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> I wonder how we, humans, collectively build extraordinary monuments while we individually rest on stilts My take is that we used to have brilliant engineers

> I wonder how we, humans, collectively build extraordinary monuments while we individually rest on stilts My take is that we used to have brilliant engineers in the time where computational ressources were scarce (60s, 70 , 80s...), and they thought out their design thoroughly starting with a fucking paper and pencil. Aerospace indutries still rely on the designs from these times. But now engineering seems to be : let's ask my computing power what is the good design, with little further questioning.

Gravityloss 8y ago
There were a lot of failures and accidents back then. But in general, designers did get more experience because there were more aircraft programs and they were way faster. So if you designed, say, landing gear, you might have done quite many during your career. It was more "agile" in that sense. Nowadays companies can not go so quickly to production. The whole business has turned into oligopolies both in the main integrators and the suppliers.
noncoml 8y ago
Brilliant engineers are still there. We haven’t gotten stupider as a species in 30 years. It’s the economics that changed. As people say “They don’t build stuff like they used too anymore”. First we started going cheap on the materials. Now we are going cheap on the engineers too. Why pay a senior “brilliant” engineer $$$$ when a fresh out of college “average” engineer can write the “same piece of code” for $$
- ptidhomme 8y ago
  Indeed, and I'd add that we are going cheap because we can, thanks to computing power. As a matter of fact : computing tools make a lot of things easier and cheaper (which is good). But the setback is a tendency to "laziness" in the whole process...
- noir_lord 8y ago
  > “They don’t build stuff like they used too anymore”. In fairness part (but far from all) of the reason we don't build stuff like we used too, is because we have much better understanding of material limits so we don't need to over-design structual elements like we used to. How that understanding of material limits feeds into design obsolescence is where I do get annoyed though. With everything we know now we could (obviously) build things better (for whatever criteria you chose) than they did 50 or 100 years ago, if that was the goal but it rarely is. My favourite piece of civil engineering in the world (because it's nearby and I've ridden over it many times) was built in 1980 though (it's the exact same age as me) and its still awe-inspiring to look at. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/Humber_Bridge_Sunset_Wideshot.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/Humber_B...
  - dx034 8y ago
    The problem is that if a company gives customers (both b2b and b2c) the choice between a cheaper product with minimal guarantees vs. a product that is indeed better and can last longer, not enough customers will choose the better (more expensive) product to justify development cost (there are exceptions obviously). Partly, companies are even forced if the lowest bidder for pre-defined specification gets the contract. I believe there are more than enough engineers and companies that would like to build better and more durable products but demand just isn't there.
    - tracker1 8y ago
      The problem is you can't trust anything/anyone any more... Brands are generally trusted until you get burned by one. And then they relabel or buy out another brand to burn. I often make choices that are anywhere from 50% more cost to 200% if I'm relatively certain I'm actually getting a better product. Unfortunately that trust is usually limited and even then, you often don't have a good trust case. There are also times where I look at industrial options for comparison, as that's often usually skewed towards more solid/maintainable production. Though again often means more expensive. I tend to find the best value (my own experience) about 2/3 up the pricing scale for whatever products I'm looking at. If I could find appliances in general with a 15+ year warranty (that didn't have weird loopholes), I'd be more inclined to buy. Unfortunately, they often don't cover interface boards, and even then they redesign in often incompatible ways each year and stop making the previous version entirely.
  - rjsw 8y ago
    As someone who has spent most of their working life so far trying to make it easier to store data on materials, I'm not sure things have progressed all that much. I do work with people from Boeing (and Airbus) but they are not yet using all the features of stuff I wrote 30 years ago.
- bambax 8y ago
