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At my job I have to deal with the structural design part of the building code for US and Canada (ei. calculating loads on structure). Part of my job is to find
by max51 4y ago
At my job I have to deal with the structural design part of the building code for US and Canada (ei. calculating loads on structure). Part of my job is to find the differences in each new version to see if we need to implement anything new in our software.
For seismic, the Canadian code is easy enough to understand that teachers use it in college instead of manuals or notes. To calculates something (eg. a specific wind load or seismic load), you just read the section from top to bottom and follow the recipe. Things are actually placed in the order that an engineer would use them.
With the US code, you have to deal with triple negations and 80% of the usefully information is presented as references to other sections. It's really not fun trying to understand it when a single sentence will link you to 8 paragraphs, 6 of which are in a completely different chapters or sub-chapters. And as you can imagine, these 8 paragraphs will also have their own references to other part of the code. It's a complete mess that is impossible to follow unless you write your own summary and/or take screenshots and rearrange them in order.
You end up with a situation where even experienced engineers can't understand it and have to rely on notes from colleagues, college textbooks, calculation examples, or they just blindly follow the design software they bought.
Working the support line for a high end structural analysis and design software has really opened my as to how incompetent and lazy a lot of the senior engineer from highly reputable firm can be. It would be a lot safer for the public if the "easy to understand" version of the code came from those who wrote the original. I suspect it's the same in other professions too.
- mistrial9 4y agothank you for this reply -- here in California, there is no secret that much building activity has been legally curtailed to such an extent that it becomes another endeavor entirely.. that of seeking and obtaining permission at every turn. Obscure and contradictory rule books specifically enable this kind of gatekeeping IMHO.
- astrange 4y agoA big problem with US building codes is just there’s too many of them - every town has its own rules, so you can’t share knowledge or buildings between them. Some of the common rules in the US don’t help though; aesthetic rules like setbacks are pointless and expensive, but even the safety rules other countries don’t have cause big problems. Can’t have single stair apartments and everything has to be built to accommodate gigantic fire trucks.
- vjk800 4y ago> It would be a lot safer for the public if the "easy to understand" version of the code came from those who wrote the original. I suspect it's the same in other professions too. Senior engineers probably have their own intuition to what is "safe" based on their experience, which might be more accurate than the horrible mess of a law that you describe.
- ElemenoPicuares 4y agoWhich is great until the inspector comes.
- max51 4y agothe problem is that they built their "intuition" without ever looking at the code directly. They are always using second and information and those are not always good. My concrete design handbook in college had a corrections on at least 75% of the pages and it was the 3rd edition. We often look online and in popular textbooks for design examples to test our software, and we find a lot of errors in them too. >which might be more accurate than the horrible mess of a law that you describe I've had a senior engineer at one of our biggest client accuse us of having a bug in our software. He has dozens of people working for him and teaches other engineer how to design bridges. Turns out he used the arctan function in excel instead of cosine. Her mistake was roughly doubling the shear resistance of the main beams on the bridge. We ere the one to find the mistake in his calculation. clients often call us with question like "how can I use your software to design XYZ". When we talk with them on the phone, they often don't have a clue how to do it manually and they are hopping that the software will just do it for them. It's also very common for us for find critical mistakes in client's finite element models when they contact us for something completely different.