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I call this the painting problem. Painting the walls of a room seems easy to an amateur: You just buy a few gallons at Home Depot and slap it on. But a professi
by dreamcompiler 9y ago
I call this the painting problem. Painting the walls of a room seems easy to an amateur: You just buy a few gallons at Home Depot and slap it on. But a professional knows that prep, trim, and cleanup are 80% of the job and they take skill. Anybody can slap paint onto the middle of a wall. What's difficult and time-consuming are making the edges sharp and keeping paint off the damn carpet.
- markatkinson 9y agoGreat analogy. I tried to paint my own flat. Was a disaster.
- WalterBright 9y agoI've tried to hang sheet rock. How hard could it be? It certainly looks easy. A disaster for me, too.
- moreless 9y agoFor us non-english speakers - "sheetrock" == drywall. I find I can do most such works better than (average) professionals, but it takes a lot of time to learn, prepare, execute (+ sometimes re-execute) and clean. It all depends on when you are satisfied with the result.
- Jaruzel 9y agoI recently came across 'sheetrock' as a term and had to google it... For UK natives it's actually three steps: "sheetrock" == drywall == Plasterboard
- logfromblammo 9y agoI have also heard it as "gypsum wallboard", which is certainly most descriptive. I'm not certain whether the water-resistant, mold-resistant variety typically hung behind tiles in bathrooms is ever referred to as "wetwall" or if they still call it "drywall". Nor am I aware of whether anyone calls the foil-backed, glass-reinforced, fire-resistant variety "firewall" instead of "drywall". I wouldn't be surprised if obsolete and inapplicable names still attach to items with the same function. If we ever move to polyethylene film panels sandwiched with phase-change material for our walls, it might still be called "plasterboard" somewhere.
- marme 9y agoit is called dry wall because it is installed while already dry. Unlike the old technique of lath and plaster where you build up the wall with multiple layers of wet plaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lath_and_plaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lath_and_plaster
- fl0wenol 9y agoSheetrock is USG's trade name for a line of drywall products. Sounds like it's going the way of Kleenex, Band-aid, or Hoover.
- sokoloff 9y agoI'm a die-hard DIYer. I hire out drywall and blueboard/skimcoat work. Two guys who do that work everyday can do in a 6-hour day and ~$800 what it would take me two weeks and $300 in materials and their job looks 4x better than mine.
- at-fates-hands 9y agoI used to work for a home theater company. We were regularly working on newer mansion in the suburbs. If you ever want to see some dudes that work faster than fast, go hang out with a drywall crew. I remember showing up on a site, and the drywall guys had just started carting in a ton of drywall. By the time we left in the afternoon, they had cut, hung, taped and mudded over 3,000 sq feet of home, it was insane.
- juanmirocks 9y agoI feel you. I managed to paint my walls, but it took me much more time than expected and my flat was chaos for some weeks thereafter.
- cortesoft 9y agoSo you are saying edge and corner cases are the most difficult?
- chairmanwow 9y agoIn fault-tolerant distributed systems, yes; undoubtedly.
- metahost 9y agoGreat pun!
- kazagistar 9y agoNot sure if it's a pun, or the literal etymology of the phrase.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- d0mine 9y agoThey are also most common: «the high-dimensional unit hypercube can be said to consist almost entirely of the "corners" of the hypercube, with almost no "middle".» https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_dimensionality#Distance_functions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_dimensionality#Distan...
- marcosdumay 9y agoKeep the stuff from spilling all over the place is also between the most difficult things.
- warrenm 9y agoKeeping your buckets sorted is definitely important
- brisance 9y agoThis is Parkinson's Law of Triviality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality
- SOLAR_FIELDS 9y agoIt is frightening to see bikeshedding in practice. I used to work for a regional transportation authority that would administer hundreds of millions of dollars in federal/state/local road projects. Local leaders would monthly come in and sit at a huge round table (40-50 cities/counties/regional leaders) and vote on projects. 800 million dollar projects would sail through with almost no questions in the first five minutes, but then the leaders would spend the next two hours of the meeting debating about the $100,000 pilot project to help the homeless.
- crdoconnor 9y agoWhy? Do some of them have something against helping the homeless on principle?
- SOLAR_FIELDS 9y agoIn that case it was a jobs program (to help construct roads) and the rationale against it was that they were extending beyond their purview of what the commission was meant to do.
- philipodonnell 9y agoIsn't that sort of rational then?
