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<< According to official records, the design for the bridge shifted multiple times over the past seven years, largely due to conflicts between the Public Works
by oc1 1y ago
<< According to official records, the design for the bridge shifted multiple times over the past seven years, largely due to conflicts between the Public Works Department (PWD) and the Railways. The two agencies couldn’t agree on how to share land, and in trying to work around both railway property and the new Metro line, they ended up producing a final layout with an abrupt 90-degree angle.
I love that mindset. Europeans would have simply refused and 100 years later it would have probably been build after all legal has been cleared. Indians instead never say no. That's how you build software, so why not bridges.
- sheiyei 1y agoThey worked with the land they were allowed to use, and it ended up like this. Not even a money issue, just bureaus refusing to cooperate.
- conductr 1y agoI think that's the parent's point, someone should have just said No. If you have to sacrifice so much due to whatever constraints you face, the resulting solution usually is not going to solve the original problem very well. At the very least, I would have let it be known that I did not think the resulting bridge was a good design for traffic and has only been designed to appease the process. "I do not recommend constructing this design" would have been my CYA.
- libraryatnight 1y agoSomeone should just say no to dark patterns, someone should just say no to layoffs that aren't actually necessary but bump share price, why aren't we all saying no more? Why does it have to be this obvious for this forum to conclude "Engineers should say no."
- lovich 1y agoYou get fired for saying no. Unless the government backs up qualified people saying no, by protecting them from the companies wrath, then you won’t get anyone saying no. Caveat that this is targeted towards US software environment, I’m under the belief that engineers designing roads and buildings are actually accredited and protected in this way in some countries
- reaperducer 1y agoYou get fired for saying no The people in the article said yes and also got fired.
- cruffle_duffle 1y agoOf course they did! That is exactly what managements plan was! You think the corrupt politicians that greenlit this thing are going to take the fall? You think the people at the top weren’t aware this thing was unworkable?
- triceratops 1y agoBut it took longer to get fired after saying yes, and they were paid the whole time.
- fuzzfactor 1y ago>it took longer to get fired after saying yes, and they were paid the whole time. It's even worse than merely being fired from the project though, they were suspended. Nobody saw it coming, but it turned out to be a "suspension bridge" after all ;)
- wat10000 1y agoI see plenty of people saying programmers should refuse to implement dark patterns. Layoffs aren't done by engineers. In any case, you can't rely on people to do the right thing just because it's the right thing. Real engineers have skin in the game. They put their signature on stuff and they're responsible if it goes wrong. If it's particularly egregious, they can lose their license or even be criminally prosecuted. That's a powerful backstop against pressure coming from above. Software doesn't have this, so naturally people are much more likely to give in to that pressure.
- parpfish 1y ago[flagged]
- potato3732842 1y ago[flagged]
- justsomehnguy 1y ago[flagged]
- sim7c00 1y agoyeah lovely mindset now the engineers will go to jail
- theamk 1y agoGood, they approved an design that's unsafe for road users. Better to put engineers in jail, instead of someone dying from car crash on unsafe bridge.
- sidewndr46 1y agoThe only way it could get funnier is if the roadway had to be inverted 180 degrees like a roller coaster at some point.
- smitty1e 1y agoOr a large pole with seven cables from its tip were installed at the vertex, making the project a literal suspension bridge.
- cs702 1y agoShouldn't the bureaucracies be penalized, instead of the poor engineers? The engineers built the 90-degree layout specified by their clients! I wouldn't be surprised if there's a paper trail documenting the engineers' objections, signed and notarized by the clients. It's hard for me to judge the engineers without knowing more.
- strogonoff 1y agoSometimes we are paid to say “no”.
- cruffle_duffle 1y agoDepends entirely on the culture. Some cultures saying “no” is simply not what you do.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- strogonoff 1y agoThat doesn’t sound like a good justification.
- teamonkey 1y agoMore often we are paid to say “yes”
- strogonoff 1y agoIt might have been a bit of wishful thinking. Put it this way: sometimes a licensed engineer, who can lose the license for shoddy engineering, is paid to say “no”. Say “yes”, lose your license, no longer get paid. While there is no licensing in our industry, we can (should?) have our personal standards play a similar role.
- dsr_ 1y ago
- anal_reactor 1y agoThe demand for yes-men stays huge. A manager comes, he wants yes-men. Things fail. Someone gets blamed and removed, maybe the manager himself. The circus continues. I wonder why capitalism doesn't remove this obvious inefficiency, but rather seems to promote it.
- AnimalMuppet 1y agoGovernment bureaucracies are rather far from "capitalism".
- anal_reactor 1y agoYes but this problem exists in capitalism too. Name one big company that doesn't suffer from this issue.
- AnimalMuppet 1y agoFair, capitalism does in fact suffer from this. But so does every bureaucracy. For that matter, so did monarchy. So it seems to me to be a bit to single out capitalism.
- adrianN 1y agoI wouldn’t be surprised if having bridges with 90 degrees angles is often better than having no bridges.
- graemep 1y agoOn the other hand the Indians have blacklisted the firms involved. The European mindset seems to be to let them keep doing stuff - e.g. Fujitsu in the UK.
- porridgeraisin 1y agoOh don't worry. In India, land is the most valuable thing in general and all land/housing/infra related industries are infested with politicians. There are exceptions of course, and unless this company is one, they'll just be back with a new name, and the political party will be advertising to the public how they're so unbiased that they shut down the company of their own political brother.
- orwin 1y agoI hate software built like this, it's hell and you end up with 4 different designs in your app by the time you hit production. That's the kind of app that needs internal audit, where some objects are audited, but as the data is never used, the audit in fact only works on a fifth of the project and is never used. Please say 'no' more often.
- user32489318 1y agoYou’re right but: https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/en/2024/07/09/new-ghent-motorway-bridge-too-narrow-trucks-and-cars-get-stuck/ https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/en/2024/07/09/new-ghent-motorway-b... Belgium has run into the same problem and they went on with it
- fyurule 1y ago[dead]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- burnt-resistor 1y agoThis is a consequence of when there's neither collaboration or reasonableness between stakeholders, and when a project is driven forward by a bureaucracy. Those doing the actual work are ordered to do the impossible, even if the result under the given constraints is totally pointless.