It isn't like people don't wonder why it takes so long or costs so much to, say, build a road, either. It seems like everybody massively underestimates how long it should take to do something that they don't know how to do and won't be doing. I characterize this mindset as "I need _x_ to be true, therefore _x_ must be true." It's endemic in all of the people who don't actually produce anything.
> Never underestimate what a bored machinist can accomplish in their spare time.
Put a bit broader, never underestimate what people can achieve and figure out in their spare time. I mean as a child I would build dams and channels out of stones and dirt at the beach or near rivers while on vacation, without any formal education or knowledge about waterworks. I can see how this play would end up in things like irrigation systems, aqueducts and sewage systems over time, if I were to live in a place or a time where those things were not present.
It's probably been the same with tools and art for tens of thousands of years. When people are not struggling for survival, they will experiment.
>Time that could have been spent experimenting on new techniques, trying new ideas, taking on new projects.
this mindset seems to be the exact ones that coporate companies sinking in tech debt has. The absurd extreme of this is that carpentry is a waste of time when you could be making more money as a doctor.
Fact is you don't need to be 100% optimal on time and resources and you don't need infinite money to live. I'm sure carpenters work on thin margins but a few pieces of plywood won't bankrupt them and leave theif families on the streets.
If someone sacrifices a little time and money for personal satisfaction and pride, that's fine. If they want to maximize profits that's also fine (as long as they aren't abusing their labor to do so). C'est la vie.
> You won't get competence in managing the budgeting, planning, and execution of a subway line without doing it a lot.
> So how do you break the cycle of inefficiencies leading to people scared to start enough projects necessary to build expertise?
I wonder if this could be something that's only possible when you're riding on fast exponential growth - fast enough that you can afford starting more and larger projects faster than population growth (or at least faster than competent people entering management work), with confidence that this "spending spree" is self-sustaining. Once you lose that confidence, you start worrying, lose velocity, and then lose capability.
This would explain why it seems that nations tend to rapidly industrialize and improve across the board, in a kind of push that lasts for couple decades, and then runs out of fuel, leaving the nation barely able to do any large project anymore.
An analogy in my mind is to a scramjet: an engine that allows you to achieve extremely high velocities, but which itself needs you moving very fast to even start it - and conversely, if you let your airspeed drop past the threshold, it will stop working.
>"Clever and diligent" people will try to complete the most important tasks themselves to ensure they get done right, thus creating a bottleneck.
This is the difference between me and my mom. She'll put off something for ages because she could theoretically do it herself, but I'll just hire someone else to do it after calculating the value of my time/opportunity cost vs hiring someone.
>All of the good stuff was created by people who worked overtime.
What if those creations were largely responsible to lazy people who had time to think of innovations instead of grinding away? I think it takes all types, honestly.
> having my brain stuck in idle for 8 hours all day every day
You'd be surprised how many times manual labor requires solution finding. Even figuring out a leaking pipe or a problem in the electricity panel requires ingenuity. Designing and making custom furniture can be complex. A competent construction worker / repairman can be like a dev and payed like one (& sometimes harder to find). Take a look at those DIY videos to see what I mean. Not to mention the tooling these guys have in their shops ...
> Someone wanting to build would have basically the same intelligence as a civil engineer today, they would just have a smaller set of materials and techniques.
Not just a smaller set of materials and techniques, but also a smaller amount of time around the requirements needed to just survive - getting food/shelter, etc. Advancements in civilisation makes the overheads to staying alive smaller, so more time and effort can be spent on advancing technologies.
> The number of individuals who know how to make a can of Coke is zero.
This reminds me a fact I remember time to time. If civilization collapses after, say, a world war, I most probably can't make a pot, can't grow plants, can't differentiate if one is edible or not, can't dig for petrol, can't make plastic (or even glass), can't reinvent concrete, can't make gunpowder etc., you get the point.
I can only write software and maybe drill with tools and nail with a hammer but that's all.
> I work in the tech industry. I'm somewhat rare in that I also work on my own vehicles, do my own maintenance, repair things, build my own stuff around the property, etc. A lot of coworkers at various places I've worked over the years view this as somewhere between "eccentric" and "slightly mad." "Why would you do that yourself, just pay someone else to do it!" is the common sentiment.
