[majormajor]

One of the most interesting things to me here re: the common question "why can't we build quickly anymore":

"They didn’t have design loopbacks because they had extremely experienced builders. The builders knew what they were doing. They had been building skyscrapers for between 30 and 40 years and they understood what they had to pay attention to and what was possible and what had to be designed in what order to eliminate the loopback. Now, all the computers in the world: they’re not going to substitute for deep experience. I propose that if they didn’t know what they were doing there’s no way: they would not have had the chance to hit that kind of number."

How many cities out there today have as many builders building skyscrapers at the same pace as they were then? Is there a way to get that speed back without the same sort of practice?

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The workflow/independent stuff is also very interesting, but similar to the above question, it's tough to draw exact parallels to software. We've all seen big waterfall projects fail, and the "design floors on the fly independently" aspect has a lot of similarities with rapid iteration, etc, but software is somewhat different in that the labor and the design are the same - there isn't a "steel team" and a "concrete team" etc that can work completely independently, I don't think.

"Create the schedule and then figure out the project" is probably a super useful takeaway, though.

[xkcd-sucks]

Anecdotally, my elderly father was an Architect for quite a long time - He claims the trend was (1) away from skilled labor and (2) towards contractors building only what is made explicit in drawings. I.e. details would be specified as "typical - see an example (only it's unusual)" and rely on the the best judgment of the contractor/labor to implement, while now work halts if there is any ambiguity. He thinks the old practce led to higher quality buildings more quickly, while the new practice is an inevitable consequence of legalism (everybody sues everybody when anything goes wrong) but more a consequence of less expert labor.

[slotrans]

> Is there a way to get that speed back without the same sort of practice?

No.

Practice is the ONLY way to get good at anything. Doesn't matter what it is.