4 ms·

I wonder what the actual statistics on bridge building are. Are they really typically done on time and on budget? How many times do the drawings or engineering

by zaphar 6y ago

I wonder what the actual statistics on bridge building are. Are they really typically done on time and on budget? How many times do the drawings or engineering specifications for a specific bridge have to change while getting built to adapt to new information? We trot out this particular analogy all the time in software engineering and I can't remember ever seeing any real data to back up the assertions.

corty 6y ago
From having lunch with guys from the mechanical engineering department (they were right next door at uni) my anecdotal second-hand wisdom is: Most larger engineering projects are as broken, tedious, expensive and unpredictable as most software projects. You will always find unsteady ground that nobody told you about, new last-minute requirements, shitty subcontractors making a mess and substandard parts that happened to be cheapest on the tender. From what I've heard, around 2 in 3 projects are over budget or over time in a significant way because something was massively screwed up somewhere and needed to be hotfixed, patched, rebuilt or -my favourite- reevaluated to be statically sound without structural changes. I think the common software engineering myth about "real engineering" being somehow better and something one should aspire to is just really a myth.