Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by plausibilities 2607 days ago
Handyman Contractor mentality vs Civil Engineer mentality in a nutshell

Unfortunately not everyone cares about resilience and certain performance thresholds when it comes to construction, especially when budgets become involved.

Some customers will are happy to cheap out for a hack-job remodel in the hopes that they can flip their home and run off before the bagholder realizes they got a lemon.
2 comments
dsfyu404ed 2607 days ago
The handyman spends 20min thinking about how to solve the problem.

The civil engineer spends 20min thinking about how to solve the problem and 20-days making sure there's no way whoever signs his paycheck is going to be told by a court to pay out a bunch of money if something goes sideways.

An professional engineer is basically just a lawyer for the laws of physics. You're not paying for his ability to come up with a solution. Anyone can read the books and do that. You're paying for the fact that other people take that solution seriously.

link
hinkley 2607 days ago
There was some CivE professor that people liked to quote who talked about how he had no qualms flunking people from his classes because a degree in Civil Engineering was a license to kill.

If you let dumbasses through the system, they will build a pedestrian bridge in a hotel lobby that fails and kills a hundred people at a party.

link
vincnetas 2607 days ago
For those who didn't catch the reference : Hyatt Regency Walkway Collapse

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnvGwFegbC8

link
gmueckl 2607 days ago
A lot of the most serious software engineering work that I have done had much the same ratio: coding the a solution that mostly works was easy. Making sure that it is robust against all kinds of failures (CPU, RAM, bus/external device failure, random bit flips etc.[0]) and does the right thing was a lot of work.

[0] The system I worked on was hardened against all of that and some more failure modes.

link
Waterluvian 2607 days ago
"handyman vs. civil engineer." I'm going to use this the next four or five times and see if the analogy helps.

I mean both are valid depending on what you want. Are you asking me to whip up a script to answer a one-off question or a pipeline to answer that question for every customer every quarter?

link