  > “They don’t build stuff like they used too anymore”. Okay maybe, but we have been saying this literally forever.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  I think it may be that brilliant engineers still exist somewhere, but I suspect they're less likely to go into aerospace than in the 50s, 60s or 70s. Heck or even the 40s. Immediately after the war aerospace was red hot - there were countless countries and companies putting out new jet designs - both commercial and military. The competition and pace was intense and there was quite some cachet and public interest in aviation. Since roughly, I guess, the 90s aerospace is rather settled and a very mature market. There's only a few major players left, and very very few new products; many of those are variations on the previous. Not nearly as much place or appeal for the brightest stars.
  - cstross 8y ago
    No, there's more to it than that. Firstly, from 1903-1968 aerospace was in a period of exponentially improving performance (range, speed, altitude) comparable to Moore's Law. But from the mid-60s onwards the rapid improvements stopped, as developments hit hard limits imposed by material science and thermodynamics: it's hard to get a material much stronger than carbon fibre or titanium alloy, it's ridiculously hard to go faster in air (drag increases faster than the square of speed: if you throw more energy at the problem via your engines it comes out in the form of friction-induced heating). Secondly, there have been huge incremental improvements since 1968. Consider the 737 series. The 737-100 had a maximum range of 1540 nautical miles on 17.86 metric tonnes of fuel; today's 737MAX-10 can do 3850nm on 25.94 tonnes of fuel: it's 72% more fuel-efficient. It's also gone from 118 to 204 seats, so about the same upgrade is passenger capacity. The cargo capacity has almost doubled, too. This being HN, the point of comparison should be an Intel-cpu laptop circa 2009 with an equivalent laptop today. The headline clock speed is probably similar (stuck around 2.4GHz), as is the number of hardware cores. The modern laptop probably has more RAM and more storage, but only by a factor of 2x or 4x. But it has double or triple the battery life, 4x or 8x the pixels on screen, a screamingly fast SSD instead of a rotating-platter drive, and a GPU that the OS can offload a chunk of work onto other than simply accelerated graphics. It looks disappointingly similar, but if you could give your 2009-self your 2019 laptop they wouldn't be in a hurry to give it back again. There have also been huge improvements in overall safety, the 737MAX MCAS problem aside; compare accident rates today with accident rates in the 1980s, let alone the 1950s if you want an eye-opener. (Of 1010 Boeing 707s delivered, there have been 173 hull losses in accidents.)
- LoSboccacc 8y ago
  > Why pay a senior “brilliant” engineer $$$$ there are very few brilliant engineer of yesterday whose job role today is to train the next generation of brilliant engineers so that their vast experience doesn't get lost in time; the brilliant engineers of today have to relearn their experience walking the same mistakes, so that even companies that pays those premiums for senior engineers will have to face the same generational problem as everyone else, because they don't want to waste highly expensive professional to something as mundane as training on the job.
- avip 8y ago
  >We haven’t gotten stupider as a species in 30 years I'm honestly not sure that's true. On top of anecdotes (in my grandfather's generation, the norm was to fluently speak 3-4 languages), go ask any STEM prof. with 20+ mileage about the general math, science and logic literacy of students nowadays.
  - impendia 8y ago
    I'm a math professor at a US state university. I once asked one of my older colleagues whether our students had gotten better or worse over the years. About the same, he said.
  - jcranmer 8y ago
    > On top of anecdotes (in my grandfather's generation, the norm was to fluently speak 3-4 languages) I'm not aware of anyone in my grandfather's generation that can speak more than one language fluently. The fact that my grandparents grew up on farms on the edge of the Dust Bowl may have something to do with that, but I rather suspect you're attempting to compare a tiny subset of the population in the past against the majority of the public today.
    - avip 8y ago
      I agree and that’s why it was framed as an anecdote.
  - spacenick88 8y ago
    That's almost certainly "rosy past" bias. Even Aristoteles is said to have complained about the terrible youth.
  - cafard 8y ago
    I think that professors judge their own generation by their peer group, and the current generation by their classes.
- philpem 8y ago
  There's also the prevailing management theory that "all staff can do the same job" -- I've seen this in various perverted and butchered variants of Lean and Agile. The theory is sound -- at least two engineers on a project should know how a given functional unit works. It's a practice for lessening the impact of "bus factor", where you have one engineer everyone relies on because they're "the one person in the whole company who understands it". The issue is when this kind of thinking reaches management, and you see someone being pushed into a role when their skill set is radically different to what's needed. And then there's surprise and finger-pointing when things (inevitably) go wrong...
