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Engineers Don't Solve Problems (2018)

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Re: Engineers Don't Solve Problems (2018)

#11

Post by sour-taste »

I 100% agree with this article, but I suspect it will not be well received here. HN is so focused on innovation at all costs that anything that goes against that will be rejected.

I think that one of the issues with doing as the author suggests and thinking of technology as a transformation is that it can be hard to come up with the downsides of your new tech. Engineers will constantly be encouraged by management and customers to deliver a solution, and often saying 'this is my solution, but it comes with caveats' will be frowned upon. Additionally, it's clear in retrospect that the expansion of the city the grand canal allowed would lead to depletion of the ground water which would lead to sinking of the city and the canal being inneffective, but was that known at the time? Could engineers working on a canal project have anticipated socioeconomic trends like this? I'm not saying they couldn't have, just that it's difficult.

Re: Engineers Don't Solve Problems (2018)

#12

Post by dentemple »

sour-taste wrote: post #11

I 100% agree with this article, but I suspect it will not be well received here. HN is so focused on innovation at all costs that anything that goes against that will be rejected. I think that one of the issues with doing as the author suggests and thinking of technology as a transformation is that it can be hard to come up with the downsides of your new tech. Engineers will constantly be encouraged by management and…

I just don't see the same takeaway here. Engineers don't go around building sewer systems for kicks. They were commissioned by people who were far more interested in the short term gain than for any long term considerations.

We see the same problem with the U.S.'s approach to the levee system. A neighborhood commissions an engineer to spare their homes from flooding, but without any care taken to protecting those homes outside of town lines.

The problem here isn't with the engineer; the problem is North America's unwillingness to fund long-term solutions that benefit everyone, not just a chosen (and temporary) few.

Re: Engineers Don't Solve Problems (2018)

#13

Post by rramadass »

This is an excellent article. I think it is a good example of lack of whole "systems thinking" and a failure to really understand the scale of the problem. The main issue it seems to me is that the problem was evaluated and solved only in one given context without thinking through long-term future ramifications. I am almost willing to bet that this was due to the Suits/Politicians wanting to get something done rather than allowing time for the Engineers to fully evaluate the problem and come up with a robust solution. The oft repeated trope "any action is better than inaction" is not applicable under all circumstances. The complexity, scale and risk analysis of the problem should dictate whether one needs to spend more or less time evaluating it. It seems in this case nobody got those parameters right.

Re: Engineers Don't Solve Problems (2018)

#14

Post by olooney »

sour-taste wrote: post #11

I 100% agree with this article, but I suspect it will not be well received here. HN is so focused on innovation at all costs that anything that goes against that will be rejected. I think that one of the issues with doing as the author suggests and thinking of technology as a transformation is that it can be hard to come up with the downsides of your new tech. Engineers will constantly be encouraged by management and…

> [...] was that known at the time? Could engineers working on a canal project have anticipated socioeconomic trends like this?

Mexico City has grown from 4 million in 1951 (the time of flood mentioned in the first paragraph) to over 20 million today. Few civil engineering projects solve problems 70 years in the future for a city five times as large. As far as I can tell from the article, the engineers did anticipate population growth and designed a system that would last for decades; furthermore, they monitored the system, were aware of stresses and possible failure points, and took several appropriate corrective actions as the decades went on. All of this is just from reading the article.

If at my job I criticized a design by saying, "this design is terrible because if it is wildly successful and gives us 5X growth, then 70 years from now it might require some rework" I would be laughed at. If I followed it up by suggesting that this reflected some sort of fundamental problem with the methods of engineering I would probably not be taken seriously. Engineers are not godlike miracle workers, setting in motion an ineffable plan that somehow make the world holistically better over an indefinite time frame. It's OK to just solve the tractable problems in front of us and to get a good couple of decades out of a system.

Re: Engineers Don't Solve Problems (2018)

#15

Post by sprainedankles »

> The challenge we face as a society is to build the structures of popular power to decide collectively which burdens are worth their weight, and how to distribute them justly. These are not choices we should leave to politicians, or even engineers.

I understand the allure of creating a system that allows the "popular power" to make decisions, but that in itself is a difficult problem to solve.

We couldn't possibly crowd-source how to solve this flooding problem until the majority of that crowd has been educated on several aspects of the issue. Perhaps what the author is implying is that there needs to be a better interface between Politicians/Engineers and the people such that the P/Es say "hey here's our plan, find the flaws" and the people say "here are the flaws"

But there's the difficult problem. There will always be flaws and trade-offs, and this kind of interface eats up large amounts of time that may be better spent implementing a short-term solution to buy a few more years until a long-term solution is reached. It's a catch 22.

The decisions must eventually come down to the P/Es, but maybe we just need to add a few more feedback points into the decision-making system.

Re: Engineers Don't Solve Problems (2018)

#16

Post by jpollock »

sprainedankles wrote: post #15

> The challenge we face as a society is to build the structures of popular power to decide collectively which burdens are worth their weight, and how to distribute them justly. These are not choices we should leave to politicians, or even engineers. I understand the allure of creating a system that allows the "popular power" to make decisions, but that in itself is a difficult problem to solve. We couldn't possibly c…

Isn't "building structures of popular power" the definition of politics?

Re: Engineers Don't Solve Problems (2018)

#17

Post by glitchc »

Sounds like a city planning problem rather than an engineering problem. Engineers design solutions to specifications, budgets and constraints. The latter two often dominate the shape and form of the final solution. That the poor areas flood first doesn’t sound like an accident. I am reasonably confident that the original designers presented all of the caveats in their solution, and the elites were happy with the trade-offs and signed off accordingly.

Re: Engineers Don't Solve Problems (2018)

#18

Post by ialyos »

sprainedankles wrote: post #15

> The challenge we face as a society is to build the structures of popular power to decide collectively which burdens are worth their weight, and how to distribute them justly. These are not choices we should leave to politicians, or even engineers. I understand the allure of creating a system that allows the "popular power" to make decisions, but that in itself is a difficult problem to solve. We couldn't possibly c…

I took this quote to mean the following: Engineers are well equipped and positioned to understand the set of solutions that are available to them and the material negative impacts of those solutions (e.g if we build a dam at spot x, the region y might have an increase in floods). But engineers should not be given the ability to make decisions about which of set of negative impacts a society should bear, and that should instead be a decision made collectively.

So the interface between the engineers and the people is not to find solutions together, or to find flaws together, but for engineers to find solutions and flaws, and the people to pick the one that they are happiest with.

(I'm not certain my understanding of the quote is right, just sharing my interpretation / an alternative to the ones you shared)

Re: Engineers Don't Solve Problems (2018)

#19

Post by hexadec »

clktmr wrote: post #10

The engineers that build the new drainage system in 1975 did indeed solve the problem. The new problems are a result of bad city planning.

That is the point of the article though. But they did not really solve the issue, it just highlighted a new issue. Engineers solved the flooding of the city but brought to light the fact that groundwater pumping is causing the city to sink. So they solved the short term issue but the root problem is still getting worse.

Re: Engineers Don't Solve Problems (2018)

#20

Post by spease »

rramadass wrote: post #13

This is an excellent article. I think it is a good example of lack of whole "systems thinking" and a failure to really understand the scale of the problem. The main issue it seems to me is that the problem was evaluated and solved only in one given context without thinking through long-term future ramifications. I am almost willing to bet that this was due to the Suits/Politicians wanting to get something done rather…

The article doesn’t present an alternative that they should have used if they had spent more time. Are you referring to something specific?
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