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You can plan, design, and engineer around things you don't know. Civil engineers have been doing it for a while now, maybe we should keep notes.
by mfukar 10y ago
You can plan, design, and engineer around things you don't know. Civil engineers have been doing it for a while now, maybe we should keep notes.
- alfonsodev 10y agoSure you can, but do they always deliver on time ? There are may cases that come to my mind like the new Berlin airport or Panama canal's expansion.
- mfukar 10y agoI don't know whether civil engineers can make accurate estimates. I focus on my own craft's problems. I suppose they too can make inaccurate estimates just as anybody else. However, delivery dates and deadlines are somewhat removed from estimates: they are the subject of a compromise between a client and a supplier whose relationship with the actual engineers is also a bit detached. To keep myself from rambling, I'll say this: making accurate estimates and connecting them to timely delivery are two huge, but different, problems.
- pdimitar 10y agoCivil engineers don't have to reinvent 50% of their craft every several weeks when yet-another-new-form-of-concrete is invented however. Their craft is for the most part very static, well known and well documented. It's only up to the particular man/woman to be well-versed professional. In the modern programming you work in constantly changing conditions and you have to be on the loop of the latest changes even if you don't incorporate them in your work.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- mfukar 10y agoYou can't say we reinvent our craft because at this point all we have is some vague empirical ways of pseudo-sciensing the shit out of everything. We don't invent yet-another-new-form-of-concrete either, but we do constantly rewrite our tools because apparently we can't stick to a good way of organising them that has worked for us in the past, we constantly lay abstraction upon abstraction with no second thought (web dev frameworks, everywhere!), and we provide half-assed, incomplete, untested "tools" for everyone else to colour up some bar on a mildly popular website. Software development is not engineering, at this point, it's fashion. That's nothing to be ashamed of. Fashion has been developed and affected even mathematics. The difference is mathematicians had already figured out a solid, rigorous foundation for their work that allows them to indulge in fashionable techniques and tools. We haven't. This is all irrelevant to the point I was making, though. :-)
- pdimitar 10y agoSemantics, my fellow human. ;) What I meant is that each week/month somebody wants us to think differently about age old problems. It's not exactly helping matters, I think most of us will agree.
- mfukar 10y agoTotally agree, and it's useful. We need people to challenge established assumptions from time to time.