- guatepeor4 8y ago
  Probably a lot of diversity hires too, with lower IQ. Maybe some womynz who tech are in the management roles. It's amusing to watch how a culture piously self-desructs.
  - reitzensteinm 8y ago
    If this disturbing march towards the lowest common denominator continues, eventually Boeing may even hire you.
    - guatepeor4 8y ago
      I am not applying.
  - sctb 8y ago
    Obviously we've banned this account.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - guatepeor5 8y ago
      Good job! Crimethink should not be welcome here.
- vkou 8y ago
  Here's the fun bit. A lot of the brilliant engineers that worked on incredibly important historical projects were not getting paid $$$$. Only in silicon valley ad-tech do 'brilliant' engineers make 40 times more then the janitor.
- ubercore 8y ago
  I'm glad we don't build stuff like they used to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joMK1WZjP7g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joMK1WZjP7g
yiyus 8y ago
> But now engineering seems to be : let's ask my computing power what is the good design, with little further questioning. I see this quite often at the undergrad level. Even for the simplest problem that can be solved with a pencil and a couple of calculations, many students launch their finite element software and blindly trust the results, even if it is telling them something obviously wrong, like orders of magnitude larger or smaller than expected, or with the opposite sign. I acknowledge the problem, but I do not know where it comes from, or how to stop it.
- majewsky 8y ago
  I don't find that particularly surprising. Engineering students want to learn how to build machines to find solutions to everything, so it's intuitive that they would place a high confidence in a solution provided by a machine.
  - yiyus 8y ago
    Good observation. There is a nice analogy to programming here. The same that one of the main tasks of the programmer is to handle errors, one of the main tasks of the engineer is to know the limitations of the tools he is using.
  - C1sc0cat 8y ago
    With no back checking?
    - majewsky 8y ago
      That's why I said "engineering students", not "engineers". Not blindly trusting your outputs is (or, at least, should be) part of the curriculum.
- salawat 8y ago
  Is this for real? That's startling to me. I don't really feel like I "know" something well enough to bother with the overhead of developing computer code until I can at least get the essence of it down on paper. Computers are for enumerating and increasing confidence in proofs. I find pen and paper to be far more creativity friendly.
Cthulhu_ 8y ago
I think that's a bit unfair; designs have gotten so much more advanced and efficient in part thanks to computational design. The efficiency, range and maximum weight that airplanes can carry has pretty much doubled since that time. However, the original comment and the video it is a reply to explains a bit of the countering force; economy and competition. It's management that pressures the engineers to cut corners, basically. I don't doubt the Boeing engineers are some of the best people in the industry. I'm very much skeptical of management (and whipping them are shareholders) that optimize for time and by extension profits.
robbiep 8y ago
But we do. Look at SpaceX. Landing Rockets, crew dragon going to be half the cost of starliner. It’s just that LargeCorp eventually has the profit motive as the overriding goal and stops being innovative. It’s schumpters creative destruction in reality
spacenick88 8y ago
SpaceX is landing rocket stages on a drone ship after having them drop from 7400 km/h at 100 km altitude. JPL has a city car sized rover craned from a hovering lander on Mars and DeepMind has a computer win against the acting Go champion. Pretty sure that rules out the "today's engineers are bad" hypotheses.
- ptidhomme 8y ago
  Indeed we still make great technological achievements, and thanks God there are still brilliant engineers out there. But they may not be equally distributed in the industry. And many of them (in my humble experience, at least) rely too much on computing tools and algorithms they do not completely master, expecting a "magical" answer out of them.
- magduf 8y ago
  There absolutely are brilliant engineers out there. The problem is, they're probably not working at Boeing.
magduf 8y ago
We still have many brilliant engineers. The problem is that the brilliant ones from that age have all retired or died, and the brilliant ones these days didn't go into aerospace engineering, they went into other fields. Even when I was in college 25 years ago, we were making fun of the Aerospace Engineering majors as being in a dead-end field where they could look forward to few jobs and lay-offs. It's only gotten worse since then, I'm sure. The pay and career potential and job security is much better in computer science and engineering, so that's where all the brilliant engineers have been going for quite some time now.

