Heh, when I worked as a designer/CAD monkey I once spent about a week learning basic autoLISP and putting together a couple of very simple plugins, despite having literally no programming experience. Actual nightmare. Added bonus, the plugins weren’t really all that useful as they duplicated tasks that only took ~30s each, down to maybe 10s with the plugin. They were nifty and I am proud I did it but god damn. I had thought they would take maybe an hour or so each. I was wrong.
Hey I wrote a whole suite of those when I started at my job. It was a pain just finding the documentation for autolisp…
Tools ended up saving us a couple hours on each project, but then we switched to ArcGIS Pro and I had to rewrite them all lol.
Luckily that’s Python, and pretty decently documented online. Now the tooling does about 60% of the drafting work for everyone and the beauty is that we just end up doing more work!
Oh wow, I was doing some structural detailing work. I’ve dealt with survey data just for laying out structures (including once in a national park, which… Never again) and that was bad enough! I can’t imagine using AutoCAD in a context where GIS would be more appropriate (which I am very broadly familiar with from my degree, that I did after resigning from my designer gig)
Yeah, we were doing large scale FTTH network design and tracking each fiber with a spreadsheet until I wrote some auto routing extensions lol. It saved the company and made everyone about 50x more productive, but pay only went up moderately, $16/hr - $25/hr
This is MUCH easier to do in ArcGIS since we can directly pull in county data for permitting now
They make programmers sound like calligraphers.
Just yesterday I had to comb through a 17-ft roll of parchment looking for a dropped semicolon.
That sounds more fun than a lot of other jobs I’ve had tbh
Heh, when I worked as a designer/CAD monkey I once spent about a week learning basic autoLISP and putting together a couple of very simple plugins, despite having literally no programming experience. Actual nightmare. Added bonus, the plugins weren’t really all that useful as they duplicated tasks that only took ~30s each, down to maybe 10s with the plugin. They were nifty and I am proud I did it but god damn. I had thought they would take maybe an hour or so each. I was wrong.
Hey I wrote a whole suite of those when I started at my job. It was a pain just finding the documentation for autolisp…
Tools ended up saving us a couple hours on each project, but then we switched to ArcGIS Pro and I had to rewrite them all lol.
Luckily that’s Python, and pretty decently documented online. Now the tooling does about 60% of the drafting work for everyone and the beauty is that we just end up doing more work!
Oh wow, I was doing some structural detailing work. I’ve dealt with survey data just for laying out structures (including once in a national park, which… Never again) and that was bad enough! I can’t imagine using AutoCAD in a context where GIS would be more appropriate (which I am very broadly familiar with from my degree, that I did after resigning from my designer gig)
Yeah, we were doing large scale FTTH network design and tracking each fiber with a spreadsheet until I wrote some auto routing extensions lol. It saved the company and made everyone about 50x more productive, but pay only went up moderately, $16/hr - $25/hr
This is MUCH easier to do in ArcGIS since we can directly pull in county data for permitting now
Someone tell Epic it’s been like 30 years since anyone used a punch card at least