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Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history

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Re: Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history

#121

Post by robocat »

ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #106
robocat wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a strawman argument, because most engineers aren't engineers. The vast majority of engineers have no consequences for their shite. Neither is certification a panacea against bad engineers. Watch mechanical engineers design plastic rubbish. Watch some electronic engineers design circuits that don't work. Watch some geotech engineers make up overspecified bullshit: because they're paid per hour and their work is…

>The vast majority of engineers have no consequences for their shite. What do you base this on? In my country, engineers are legally responsible for their designs.

Look up some post-mortems on engineering failures in your country that caused deaths. Pick something big like a dam failure or a large building.

Did the engineers have their certification revoked? Did the engineers go to jail for criminal negligence?

I found a couple of examples and counter-examples in European countries.

I'm no wonk, but too often major failures have seemingly small consequences.

Re: Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history

#122

Post by ThrowawayTestr »

robocat wrote: post #121
ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The vast majority of engineers have no consequences for their shite. What do you base this on? In my country, engineers are legally responsible for their designs.

Look up some post-mortems on engineering failures in your country that caused deaths. Pick something big like a dam failure or a large building. Did the engineers have their certification revoked? Did the engineers go to jail for criminal negligence? I found a couple of examples and counter-examples in European countries. I'm no wonk, but too often major failures have seemingly small consequences.

Yes. Just because the word means nothing in your country doesn't mean it means nothing in other countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algo_Centre_Mall

Re: Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history

#123

Post by to11mtm »

sublinear wrote: post #51
to11mtm wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IDK, I think it's been a bit of a (reverse?) bell curve of sorts. 30+ years ago, You had to be a -lot- more careful about how you handled releasing software. Your stuff was in boxes on shelves, most people didn't have internet access to 'download an update' so fixing anything had a long tail support cost (i.e. paying for the media containing the fix and shipping). But there's a fine line. As an example, If your shop…

> Your stuff was in boxes on shelves... Have you ever heard of an SLA? This "used to be" story about software has never been true. If you can't meet the agreement, then or now, you're done. Software has always been a lot more diverse than just consumer goods. Why is that your only evidence of how you think software projects are managed?

> Have you ever heard of an SLA? This "used to be" story about software has never been true. If you can't meet the agreement, then or now, you're done.

I will admit, My judgement of 'non-consumer-software' is somewhat based on my corporate experience, where either:

- The contract with the vendor writing/providing software to the company is written so poorly that absolutely counter-intuitive decisions are made to try to steer the ship at the last moment, because the contract was written so bad there is no support

- For SaaS-ish offerings, the company would have some guy in a corner fixing the bugs in the data within the SLA, not necessarily fixing the actual bug causing the problem.

- You're lucky enough to be at a shop where the requirements are handled well enough that, yes, to your point, You have SLAs and things get fixed or there are penalties involved.

I will however stand by my original point; Before the days of the Internet and automatic updates (let alone 'SaaS web apps',) shipping an update could still be very expensive from a cost perspective.

Re: Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history

#124

Post by to11mtm »

BobbyTables2 wrote: post #53
to11mtm wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IDK, I think it's been a bit of a (reverse?) bell curve of sorts. 30+ years ago, You had to be a -lot- more careful about how you handled releasing software. Your stuff was in boxes on shelves, most people didn't have internet access to 'download an update' so fixing anything had a long tail support cost (i.e. paying for the media containing the fix and shipping). But there's a fine line. As an example, If your shop…

Exactly! How many updates did one apply to Windows 3.0 and Word in those days?? Sure, there might have been a “hotfix” available for download over a long distance BBS, but virtually nobody would have ever done so (even if they were lucky enough to have a modem). Maybe large companies applied such when impacted. Even in the Windows XP days, I think windowsupdate.com was still a manually triggered process… For a while,…

Somewhere in my Dad's house, I think I still have the 'free' DOS 6.22 update disks that came if you registered 6.21.
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