[paganel]

He's correct, though, a bridge that collapses after only 10 years of use demands mockery (and worse) for the people that designed it. Especially as this new bridge replaced an existing one which had, indeed, been up for more than 100 years. It's very fortunate that no-one died because of the incompetence of the people involved in building it.

My dad is a retired civil-engineer and he displays the same type of mockery (and worse) when he sees badly built stuff. Because he very well knows that badly built stuff can cause people to, well, die. It's not "they made an ooopsiee, let's not make it worse by denigrating the designers/builders", it's "they really f.ed things up, people could have died, they're morons (and worst)".

[matthewmacleod]

This is a shit attitude that results in more shit collapsing because everyone’s busier finger-pointing, calling each other morons, and trying to avoid being called morons than they are figuring out why shit collapsed in the first place.

A bridge doesn’t collapse because someone was incompetent or fucked something up. It collapses because multiple different things fucked up in lots of ways, and the processes responsible for checking they didn’t fuck things up also fucked up. It’s a systemic failure, and by far the most important thing is figuring out how this failure happened and how we can prevent it from happening again in the future.

[paganel]

> than they are figuring out why shit collapsed in the first place.

That's what the guy from the YT video is trying to do in the first place, while also naming things for how they really are.

> A bridge doesn’t collapse because someone was incompetent or fucked something up.

Yes, that's why a thing like a bridge collapses, because key people that were part of the process managed to fuck up. It's as simple as. That's what my dad's structural engineering professor told him and his student colleagues back in the '70s: "don't fuck up in your future job or people will die. You'll also most probably go to prison". Said professor didn't mention anything about systemic errors or anything like that, which actually means diluting the blame ("it was not me, it was the system").

Civil engineering is not like aeronautics, which has lots of moving parts, civil engineering is (mostly) a tried and tested discipline (like the 100+ years old bridge that was replaced by this new, fancier bridge can attest to). Yes, learn from mistakes, obviously, but also call people out and throw them in prison if people have died because of their incompetence.

[matthewmacleod]

The idea of a risk management strategy that involves depending on people to not fuck up is plainly laughable.

[paganel]

Cathedrals were not built based on “risk management strategy”, but on builders not fucking up. The civil engineers that I know of (basically my dad and his friends from his generation) looked up to those builders from the Middle Ages, not to today’s management consultants instructing them about “systemic risks” and “strategy”. Granted, I do not know what today’s generation of civil engineers looks up to.