4 ms·
Our tooling's pretty shitty, generally, isn't well-standardized or anywhere close to it across the industry, is changing rapidly (largely not to any real purpos
by karatestomp 7y ago
Our tooling's pretty shitty, generally, isn't well-standardized or anywhere close to it across the industry, is changing rapidly (largely not to any real purpose, though sure, sometimes improvements slip in) and we're all expected to become semi-competent (nowhere near enough time or brain space for full competence) on an absurdly large set of these tools—not just using them, but using several different ones for similar purposes but with different interfaces and quirks (boy do they have quirks), how to set them up, how to fix them when they break, and so on.
Oh and you can make a name (and pile of money) for yourself if you manage to promote some mediocre beta-quality-at-best tool and trick enough other people into using it, and if people call you out on it they're the assholes.
Every thought experiment that immediately comes to mind, in which other professions of various sorts had to deal with some similar situation on an ongoing and apparently never-ending basis, read as absurdist comedy. Yet here we are.
[EDIT] ok here's a fun one: imagine if framers had to use a different hammer depending on the brand of wood at the job site. Like, hammer weight is different and you even hold it differently. For some you can use air nailers, others you can't, some of them only work with air nailers that have a second person working the trigger while one holds them, all the different air nailers need different compressors, some of those take different voltage, shit like that. Imagine it's like that for all their tools and that these differences manifest in all sorts of ways based on the combinations of materials & tools.
We wouldn't say "gee why are house-builders so bad at building houses, and LOL they can never even tell us about how long it'll take", we'd say "holy shit how do any houses get built, it's practically a miracle, we should fix it so it's not so hard—for no good reason—to build houses"