[juliusmusseau]

> stakeholders wanted an over-the-top bridge design [...]

Nothing wrong with that!

> They were so focused on building a nice looking bridge — and meeting deadlines

These are also good things.

To me sounds like the civil engineers started behaving more like software engineers. The independent peer reviewer they hired was not qualified to do the review.

> Louis Berger was not qualified by the Florida Department of Transportation to conduct an independent peer review and failed to perform an adequate review of the FIGG Bridge Engineers design plans and to recognize the significant under-design of the steel reinforcement within the 11/12 node, which was unable to resist the horizontal shear between diagonal 11 and the bridge deck.

This whole business of the engineers ignoring the cracks that the contractors kept needing reassurance about is also insane.

[varjag]

> To me sounds like the civil engineers started behaving more like software engineers.

Things like these were common in construction before software engineering was a thing. It always makes me chuckle when someone defers to "if we built buildings like we build software" trope. We do, and worse.

Lots of constructions standing around the world are not up to the codes in zillion different ways. They are still standing because redundant nature of physical construction is more forgiving than execution on a Turing machine.

[paganel]

> Things like these were common in construction before software engineering was a thing

I read in an architect's memoirs that when he was a student back in the 1940s whenever his Architecture faculty teacher and his students visited a construction site to maybe change some small details (or at least they were perceived as "small" by said architects) oftentimes they were met with very angry construction site workers who would make the above architects think again about trying to force the implementation of those small changes. A similar story was told to me by my father (also a civil engineer) as happening in the 1980s, though the level of implied violence coming from the construction workers was a little more subdued. Wish that we in the software industry would be like those construction workers from time to time.

[InitialLastName]

You have the metaphor wrong. You're the software engineer. Your toolset is the angry (or not) construction worker. Build a toolset that yells at you when you want to do something stupid/dangerous.

[Accujack]

Interestingly, the mindset of the people who develop software toolsets (and operating systems like Unix) is exactly the opposite.

[OneWingedShark]

> Build a toolset that yells at you when you want to do something stupid/dangerous.

Why do you think I'm a fan of Ada? (And looking to get into VHDL, too.)

[lallysingh]

.. a type checker?

[rendall]

> Wish that we in the software industry would be like those construction workers from time to time.

A cluster of burly construction workers holding spanners is probably more physically intimidating than whatever we software developers could typically muster.

[bregma]

What if I made the caffe latte really really hot before brandishing it?

[treypitt]

We need to form unions. That would spark the change in culture and physical fitness we need to throw our weight around.

[ralusek]

Please no. If I had to be unionized, I'd change professions.

[jimmydddd]

A friend who worked in construction in NY city told me a story of how, on a project, they had one section of rebar sitting on the ground. When the construction inspector came to inspect the site, they would put the piece of rebar near where they were pouring concrete to give the impression that they were forming the concrete with rebar in it. They were not (I presume to save time and/or money).

[varjag]

We have that 12-story municipality building here, standing since 1970s. An inspection last year has found it doesn't have even half of rebar necessary in the pillars, so they had to evacuate it.

[ralusek]

> They are still standing because redundant nature of physical construction is more forgiving than execution on a Turing machine.

Joke's on you, 100% of my code is redundant.

[lqet]

>> stakeholders wanted an over-the-top bridge design [...]

> Nothing wrong with that!

Well, in this case, apart from the structural problems, the bridge just looked cheap and kitschy because of the fake cable stays. So yes, there was something very wrong with that, but this problem is so common in contemporary architecture that we don't seem to recognize it anymore. There is just no way for an over-the-top designed building to have any dignity.

[dsfyu404ed]

>Nothing wrong with that!

Except that it's not private money. It's public money.

This is the bridge equivalent of a town using a state grant to buy a Cadillac for the code inspector to drive around in. There is no place for that kind of behavior with other people's money.

If the university wants to build a bridge with all the bells and whistles with their own money that's fine. When they do that with public money there is an opportunity cost of the other improvements to society that money could have bankrolled. To claim that it is ok to spend public money on frills like this is to claim that the net difference between a boring pedestrian bridge and a fancy one (i.e, the "frills") is more important to society than the other things that money could have done.

[baud147258]

>> stakeholders wanted an over-the-top bridge design [...]

> Nothing wrong with that!

Well, there's nothing wrong as long as they are not spending their money.