I feel like it's partly a consequence of a highly specialized society. I'm not sure how to fix it. There's an opportunity cost. Why would I change the oil in my car when it's $40 to get it changed at the shop? Since I don't change my oil, I now don't know the basics of how to jack up the vehicle, I don't understand how to use the torque wrench to tighten the drain plug and I'm basically missing all the fundamental skills so I got no knowledge to build on.
The other contributor, is that growing up in the city, in an apartment, there was never any opportunity to work with my hands. I still recall a shop class in high school. I got to use a lathe and a oxy acetylene torch. That was many years ago now.
Now that I'm older, I make conscious effort to learn how to do things with my hands. There are things that I still must outsource, when they are on a critical path. For example if the car is down because the suspension needs to be replaced, I'm not going to spend 3 months researching and fixing it. We need it now.
I've come to really appreciate the famous Heinlein quote:
> A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
Im also very much attracted to the idea of a "renaissance man" [1] :
> Embodying a basic tenet of Renaissance humanism that humans are limitless in their capacity for development, the concept led to the notion that people should embrace all knowledge and develop their capacities as fully as possible.
> Would you go to a doctor that knows how to remove an appendix, but doesn't know how the circulatory system works?
Would you go to a doctor who understands how to do a heart transplant, but doesn't understand the Navier-Stokes equations underlying how viscous fluids like blood behave? Would you trust your car to a person who doesn't understand friction at the level of interatomic forces? Would you seriously trust your life to an airline pilot who couldn't single-handedly design and build a plane at least as capable as the Ford Trimotor?
People have always been specialized. Always always always. Even back before "specialization of labor" was officially invented, the people who lived in the Kalahari didn't know about hunting seals and people who lived in Polynesia couldn't hunt a buffalo or a bison to save their lives. There just isn't enough time, interest, or opportunity in one life to learn everything top-to-bottom. We're slowly improving the amount of opportunity, and you can fake an interest for a while, but increasing the amount of time is still a miserably slow process.
> Truly massive projects that can be measured in large fractions of a human lifespan are exceptionally rare.
We still get massive projects, but they proceed like evolution: every step has to have a benefit. (Even if the part that step plays in the final product is not what gives it the immediate benefit.)
>>What does it cost us as a society when a generation loses those skills?
This. This is a lot to do with today's society. We don't seem to appreciate the problem at all. People just think that they can throw some money at someone and get the things repaired and so they don't need to learn anything.
Society as a whole may have to bear a huge cost, and by the time they realize this they might have already lost their time.
Manufacturers are a lot to blame but today's lifestyle of "it's just a matter of few bucks, so why waster time?" is also to blame.
>Maintaining systems often takes more skill and understanding than building new ones.
This is true in practice, but in my opinion it's self-fulfilling - maintaining systems often takes more skill because they were built (or modified) by people with less skill.
When skilled people build a new system, it takes less skilled people to maintain it. Of course, the longer the less-skilled people maintain it, the higher the skill floor creeps for maintaining it.
> We don’t need to solve just for the physical actions, but also for the human experience of building and the feeling of mastery. Particularly for physical trades.
This is like complaining that cars did away with the pleasures of horsemanship, or how laser printers have destroyed the pride engravers derived from their work.
The history of technology is full of taking hard tasks that people took years to master and therefore derived status and self respect from, and replacing them with machines. People cope.
"One would have to be out of their mind to hire someone who is untrained and high out of their mind to build a house (or anything else for that matter)."
Tell me you've never worked in the trades without telling me you never worked in the trades.
"That said, if you pick the right set of filters to look through, anyone can look helpless in a way that is unfathomable to someone else, so to judge anyone on such a basis is at the least misinformed."
Postmodernist navel-gazing aside it isn't unreasonable to expect grown-ass adults to be able to handle maintenance and repairs on their home.
1. Unless you're screwing around with systems work (plumbing, electrical, hvac) there's nothing particularly complicated about the work and honestly even plumbing and electrical work are dead fucking simple compared to wrangling a codebase.
2. The majority of folks were able to clear this low-ass bar 20 years ago.
3. The US is missing two full generations of skilled trades, the odds of being able to attract a talented craftsman to your project are slim and the majority of folks can't afford one when the find them. The aphorism "If you want it done right do it yourself." has never been more true than it is now.
It isn't like people don't wonder why it takes so long or costs so much to, say, build a road, either. It seems like everybody massively underestimates how long it should take to do something that they don't know how to do and won't be doing. I characterize this mindset as "I need _x_ to be true, therefore _x_ must be true." It's endemic in all of the people who don't actually produce anything.
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