreneur and make money everything is available for you at a fraction of the costs online.

The education system in my view doesn't teach you the skills that are important to succeed, or at least they didn't taught me, like personal finance, health, nutrition, you know, critical thinking, starting a business, whatever.

By the time you learn all of these realities, and in my case, the realities of running an architectural business, in my part 3, it was too late.

Yeah, the education system really teaches you how to be an obedient employee, consume more than you can afford and, you know, get into student debts and consumer debts and so on.

By the time you know it, you're running around in the in the rat race.

That's what happened to me, I'm sure to many others.

Wow, what a wonderful description of how you've moved into tech, you know, and I'm sure people are wanting to know what was your starting salary as a software engineer?

So I had negotiated my salary so the range was 35 to 40 and I just asked for the higher range.

So 40k for context is the same salary that I had left architecture on in 2019.

I had 6 years of experience that was relevant.

I'm now over a year in my first role I already got a promotion and a significant pay rise.

The salary is good, however the reason I did what I went through this career change was location independence So I have a lot more flexibility now and I'm currently working, you know, 4 times away from London a year.

So, so far I've been to a few countries and I plan to go to Greece and Egypt in autumn and work from there.

And of course, Romania, where I can spend more time with my family.

Next year, I plan to leave London and travel and work remotely on a full-time basis.

I think you would struggle to do that, not just only doing architecture, but on an architect's salary, working remotely.

I don't think that's appropriate or even possible, but you never know.

What aspect though of your architecture training or skills are transferable to the job you do now?

And also how fast can you pivot if people out there listening now wanted to do that?

Sure, I mean, everyone's journey is different.

Architecture is a great education and I'm very grateful for the skills it gave me amazing skills like design, work ethic, problem solving, you know, systems thinking, abstracting, making information super clear, simple.

These are all relevant to programming in my case, but not only to programming.

So, for example, I made loads of qualified architects have successfully transitioned into UX UI, which is user experience, user interface in tech.

And I also this is also known as you know product design this transition is fairly straightforward for architects as the skills are directly transferable so yeah I recommend everyone look into it You'll be surprised how familiar and easy it can be to make the switch as an architect with the skills that you already possess.

For me, it took me 18 months since the moment I decided to transition till the moment I was fully employed.

But again, that's my story and my timeline, only because I got sidetracked by my part-time architecture job that turned into full-time architecture job and so on.

You can do it much faster depending how much you want it, but also, yeah, there's a certain amount of discipline that's involved.

If you don't have that, you can look into kind of boot camps, which give you a framework to operate within, which could accelerate that process.

Can you please tell my listeners about this?

So it's actually during, well, actually before the boot camp in architecture practice, I was mentoring work experience students, considering a career in architecture.

During the boot camp, because I already had a little bit of self-taught experience, I was helping my peers with their coursework as well.

So again, that brought me a lot of joy there.

After the bootcamp, I'm still involved with BrainStation as a mentor for them.

So I help guide people that are considering a career in tech.

I use ADP list, which is a platform for mentorship.

You can find me there and I have some free slots on Wednesday.

So if you want to chat or some advice, you can find me there.

And yeah, I can help you show how useful your skills as an architect can be, you know, outside of architecture.

do you want from your career in software engineering and also what money do you think you'll be earning in say 15 years time?

Great question so it's very personal I think to everyone but I already have everything I want from my career, which is flexibility.

Everything else is a bonus for me in 15 years time as a software engineer, I'll be earning way more than an architect with similar experience.

However, for me, it's, as I said, more about having the options and the flexibility to operate on my own terms.

Do you regret getting out of architecture at all?

As I said at the beginning, I was ignorant for the longest time.

I was following this path that was set in front of me, you know, Rebook part 1, Rebook part 2, Rebook part 3, and I never really stopped to question any of it.

So my only regret was not doing it earlier.

I'm 33 but you know it's never too late to do your own pivot if you want to do it.

So it was during my time at London met that we as part twos were asked to speak to, you know, school, high school students considering a career in architecture.

So we went into this room with them and almost to kind of help pacify them about, there was this whole movement about mental health issues, particularly within architecture.

So, yeah, we were talking to these students about our experience and basically telling them, oh, you know, it's not that bad.

And yes, it's hard work, but, you know, it's really creative and rewarding.

So coming out of that meeting, I felt really bad because I was kind of in a way lying to these students, it wasn't what I had experienced, but I felt that was the agenda that was being pushed by the uni at the time, so yeah, there's that.

It's only when we hear stories like this that we, that people can get a real understanding of what it really is like to study architecture and experience architecture.

And I just want to say the number 1 episode was about someone who's moved out of architecture.

Yeah, it's really important to get this stuff out there for people to make truly informed decisions.

Because the system, looking at the system from outside, it's very enticing.

It looks very, you know, with all the end of year shows and with all the, you know, journals and the star architects, it's very easy to fall into this story or this image or this trap.

Yeah, when I first started architecture, I thought I was going to be a star architect.

6 years later, I ended up working and falling in love with conservation and working with existing buildings.

So I'm just interested in this 1, you know, what do you do to de-stress if you do get stressed?

So funnily enough, I had to get out of architecture to realize how stressed I really was and I can say happily that I haven't been stressed since I left architecture.

I've been working hard but there was no stress attached to it.

I have loads of time outside of work to think, to plan, to work out.

Very involved with the tech community here in London.

I'm running a small photography business as well, architectural photography.

I'm currently doing a course on product management, where I'm learning about startups, launching and managing my own digital product.

I don't plan to stay an employee forever.

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