Gravityloss 8y ago

There were a lot of failures and accidents back then. But in general, designers did get more experience because there were more aircraft programs and they were way faster. So if you designed, say, landing gear, you might have done quite many during your career. It was more "agile" in that sense. Nowadays companies can not go so quickly to production. The whole business has turned into oligopolies both in the main integrators and the suppliers.

noncoml 8y ago

Brilliant engineers are still there. We haven’t gotten stupider as a species in 30 years. It’s the economics that changed. As people say “They don’t build stuff like they used too anymore”. First we started going cheap on the materials. Now we are going cheap on the engineers too. Why pay a senior “brilliant” engineer $$$$ when a fresh out of college “average” engineer can write the “same piece of code” for $$

ptidhomme 8y ago
Indeed, and I'd add that we are going cheap because we can, thanks to computing power. As a matter of fact : computing tools make a lot of things easier and cheaper (which is good). But the setback is a tendency to "laziness" in the whole process...
noir_lord 8y ago
> “They don’t build stuff like they used too anymore”. In fairness part (but far from all) of the reason we don't build stuff like we used too, is because we have much better understanding of material limits so we don't need to over-design structual elements like we used to. How that understanding of material limits feeds into design obsolescence is where I do get annoyed though. With everything we know now we could (obviously) build things better (for whatever criteria you chose) than they did 50 or 100 years ago, if that was the goal but it rarely is. My favourite piece of civil engineering in the world (because it's nearby and I've ridden over it many times) was built in 1980 though (it's the exact same age as me) and its still awe-inspiring to look at. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/Humber_Bridge_Sunset_Wideshot.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/Humber_B...
- dx034 8y ago
  The problem is that if a company gives customers (both b2b and b2c) the choice between a cheaper product with minimal guarantees vs. a product that is indeed better and can last longer, not enough customers will choose the better (more expensive) product to justify development cost (there are exceptions obviously). Partly, companies are even forced if the lowest bidder for pre-defined specification gets the contract. I believe there are more than enough engineers and companies that would like to build better and more durable products but demand just isn't there.
  - tracker1 8y ago
    The problem is you can't trust anything/anyone any more... Brands are generally trusted until you get burned by one. And then they relabel or buy out another brand to burn. I often make choices that are anywhere from 50% more cost to 200% if I'm relatively certain I'm actually getting a better product. Unfortunately that trust is usually limited and even then, you often don't have a good trust case. There are also times where I look at industrial options for comparison, as that's often usually skewed towards more solid/maintainable production. Though again often means more expensive. I tend to find the best value (my own experience) about 2/3 up the pricing scale for whatever products I'm looking at. If I could find appliances in general with a 15+ year warranty (that didn't have weird loopholes), I'd be more inclined to buy. Unfortunately, they often don't cover interface boards, and even then they redesign in often incompatible ways each year and stop making the previous version entirely.
- rjsw 8y ago
  As someone who has spent most of their working life so far trying to make it easier to store data on materials, I'm not sure things have progressed all that much. I do work with people from Boeing (and Airbus) but they are not yet using all the features of stuff I wrote 30 years ago.
bambax 8y ago
> “They don’t build stuff like they used too anymore”. Okay maybe, but we have been saying this literally forever.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
NeedMoreTea 8y ago
I think it may be that brilliant engineers still exist somewhere, but I suspect they're less likely to go into aerospace than in the 50s, 60s or 70s. Heck or even the 40s. Immediately after the war aerospace was red hot - there were countless countries and companies putting out new jet designs - both commercial and military. The competition and pace was intense and there was quite some cachet and public interest in aviation. Since roughly, I guess, the 90s aerospace is rather settled and a very mature market. There's only a few major players left, and very very few new products; many of those are variations on the previous. Not nearly as much place or appeal for the brightest stars.
- cstross 8y ago
