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What I want to become Vs What I do
(lemm.ee)
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this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2024
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Engineers now: We built an airport, 9 years behind schedule and at 233% the cost.
We are rebuilding a train station at (currently) 366% the planned cost and an estimated delivery time of 200% the original estimate, into rock that might swell when in contact with water and heave the station out of the ground, in order to decrease the station’s capacity by 17%
This is not the engineers fault though.
It is highly political projects, politicians offloaded their old friends and competitiors onto the boeards and other functions and in the case of the airport major planning was undertaken by a guy who is a technical drawer and not an engineer.
Most of these fuck ups could have been prevent, if the project management was done by project managers with an engineering background and if the owners side would have been represented by peoplewith a technical backgrounds.
Source: i have worked in civil engineering for public projects. We wasted 50% of the time explaining Politicians and MBA bros C-levels why they can't start by building the roof and why replanning half the stuff is a bad idea, when we are already on the market with bids for contractors.
Engineers aren't in charge of graft.
estimates are just that, a guess
For healthy working relationships and solid infrastructure you under-promise and over-deliver.
For maximal profit and sustainable business models you over-promise and under-deliver.
The company that under-promises won't win the bid, though. Unfortunately the norm now is to overpromise, and then squeeze as many extra fees and concessions out of the project as possible.
There's also a culture of contractors vs engineers where limits willingness to work together to find solutions. "not my fault".
Exactly, hence the root of the problem the original meme is getting at...
Well sure that's fundamentally true, but really doesn't give any sort of accurate picture of how estimates are done any more than "humans are just collections of cells" does, and anybody who does estimates without using some sort of data as the basis and is purely guessing is doing it wrong as fuck.
It's not like we have no idea how long certain tasks have taken in the past, or what affects how long something will take.