The Tyranny of ‘The Plan' (2013)(chrisgagne.com) |
The Tyranny of ‘The Plan' (2013)(chrisgagne.com) |
My only reservation is that the OP fails to mention that some workers died during the construction of The Empire State building: According to the builder, "only" 5 workers died, but according to a newspaper, 14 workers died.[a] No one in the developed world would want to finish a project faster and for less money if the cost has to be measured in human lives -- expect in extreme circumstances, like war.[b]
See also: https://patrickcollison.com/fast .
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[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_State_Building#Construc...
[b] In some parts of the world, projects are routinely finished faster at the expense of human lives. For example, according to https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/nov/27/qatar-death... , between 6,500 and 15,000 workers died, and more were injured, to build all the stadiums and facilities in time for the World Cup in Qatar, a tiny country in the Middle East / Western Asia with a total population of under 3M people.
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EDITS: Added " -- expect in extreme circumstances, like war" to the last paragraph, and a link to Patrick Collison's fantastic page with examples of "people quickly accomplishing ambitious things together" and thoughts on why projects take so much longer today.
People—including some here—choose risk to life for greater productivity, all the time. Every advocate of going back to the office, in places without excellent public transit or walkability, is proposing to trade some serious micromorts for extra productivity (driving's dangerous).
So comparing "directly dying from construction" to "commuting in a car" is a big reach.
Diet, stress, physically-taxing-if-not-directly-fatal jobs, cancer-linked chemicals, pollution, etc. Tradeoffs made at both the societal and individual level every day.
Even in cars, consider the difference in attention "death from direct failure of the vehicle or manufacturer" gets compared to the more-random "accident that could've happened to anyone" increased-death-probability cases.
And that ties us neatly back to construction! We have many more things in place for construction safety - from regulations to equipment to practices - but it doesn't prevent there from being any loss of life, still. We just don't want to go backward.
Maybe having more food delivery guys on the road is worse than more commuters, for public safety? Let's wait and see how 2022 did.
Are you sure of that? If the pandemic brought me any surprising new insight, then it would be how big the part of any given population is with hundred thousands dying if it just inconveniences them a little less. It needs no war, it needs people not being able to go to the hairdresser for a month.
[warning: auto-play video]
It is an interesting history of the Mohawk ironworkers who built NYC. I came across another exhibit once that said that the ironworkers originally took the jobs because, culturally, they appreciated the risk and heroism, and then it became a tradition of the tribe. In fact, it was probably this risk tolerance that kept them working without harnesses and lifelines for as long as they did.
At the end of the above article, it says that 30-50 ironworkers still die each year.
"Overall, 15,021 non-Qataris died in the country between 2010 and 2019, according to the government. A Guardian analysis in February 2021 found that more than 6,500 migrant workers from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka had died in Qatar since the award of the tournament. The death records were not categorised by occupation or place of work."
It's a normal number considering Qatar's 3 million population is 90% expats.
this is about ten times the average death rate for young people today but it still doesn't seem like an unacceptably dangerous workplace environment in the sense that if you worked in an environment that dangerous all your working life you'd still make it to retirement age with about 90% probability
that's a similar level of risk to smoking cigarettes, but of course you can't make a living smoking cigarettes, so i think skyscraper construction is somewhat more morally defensible
we aren't talking about the mines of potosí or something here
Depends. I think the Manhattan Project killed more people (not including using the bombs in combat).
WRETCHED! I FN HATE the the world cup (FIFA) --> one of the most corrupt institutions.
The conditions of the living quarters for the workers for FIFA on the world cup builds are horrific.
Plus, they wouldnt pay the workers, would seize their passports and beat them.
No safety equipment, and extremely hot working conditions. Some of the temps were as high as 125F and these guys are doing really hard physical labor.
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Actually there are a bunch of vids on the conditions:
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=working+conditions+of+build...
We have a problem. People can't get from one area of town to a neighboring area because there is a river in between and no road. So let's build a bridge.
[Long discussion of how to plan to build a bridge in the real world]
Now, let's do it in software.
We're going to start by focusing on the problem to solve: get people from A to B. With software, the solution isn't necessarily as obvious as it is in the physical world. Maybe we need a bridge. But maybe we need a ferry. Or a helicopter service. Or maybe we should just move the two pieces of land closer together. Or freeze the river.
