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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

#51

Post by sublinear »

to11mtm wrote: post #40
collinmcnulty wrote: post #15

Relatedly, I fully expect the software business to fail to learn from (nearly) literally every other industry how to operate when your marginal costs are no longer zero. It drives me nuts the number of people in software who think that people in other industries are slow because they’re just not as smart as us, rather than because when it takes months to get a cast part made, it better be right the first time.

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?

Re: Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history

#52

Post by collinmcnulty »

random3 wrote: post #34
collinmcnulty wrote: post #15

Relatedly, I fully expect the software business to fail to learn from (nearly) literally every other industry how to operate when your marginal costs are no longer zero. It drives me nuts the number of people in software who think that people in other industries are slow because they’re just not as smart as us, rather than because when it takes months to get a cast part made, it better be right the first time.

Yet this is part correct, part wrong. Indeed every industry has some unique challenges that are not directly solvable. However, while a cast is absurdly expensive, the problem is being solved in large part by software in the FDM (3D printing) space and it's changing how things are built. edit: this doesn't invalidate the OP thesis, which I strongly agree with. Except that it's not just engineers, this is a more gener…

Do you work in this field or are you just reading that? I’ve been out of the game for over five years now, but as far as I can tell from people I know still in that world, if you’re going to make more than like … 3 of a part, casting is going to be much cheaper. And while you can do some prototyping on 3d prints, the nature of the material winds up different from a cast part.

Re: Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history

#53

Post by BobbyTables2 »

to11mtm wrote: post #40
collinmcnulty wrote: post #15

Relatedly, I fully expect the software business to fail to learn from (nearly) literally every other industry how to operate when your marginal costs are no longer zero. It drives me nuts the number of people in software who think that people in other industries are slow because they’re just not as smart as us, rather than because when it takes months to get a cast part made, it better be right the first time.

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, bundled drivers were a steaming pile of crap in quality and several generations of Windows suffered greatly until Microsoft got vendors in line and updates became common.

Re: Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history

#54

Post by luipugs »

bluehatbrit wrote: post #21

I'm a hands on engineering leader for a team of about 20 engineers and I've been spending the past 6 months trying to get my team to understand just this. On Friday we had a coffee hour to share how we've been working recently and they all seemed perplexed at the workflows I've been adopting. It seems natural to me as someone who's been a manager for some time now, but very alien to all those who've never gone down t…

Can you share some details of the workflows that work for you?

Re: Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history

#55

Post by TZubiri »

Solo programming is like managing a team of developers that can only communicate and contribute in one temporal direction.

Sometimes two or more developers may appear to coexist, but it's actually a simulated concurrency achieved by rapid context switching

Every time you close a file to open another, you are setting up a different context, therefore you are different agents.

Re: Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history

#56

Post by buildsjets »

random3 wrote: post #34
collinmcnulty wrote: post #15

Relatedly, I fully expect the software business to fail to learn from (nearly) literally every other industry how to operate when your marginal costs are no longer zero. It drives me nuts the number of people in software who think that people in other industries are slow because they’re just not as smart as us, rather than because when it takes months to get a cast part made, it better be right the first time.

Yet this is part correct, part wrong. Indeed every industry has some unique challenges that are not directly solvable. However, while a cast is absurdly expensive, the problem is being solved in large part by software in the FDM (3D printing) space and it's changing how things are built. edit: this doesn't invalidate the OP thesis, which I strongly agree with. Except that it's not just engineers, this is a more gener…

That's totally untrue. You clearly do not have any experience designing, building, manufacturing, testing, and certifying either cast metal or PBF parts. BTW, PBF is powerbed fusion and it is how you make 3D printed metal parts. FDM is a plastic manufacturing process and has nothing at all to do with replacing metal castings.

For a certain aircraft part that I designed, that measured approximately 16"x8"x10", if you needed up to 12 of them it was cheapest to 3D print them using powerbed fusion from AlSi10Mg, but with a 25% weight penalty due to the lower mechanical properties of 3D printed aluminum compared to cast. If you needed between 12 and 50 of them, it was cheapest to use 3D printing to make a wax preform then use the preform to make a traditional metal investment casting from A356. For more than 50 of them, it was cheapest to invest in permanent closed die tooling.

Other than for prototyping and extremely low volume production, additive has been a total flop for real-world manufacturing, and has not at all lived up to any of it's lofty promises.

Re: Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history

#57

Post by hirvi74 »

collinmcnulty wrote: post #15

Relatedly, I fully expect the software business to fail to learn from (nearly) literally every other industry how to operate when your marginal costs are no longer zero. It drives me nuts the number of people in software who think that people in other industries are slow because they’re just not as smart as us, rather than because when it takes months to get a cast part made, it better be right the first time.

> It drives me nuts the number of people in software who think that people in other industries are slow because they’re just not as smart as us. . .

Ha! I studied computer science and became a programmer because I knew I was too dumb for med. school and the other engineering paths.

Re: Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history

#58

Post by eadwu »

This isn't an issue for engineers only, it is basically ingrained in the current system in the world. The problem is in simple terms; the fact that being a polymath is absurdly hard in today's world.

You can't not reinvent something if you don't know it exists in the first place.

The thing about software is that it slots nicely into every other field, making it a _very_ good base to work off of to get concepts (aka the modern bootleg polymath) that have likely been invented in other fields (with different names).

Re: Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history

#60

Post by Folcon »

andai wrote: post #43

>You can make lots of money by making something appear novel and undiscovered, and consequently make yourself sound smart and cutting edge. Nobody raises a round to apply a well understood discipline correctly. I'm curious about this. I thought investors preferred safe bets? On the other hand, I know that if you're too early, it can be impossible to make a business work (or even to pitch the idea in the first place).…

It's really funny, I've read this essay before a long time ago and it's really interesting playing back the many times both in realising it in retrospect and having seen it playing out before my eyes, that the last part really comes to the fore

    > One final point: I expect none of you to really get what I’m talking about here, because this principle also applies to itself. But I fully expect I’ll get the occasional email saying “Oh! so that’s what you meant.” or “Why didn’t you tell me that?” I did, but you can’t tell people anything.
In my youthful naivety I thought I understood this, but now years later I can more deeply appreciate the message that you really can't tell people anything
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