  No, there's more to it than that. Firstly, from 1903-1968 aerospace was in a period of exponentially improving performance (range, speed, altitude) comparable to Moore's Law. But from the mid-60s onwards the rapid improvements stopped, as developments hit hard limits imposed by material science and thermodynamics: it's hard to get a material much stronger than carbon fibre or titanium alloy, it's ridiculously hard to go faster in air (drag increases faster than the square of speed: if you throw more energy at the problem via your engines it comes out in the form of friction-induced heating). Secondly, there have been huge incremental improvements since 1968. Consider the 737 series. The 737-100 had a maximum range of 1540 nautical miles on 17.86 metric tonnes of fuel; today's 737MAX-10 can do 3850nm on 25.94 tonnes of fuel: it's 72% more fuel-efficient. It's also gone from 118 to 204 seats, so about the same upgrade is passenger capacity. The cargo capacity has almost doubled, too. This being HN, the point of comparison should be an Intel-cpu laptop circa 2009 with an equivalent laptop today. The headline clock speed is probably similar (stuck around 2.4GHz), as is the number of hardware cores. The modern laptop probably has more RAM and more storage, but only by a factor of 2x or 4x. But it has double or triple the battery life, 4x or 8x the pixels on screen, a screamingly fast SSD instead of a rotating-platter drive, and a GPU that the OS can offload a chunk of work onto other than simply accelerated graphics. It looks disappointingly similar, but if you could give your 2009-self your 2019 laptop they wouldn't be in a hurry to give it back again. There have also been huge improvements in overall safety, the 737MAX MCAS problem aside; compare accident rates today with accident rates in the 1980s, let alone the 1950s if you want an eye-opener. (Of 1010 Boeing 707s delivered, there have been 173 hull losses in accidents.)
LoSboccacc 8y ago
> Why pay a senior “brilliant” engineer $$$$ there are very few brilliant engineer of yesterday whose job role today is to train the next generation of brilliant engineers so that their vast experience doesn't get lost in time; the brilliant engineers of today have to relearn their experience walking the same mistakes, so that even companies that pays those premiums for senior engineers will have to face the same generational problem as everyone else, because they don't want to waste highly expensive professional to something as mundane as training on the job.
avip 8y ago
>We haven’t gotten stupider as a species in 30 years I'm honestly not sure that's true. On top of anecdotes (in my grandfather's generation, the norm was to fluently speak 3-4 languages), go ask any STEM prof. with 20+ mileage about the general math, science and logic literacy of students nowadays.
- impendia 8y ago
  I'm a math professor at a US state university. I once asked one of my older colleagues whether our students had gotten better or worse over the years. About the same, he said.
- jcranmer 8y ago
  > On top of anecdotes (in my grandfather's generation, the norm was to fluently speak 3-4 languages) I'm not aware of anyone in my grandfather's generation that can speak more than one language fluently. The fact that my grandparents grew up on farms on the edge of the Dust Bowl may have something to do with that, but I rather suspect you're attempting to compare a tiny subset of the population in the past against the majority of the public today.
  - avip 8y ago
    I agree and that’s why it was framed as an anecdote.
- spacenick88 8y ago
  That's almost certainly "rosy past" bias. Even Aristoteles is said to have complained about the terrible youth.
- cafard 8y ago
  I think that professors judge their own generation by their peer group, and the current generation by their classes.
philpem 8y ago
There's also the prevailing management theory that "all staff can do the same job" -- I've seen this in various perverted and butchered variants of Lean and Agile. The theory is sound -- at least two engineers on a project should know how a given functional unit works. It's a practice for lessening the impact of "bus factor", where you have one engineer everyone relies on because they're "the one person in the whole company who understands it". The issue is when this kind of thinking reaches management, and you see someone being pushed into a role when their skill set is radically different to what's needed. And then there's surprise and finger-pointing when things (inevitably) go wrong...
guatepeor4 8y ago
Probably a lot of diversity hires too, with lower IQ. Maybe some womynz who tech are in the management roles. It's amusing to watch how a culture piously self-desructs.
- reitzensteinm 8y ago
  If this disturbing march towards the lowest common denominator continues, eventually Boeing may even hire you.
  - guatepeor4 8y ago
    I am not applying.
- sctb 8y ago
  Obviously we've banned this account.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - guatepeor5 8y ago
    Good job! Crimethink should not be welcome here.
vkou 8y ago
Here's the fun bit. A lot of the brilliant engineers that worked on incredibly important historical projects were not getting paid $$$$. Only in silicon valley ad-tech do 'brilliant' engineers make 40 times more then the janitor.
ubercore 8y ago
I'm glad we don't build stuff like they used to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joMK1WZjP7g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joMK1WZjP7g

