Structural engineers are unsung heroes • Hacker News Board

Re: Structural engineers are unsung heroes

#51

Post by mcguire » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 12:00 AM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #20

Maro wrote: post #4

One of the best general Engineering books I've read is 'Design Paradigms'. It's an excellent book about the importance of understanding failures in Engineering. The author is Professor of Civil Engineering and a professor of history at Duke University, so all the examples are roads/bridges/etc. As a Data/SWE guy, I still enjoyed reading it a lot. https://www.amazon.com/Design-Paradigms-Histories-Judgment-E...

Ooh, that reminds me of another excellent book on failure, Sidney Dekker's "Field Guide to Understanding Human Error": https://www.amazon.com/dp/1472439058 It's about investigating airplane crashes, and in particular two different paradigms for understanding failure. It deeply changed how I think and talk about software bugs, and especially how I do retrospectives. I strongly recommend it. And the article made me thi…

That first episode should be required viewing (repeatedly!) by all architects, physical or software. Geeze.

Re: Structural engineers are unsung heroes

#52

Post by fjsolwmv » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 3:16 PM UTC

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #32

gregmac wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not silly. There correct response is "well, what's your budget?" The reply may be a number that's an order of magnitude too small, but then you have a negotiating point to work with, or at least an understandable (and not condescending) answer.

Yup. Saying "do you want me to remove the brake pedals from your car?" is basically saying "I'm lazy and want to build cookie cutter things and move on to the next paying job"

No it's not. You can remove brake pedal from your car but then you'd need to construct an expensive custom deceleration system. It's an apt analogy.

Re: Structural engineers are unsung heroes

#53

Post by fjsolwmv » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 3:17 PM UTC

jdavis703 wrote: post #7

sidcool wrote: post #6

This is true. While dealing with building architects on many occasions during my internship, they would say silly things like, 'Can you not just avoid this girder/beam/pillar?' My boss would coldly say 'Do you mind removing brake pedals from your car to make it prettier'?

I hope as you progress through your career you learn to be more respectful of diverse ideas. I'm a software engineer, I have to have discussions with designers and business people who also sometimes ask for things that just aren't reasonably doable given time and budget constraints. It's our job as professionals to explain this using a tone and words that educates others on what the technical constraints are.

What awesome TTS system are you using that can reconstruct tone from text transcripts?

Re: Structural engineers are unsung heroes

#54

Post by fjsolwmv » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 3:21 PM UTC

myegorov wrote: post #46

bobthechef wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"the structural engineer's trade is no different than any other construction trade" Can you name these? Because that statement is false if interpreted literally.

I've personally worked at different times as a carpenter (residential projects) and structural engineer (long-span bridges, tall buildings). I mean it quite literally.

Literally in the sense that calculus is literally college-algebra and trigonometry?