[onthecanposting]

I wish I had read this a year ago. I kept a mental note of pain points in the workflow, played it cool for four months, researched solutions to the problems, then when I got a shot as a task lead on a fresh project, I jettisoned the rituals and was way ahead of schedule while nobody was looking. Two months later the neurotic hall monitors found out. Oh no, sir. You don't just thumb your nose at practices that were pioneered in the 1990s just because they quintuple the cost of work. You will be made to do it our way to atone for your arrogance. You will use my ancient excel spreadsheet and tell me how much you like it.

Now the project is financially a total shit show, I'm besieged by dweebs, and I've been quietly looking for a new job for 6 months. Apparently, this was an avoidable situation.

[jfil]

Before you solve a problem, you always have to watch out if the person/team who created the problem are still around.

If they are, then you need to apply special tact to the way you solve it.

[l33tbro]

Interesting. Why do they want you to do it the old way? Or could you explain more? I've never worked somewhere like this, so curious as to why this would happen?

[spyspy]

Im not saying I don’t believe you, but I’ve never been anywhere that wasn’t at least a little like this. There’s always some power tripping person using “the way we do things” as a club against the newthought people

[onthecanposting]

The short answer is pride and inertia.

The immediate cause is lower management can't be assed to learn anything, and nobody makes them. This is in part because at big firms after 5-10 years you can politic or job-hop into management and be an email engineer who does little outside of scheduling meetings and marking up PDFs. Young engineer training is usually informal and in master-apprentice fashion. Your mentor will show you how he or she learned it 10 years ago, which is how his or her mentor learned it 10 years before that.

There is little technological progress in civil engineering design that is not externally imposed, and the last big step forward was Excel and replacing hand drawings with CAD in the 90s. Digital delivery will be the next leap, but it's going to take lobbying, fanatical champions, and pure luck that Autodesk and Bentley don't use their billions to suppress it.

Procurement laws, client ignorance, and network effects shield engineering consultants from the discipline of the market. Wasteful practice is not punished. That and licensing regulations have created a sort of guild socialism that has allowed backwardness to survive.