yiyus 8y ago

> But now engineering seems to be : let's ask my computing power what is the good design, with little further questioning. I see this quite often at the undergrad level. Even for the simplest problem that can be solved with a pencil and a couple of calculations, many students launch their finite element software and blindly trust the results, even if it is telling them something obviously wrong, like orders of magnitude larger or smaller than expected, or with the opposite sign. I acknowledge the problem, but I do not know where it comes from, or how to stop it.

majewsky 8y ago
I don't find that particularly surprising. Engineering students want to learn how to build machines to find solutions to everything, so it's intuitive that they would place a high confidence in a solution provided by a machine.
- yiyus 8y ago
  Good observation. There is a nice analogy to programming here. The same that one of the main tasks of the programmer is to handle errors, one of the main tasks of the engineer is to know the limitations of the tools he is using.
- C1sc0cat 8y ago
  With no back checking?
  - majewsky 8y ago
    That's why I said "engineering students", not "engineers". Not blindly trusting your outputs is (or, at least, should be) part of the curriculum.
salawat 8y ago
Is this for real? That's startling to me. I don't really feel like I "know" something well enough to bother with the overhead of developing computer code until I can at least get the essence of it down on paper. Computers are for enumerating and increasing confidence in proofs. I find pen and paper to be far more creativity friendly.

Cthulhu_ 8y ago

I think that's a bit unfair; designs have gotten so much more advanced and efficient in part thanks to computational design. The efficiency, range and maximum weight that airplanes can carry has pretty much doubled since that time. However, the original comment and the video it is a reply to explains a bit of the countering force; economy and competition. It's management that pressures the engineers to cut corners, basically. I don't doubt the Boeing engineers are some of the best people in the industry. I'm very much skeptical of management (and whipping them are shareholders) that optimize for time and by extension profits.

robbiep 8y ago

But we do. Look at SpaceX. Landing Rockets, crew dragon going to be half the cost of starliner. It’s just that LargeCorp eventually has the profit motive as the overriding goal and stops being innovative. It’s schumpters creative destruction in reality

spacenick88 8y ago

SpaceX is landing rocket stages on a drone ship after having them drop from 7400 km/h at 100 km altitude. JPL has a city car sized rover craned from a hovering lander on Mars and DeepMind has a computer win against the acting Go champion. Pretty sure that rules out the "today's engineers are bad" hypotheses.

ptidhomme 8y ago
Indeed we still make great technological achievements, and thanks God there are still brilliant engineers out there. But they may not be equally distributed in the industry. And many of them (in my humble experience, at least) rely too much on computing tools and algorithms they do not completely master, expecting a "magical" answer out of them.
magduf 8y ago
There absolutely are brilliant engineers out there. The problem is, they're probably not working at Boeing.

magduf 8y ago

We still have many brilliant engineers. The problem is that the brilliant ones from that age have all retired or died, and the brilliant ones these days didn't go into aerospace engineering, they went into other fields. Even when I was in college 25 years ago, we were making fun of the Aerospace Engineering majors as being in a dead-end field where they could look forward to few jobs and lay-offs. It's only gotten worse since then, I'm sure. The pay and career potential and job security is much better in computer science and engineering, so that's where all the brilliant engineers have been going for quite some time now.