[agsamek]

This article doesn't touch much about why plumbing is hard. I'm from Poland so I'm not only IT but also a plumber ;)

Plumbing is hard because it is not forgiving. It's as binary as IT except you can learn the outcome with some delay, once you learnt about a damage caused by a leak. Either you do a pressure tests right or repair can be expensive. And bugfixing is always tricky.

Water also goes down whether you like it or not. Think about all possible leaks inside the shower cabin. Or what is even more impressive that under a pressure the water goes everywhere possible.

Plumbing is similar to electrical engineering, except it usually doesn't kill immidiately (though working with gas is tricky anyway) but requires similar strict mental model to do right.

And when you see a plumber it seems like this person is just a physical worker. So work status misconception must be leveled with money...

[georgeoliver]

I had a funny experience a week ago. One night working on a hobby web project it took me three or four hours to debug something, I finally got to bed around midnight thinking "boy, programming is hard".

The next day at work we had to find a broken heat wire in a tiled bathroom floor, running 1000 volts through the wires to try to fuse the broken wire, then heating the floor up and searching with heat-sensitive paper overlays for the likely broken spot, then breaking the tile with a hammer and digging the wire out of the mortar bed. After we found it I thought, "I'd rather hunt software bugs".

[iancmceachern]

I once had to jackhammer a 4 foot wide, 26 foot long, 4 foot deep trench in my basement to replace the sanitary sewer in my house. It was old terracotta pipe and had tree roots growing into it and eventually blocked the flow. It was doing that that helped me be so thankful to have an office job. I also had to lug all the rubble upstairs in 5 gallon buckets.

[CamperBob2]

Didn't you have to bring the rubble back down when it was time to refill the trench? That would've bothered me more than the trips upstairs.

[iancmceachern]

I didn't. It's not good practice to fill in the trench with rubble (rubble is the big chunks of concrete with re-bar still in it, not the dirt). I left the dirt down there, along with any smaller chunks of concrete, anything smaller than a golf ball or so. Good practice states that you should fill the trench directly around the pipe with gravel which i brought down fresh, compact that and then fill dirt on top of that, which I had left down there, and then finally with newly poured concrete and re-bar. Filling in the trench with the rubble would potentially damage the new pipe I just put in. It actually wasn't bad bringing in the new gravel and sacks of concrete because gravity does the work for you. We just opened one of the windows and put two 2x4 boards to make a ramp and slid the bags down that. Just had to carry it from the truck to the window.

[sokoloff]

Does a thermal imaging camera not work for the finding task? That seems like it would be faster, more certain, and less aggravation all around.

[georgeoliver]

Good question, I don't know. The technician on site didn't have one. I guessing the camera would be faster, but the result image about the same. The nice thing about the paper is you easily can check multiple spots at once, so it's faster to divide down to the problem area.

[CamperBob2]

Time-domain reflectometry. To Google it is to love it.

[georgeoliver]

Very cool! The tech did have some device that could measure the distance to the fault when tied into wire upstream, but I'm not sure if it was a TDR, I think he was making more rule of thumb calculations based on the characteristics of the wire. I would say though that between his voltage box, amp box, and general test tools he had the coolest tech on the jobsite in general.

[PaulHoule]

My complaint is that plumbers frequently do poor work for the money.

We had some come and install an instant water heater and they cut an ugly hole in the side of the house without much thought.

At one office I worked in they called Roto-Rooter (a non-union franchise that is likely to wreck your pipes and require a call to the union plumbers afterwards) who claimed that we'd flushed a condom down the drain (very hard to believe) and wrecked the pipes so we had to call the union plumber.

Another time the sink wasn't running so we called the union plumbers, they unscrewed the aerator from the faucet, saw some crud come out and the water run and left in triumph, sure of their ability to outthink a group of mere computer nerds.

Us computer nerds were sitting at the faucet immediately after that, running it and talking about it. The now aerator free faucet clogged up again within 2 minutes of the plumbers leaving.

[nkrisc]

> My complaint is that plumbers frequently do poor work for the money.

Considering the quality of many expensive website and software implementations I've been required to use throughout the years at various jobs, this problem is not unique to plumbers.

[agsamek]

> My complaint is that plumbers frequently do poor work for the money.

Hehe - now you can feel like an IT customer. I think most people feel the same about IT but the domain is just more wide and prone to excuses.

[pasquinelli]

people feel that way about stuff they have to pay for, generally.

[PaulHoule]

No, I've never felt that way about a union electrician or generic handymen.

[throw0101c]

> This article doesn't touch much about why plumbing is hard. I'm from Poland so I'm not only IT but also a plumber ;)

I'm guessing that is a reference to Omid Djalili sketches about Polish plumbers:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K85ZtXnMxbM

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8mjzu0Runo&t=1m

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FM9Ps6cW9U

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omid_Djalili

[lajosbacs]

It's a stereotype across the whole Europe, even Poland takes advantage of it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_plumber#/media/File:Pol...

[agsamek]

Thanks for sharing. This was exactly what I was referring to. Also youtube links from the UK are nice, shame you are out of EU for the time being :)))

Anyway - I just added a valve regulation to our kitchen floor heating this weekend, so it was not only joking :)

[lajosbacs]

I also found the UK vids amusing (am not a Pole) -- kind of how to make fun of a stereotype in a positive way.

[fuzzfactor]

>It's as binary as IT

Yup, it either leaks or it doesn't.

IOW in the case of helium leak testing, it either leaks an unacceptable amount or it leaks an acceptable amount.

For higher pressures or stronger vacuums there's always this:

https://products.swagelok.com/en/all-products/fittings/c/100?

https://products.swagelok.com/en/all-products/valves/c/200?

For things like aerospace or energy.

[iancmceachern]

Yes, and it's even less forgiving when it's a gas, or worse a flammable gas, or 3000 psi hydraulic fluid.