Customers speak in terms of solutions: I want a bridge. I want a bigger kitchen. But with software we know to be wary of this: unlike the physical world, the users of software often do not have a good intuitive understanding of what's possible. So while they speak in terms of functionality and solutions, it's our job to root out the real problem and come up with an appropriate solution - which we might also not have a good intuitive understanding of.
"They didn’t have design loopbacks because they had extremely experienced builders. The builders knew what they were doing. They had been building skyscrapers for between 30 and 40 years and they understood what they had to pay attention to and what was possible and what had to be designed in what order to eliminate the loopback. Now, all the computers in the world: they’re not going to substitute for deep experience. I propose that if they didn’t know what they were doing there’s no way: they would not have had the chance to hit that kind of number."
How many cities out there today have as many builders building skyscrapers at the same pace as they were then? Is there a way to get that speed back without the same sort of practice?
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The workflow/independent stuff is also very interesting, but similar to the above question, it's tough to draw exact parallels to software. We've all seen big waterfall projects fail, and the "design floors on the fly independently" aspect has a lot of similarities with rapid iteration, etc, but software is somewhat different in that the labor and the design are the same - there isn't a "steel team" and a "concrete team" etc that can work completely independently, I don't think.
"Create the schedule and then figure out the project" is probably a super useful takeaway, though.
No.
Practice is the ONLY way to get good at anything. Doesn't matter what it is.
A seminal paper is On the Criteria To Be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules by David Parnas.
If you have not a stable system, then there is again no point in setting a goal. There is no way to know what the system will produce: it has no capability.
As we have already remarked, management by numerical goal is an attempt to manage without knowledge of what to do, and in fact is usually management by fear.
Anyone may now understand the fallacy of “management by the numbers”.
In fact this is my typical feeling with all Gantt charts.
in contrast, "workflow" is akin to kanban in this context. you start with constraints (in this case time and money) and then design the system to those constraints. mary, the speaker, mentions that they had 4 different, decoupled workflows, which helped them avoid those pesky cascading delays. workflows are process oriented (repeatable events), so steel construction, for example, was thought of as an separate repeatable (if varying) process (swimlanes, in kanban parlance) as they went up in height. kanban also focuses on realtime learning and adjustments as well as just-in-time inventory systems (important to steel being delivered on time, like using 2 different suppliers to make sure there were no delays).
this is the stuff you learn in operations class in business school (or some engineering programs), as did chris (the author of the article/blog), who went to ucla anderson.
> in contrast, "workflow" is akin to kanban in this context. you start with constraints (in this case time and money) and then design the system to those constraints. mary, the speaker, mentions that they had 4 different, decoupled workflows, which helped them avoid those pesky cascading delays. workflows are process oriented (repeatable events), so steel construction, for example, was thought of as an separate repeatable (if varying) process (swimlanes, in kanban parlance) as they went up in height. kanban also focuses on realtime learning and adjustments as well as just-in-time inventory systems (important to steel being delivered on time, like using 2 different suppliers to make sure there were no delays).
That sounds like a plan to me...
The plan is a procedural instruction list. It lacks consistency. It is whatever procedural set of things happened to have been written down. You wouldn't plan to reuse it like you would with the function because it only applies to that specific issue
That's hiw I understood it from the guys who's job it is to make money by selling auto insurance anyways.
aren't these both random 'accidents that could've happened to anyone'
do you maybe think that the foreman on a construction site sometimes picks one of the employees and orders him to get killed that day or something
I was a Title Runner when I was 18 in Reno. The Clarion had been purchased, and renamed Atlantis - and they were adding on/remodeling it...
I was driving by and there was a crane lifting a pile of I-Beams to the top of the tower... and as I was driving, I looked and thought "Damn, that would suck if they dropped that"
THE CABLE IMMEDIATELY BROKE and all the beams fell like 15 stories!!!
I got really freaked out and said "Ill never focus on disasters like that again."
Luckily nobody was injured, but I was mentally scarred.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=joe+rogan+annie...
I think the story of the submarine/Polaris missile was more interesting. They produced the plan and basically ignored it, and the PERT planning exercise has subsequently been cargo-culted for years.
whether it's waterfall or agile shouldn't really matter. in agile, there is planning, but often it's workflow based (tracking flow via story points, or what not).
If one defines plan to mean "We schedule everything up front and then stick our fingers in our ears and say 'la la la la' when reality conflicts with our imagined schedule" then of course plans are bad. Similarly if one were to define agile as "a system that is incapable of delivering any feature that takes more than 2-4 weeks to develop" then agile would be bad too.