> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://log.desipundit.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Effort-Driven Quality? - URL: https://log.desipundit.com/effort-driven-quality/ - Published: 2026-09-01T14:42:41.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-01T14:42:41.000Z - Author: PM - Tags: Personal, Tech, Macro In my previous life, I was an architecture student. Well, actually, in the late nineties. Or, as the kids these days call it, the late 1900s. Architecture school, if nothing else, is hard and time-consuming. All-nighters are common right from your first year, and it doesn't stop until your ninth semester. Yes, our undergraduate education lasted five years with a mandatory semester-long internship in your final semester. Not only did you have to be creative all those years, but you also had to work your ass off, hunched over the drawing boards, trying to artistically recreate what your mind visualized. But essentially, years of architecture education had instilled in several generations the rigors of working hard, and you would only fall behind and drop out, which many of my classmates did, if you didn't put in the effort. But now, if you remember, this was the late nineties. India's economy had opened up just four years before I started college. Computers were slowly becoming commonplace. However, they weren't commonplace enough for most of my classmates to have a computer at home. Parents relented and bought one only if you were doing computer engineering. I was one of the fortunate and privileged ones who had a dad who, although he didn't want to learn anything new, wanted to own the latest gizmos. He bought a computer for his office first for mostly accounting work and then, thanks to the rampant piracy in Indian markets at the time, got one with AutoCAD installed. That coincided with my first year in architecture school. So while I was struggling to keep up with my more artistically talented classmates, I was fiddling around on my dad's office computer at night and started learning AutoCAD on my own. By the third semester, I could draft a decent floor plan in AutoCAD, and I hesitantly asked my professors if it was okay to use it for technical drawings (building construction, working drawings, etc.), while still doing the artistic rendering for architectural design classes by hand. A second stroke of privilege and luck was that my professors were younger guys who had left a traditional college to set up a new college that I attended. They enthusiastically approved my request. Soon I was churning out drawings and making modifications in less than half the time as my classmates, leaving me with time to work on more artistic renderings, perspectives, and fancier stuff that you did on top of basic line drawings to gain those extra points that were so desired in final semester rankings and juries. Although my professors approved, my classmates did not. They didn't seem pleased that I was "using the computer to do the work for me" and that I wasn't "really doing original design work" if I used AutoCAD. After all, my college caricature featured me with a large computer monitor for a head and a long nose. To mollify them and prove them wrong, I also spent time in the studio doing some drawings by hand. But by that time, I was spoiled by the convenience of neatly editing my drawings without any sweat or pencil smudges. I realized that in their head, although not entirely their fault, they equated spending time and effort with doing quality work. If you hadn't spent several hours drawing and re-drawing your designs throughout the night, you hadn't really done your work to earn any praise. This was regardless of the quality of your design and original concepts. As the years passed, I learned to disregard my classmates' taunts about "not doing it the right way" or "not spending enough effort" (aka time). I eventually did all my work in AutoCAD, including my design dissertation, in my final semester. It ended up as one of the top three dissertations across the University of Mumbai's ten architecture colleges, and I was invited to present it at the National Center for Performance Arts (NCPA). This was early 2000, and the world had clearly moved on; now, they even offered AutoCAD classes in our college as an after-school (college?) class. Some of my classmates, recognizing the winds of change, had started using AutoCAD for their work, but still not enough to use it for their college submissions. Today, or rather even just ten years later, almost 100% of my classmates are using AutoCAD at their jobs or firms. No one would hire them if they said they didn't know AutoCAD or preferred to use drawing boards and their hands. They still did great work designing excellent buildings all over the world. Some of them are even full-time design digital rendering consultants. No one has doubted their ability and creativity. After all, the whole world was working that way now, so no one questioned them. As for me, I moved on from architecture almost immediately after I graduated, choosing to pursue a public policy degree in graduate school in the U.S. I had dabbled with 3DStudioMax toward the end of my architecture college years and if I had stuck with it, I would've been churning out walkthroughs/flythroughs in my early career as an architect, things that were effectively considered magic and stuff that movies were made of. Instead, I just used computers to write policy papers and to write and run code for statistical analysis. I hear people did regression analysis by hand and then with punch cards. But that experience in college helped me realize that people often conflate effort and time spent with the quality of the work you do. If they hadn't seen you labor over something for long periods of time and experience struggle or frustration, they didn't think you deserved what you created. After all, I still had to come up with designs in my head, and I just used the computer to visualize them much faster (and neater) than I could by hand (and dare I say, more accurately). Plenty of such tools have existed throughout history. The first invention, the wheel, was probably the first such tool to cut time and effort. Have humans ever really made anything with just their hands, without any tools? Didn't the ability to invent and use tools differentiate us from the apes in the evolutionary race? I can only think of Circe in the *Odyssey* turning men into pigs with her bare hands as sans-tools magic. What other tools are some people using today that others are deriding them for?