Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by 6stringmerc 3320 days ago
Nice to see your perspective, this is gold! I've worked in the B2B and risk management side of Construction and I'd like to chime in - as a verification - of the market in Construction. It's a multi-billion dollar per month industry in every major City. Property and development and investment are where big money plays. REITs and up.

Two things Construction cares about: Safety & Shrink.

Safety in the human cost of skilled labor - and settling workplace claims of deaths on the job / innocent bystanders / loss of property (on and on and on) - is a giant consideration. Claims are more expensive than, well, anything because they're unpredictable. Can technology help? Yeah, but looking at a tablet ain't gonna do it, unless it's like 30 cameras on the job site...which leads to...

Shrink. That's what it was called in the Big Box store. Losses due to theft. It could be something small, or something kind of big. Or maybe somebody on the job site tipped off a local relative with a good crew who have the brass ones to haul off a couple generators if they're not lifted up on a crane over the weekend...again, there's a nice middle ground of disruption for technology, but it has to be grounded in real world learning.

Sketching out a few ideas on a white board will probably not be anywhere close to the 3 years I consulted with Field Safety Managers, Claims Managers, Managing Directors who speak at Conferences to this day...I was the guy who could write it down, put it in images, because Construction people have their own world.

I'll never forget one story a highly accomplished team leader said on a conference call about Safety: "Last week at the new XXXX auto plant, installing a 4 ton brace that was freshly painted, the crew was so worried about scratching the paint that one got jammed between the brace and the wall and lost his life. Priorities are our concern."

TL;DR: Nobody makes a good brisket in a microwave.