- warrenm 9y agoDefinitely rational I think (at least, I hope) what OP was trying to get at was the relative irrationality of something 1/8000th the cost of the very expensive item taking a very long time to debate through (especially when $100,000 is most probably far less than many of those board members earn as a salary every year)
- kuschku 9y agoThat may be a bad analogy, considering painting your own apartment is something a great deal of people do, and often with good success. My parents (not in any way experts on that field) painted their entire house themselves, except for two rooms that were painted by a professional painter, and the professional painter left much worse corners than my parents. This was the paid-for result (ignore the dark corner at the bottom, that’s caused by the flash): https://i.imgur.com/s1VHV2W.jpg https://i.imgur.com/s1VHV2W.jpg
- misio 9y agoAnalogies don't always have to apply to your parents.
- kuschku 9y agoMy argument is that painting is a much smaller skill difference between a hobbyist and a mediocre professional. Actually good software engineering is a much larger skill difference.
- warrenm 9y ago>much smaller skill difference between a hobbyist and a mediocre professional. >Actually good software engineering is a much larger skill difference. Based on my years across various companies, the difference between "hobbyist" and "mediocre professional" developer/programmer is close to nil
- vanderZwan 9y agoAside from the "sample size of one"-issue: how much time did your parents take, and how much effort and preparation time, and how did that compare to the time and effort the professional needed? It could be a trade-off issue there. Also, note that this thread started with a comment about how many developers don't appreciate what the actual hard problems in their own line of work are, and how that produces poor results because of that. I expect that to be true of any profession that doesn't have some kind of rigorously enforced standard.
- DonHopkins 9y agoTrump once met a porn star who said she'd do anything for $130,000. So he told her: "Ok: Paint my tower!" It was all a perfectly innocent transaction.
- madshiva 9y agoA real hacker can fix is car, paint that wall, and can code too. There is no problem painting for me and many others who know how to use their hand. Is amazing when you talk to people and they are like: Did you do that? How do you know how to do that? Learn, try and you can do anything. As people did at every step.
- logfromblammo 9y agoThe hardest part is knowing when it is a better use of your time to hire someone else to do it for you. You can just follow all the same steps as you usually do: 1. Define the problem. 2. Determine the desired outcome. 3. Measure the existing state. 4. Note the foreseeable failure modes. 5. Plot the path from existing state to desired outcome as a series of reasonable steps, avoiding the failure modes. 6. Recursively analyze the steps, breaking them down into smaller steps if necessary. 7. Rework your plan as additional failure modes become evident. In my experience, yes, you can do anything, as long as you ignore costs. You can't, for instance, justify buying a specialized tool to finish just one job. The hardest part is really step 2.
- warrenm 9y ago>You can't, for instance, justify buying a specialized tool to finish just one job You must be new to DIY :)
- danieltillett 9y agoMy experience is a careful amateur painter is 1000% better than an average professional. Professionals are certainly a lot faster, but if you look carefully at their work it is in the main very shoddy. If you want a good result don’t skimp on the tools. Buy good quality brushes, rollers, filler, throws and paint. Also buy an edger to cut in the walls and ceilings. One final tip buy some of the disposable plastic liners for the roller tray so you don’t have to spend time washing out the tray at the end of the day.
- skate22 9y agoQuality cleaning solution and sand paper so your high quality paint doesnt peel 2 years later.
- danieltillett 9y agoYes I agree especially the cleaning part. The kitchen and the rooms close to the kitchen it is critical to clean and clean and clean. The prep should take longer than the painting. On the sand paper front make sure to spend money there. Cheap sandpaper last 2 nanoseconds and does a terrible job.
- pluma 9y agoNot sure where you're from but in Germany there are industry standards professionals have to adhere to. Sure, there are sloppy professionals like in any other job too but if they adhere to the industry standards, the result will be pretty much what you expect and they're not allowed to take shortcuts that result in lower quality work. On the other hand, coming from a country that takes its trades extremely serious, I was shocked about what I observed every time I visited the UK. It seems the expectations vary drastically between different countries (though I'm sure there are quality professionals in the UK too).
- danieltillett 9y agoI am in the land of the shonky tradesman - Australia. Not only are they massively overpaid, they make the UK tradesmen look like gods.
- ataturk 9y agoActually, there's nothing that difficult about painting after the first one or two jobs anyone with half a brain can figure it out. "Painter" is the #1 job role for alcoholics. Every paint can opener is also a bottle opener.