Death to the Blithering Idiots

[Driver]

Originally posted by craigb

You really must be an "old" engineer.

Cheers
Craig

Yeah (read my last post) Gus was short for Isambard. We had a lot of fun on the old Great Western Railway!

[jackiew]

As an old fart software engineer ( in my first job we used coding sheets and punched cards for those of you who are old enough to remember them ) I've always been a bit mystified by the split between programmers and analysts mentioned above.

I don't think you can be a good analyst unless you've at least got some experience of coding and I certainly don't think you can be a good programmer unless you can think beyond the immediate requirement. I've worked with people who are proud of the fact that they know nothing about the subject domain they are writing code in ... if someone tells them "write some code that does this" then that's what they do. I tend to ask "why do you want it to do that" . I've had vigorous arguments with managers who want to know why I haven't started writing lines of code yet and don't think that spending a few days ( sometimes a few weeks ) thinking about what I'm going to do is a worthwhile activity. And I've had even more vigourous arguments with the requirements people when I tell them that what they are asking me to do isn't well enough defined.

The biggest rows tend to be trying to get someone to decide what to do when things go wrong. "Do you want me to report an error, do you want me to try again, do you want me to make an assumption about what the user was trying to do". No-one wants to know but the devil is in the detail. And the cost blow-outs tend to be fixing all of the problems that no-one wanted to decide up front. Bit like renovation cost blowout where the owner keeps changing their mind rather too late in the piece.

The current piece of work I'm doing the person who commissioned it hadn't even read the document I'd written detailing my understanding of the requirements before he agreed to it ... he just wanted my half hour summary. I can absolutely 100% guarantee that the customer isn't going to get what the customer is expecting.

I do wonder how many people who sign up to get building work done actually read the contracts. And certainly I've had quite minor pieces of work done and realised that what I thought I was getting and what I actually got were two different things. My new deck being a case in point ( The contractor I employed does nothing but build decks. I made sure the balustrade would be the legal height ... it never occurred to me to specify the gap at the bottom and the silly bugger made it too small to sweep the debris off of the deck under it ( And presumably he does this to every deck he builds!!

[Pete J]

Well, I wan't going to join in either, but I have been prompted to by my poor experience.

When building a house in Sydney a few years ago, many things went went wrong. Supervision of the excavation was substandard and cost me an extra 2 hours work with the rockbreaker. The chippies were an excellent pair but incompetently suvervised. They had to suggest all sorts of things to the supervisor about timber, windows, flooring etc. The 3 metre high windows on the second storey presented significant difficulties the supervisor was just incapable of dealing with. The sparky did a reasonable job but again was badly managed - cost me at least an extra day's pay for him -mind you (as is my want) there were more power points than you could poke a stick at.
The architect wasn't a bad fella, and produced a resonable set of plans, workable and well thought out, using good materials, but again let down by the supervisor who didn't have a bl**dy clue.
The same goes for a lot of the work that was done, the trade guys knew their job but in my opinion were hampered by the incompetence of the supervisor.

By the end of the job, I was very glad it was all over and took to doing a few of the architraves etc myself, just for something to do and allegedly to save some money.

When I whinged about the way in which the job was managed, my friends and family alike were all too ready to tell me that I should not have done it as an owner builder and should have asked a qualified person to do it. Since then, I have kept a very close eye on myself and my mistrust grows with every day.

[journeyman Mick]

Cliff,
It was BB, works for WHI.

Mick

[bitingmidge]

I was going to shut up too.... but since I started a bushfire....

Stinky is mostly right about current training being the root cause, and SilentC's programmer and analyst categories can just about summarise architectural practicians.

Architects can from my experience be divided into pragmatic, practical types who are probably the kind of people we would all like to deal with, but at the extreme of the scale adopt an engineer's approach to design as well(which is not always good), and the arty farty limp wristed poofy design type that can't tell the proverbial from clay but don't let structure or the client's brief get in the way of a bit of self-pleasure. The latter are becoming more prolific due to (Stinky's observations) on the education process.

If you are about to embark on a project, take time before employing any consultant to ensure that you are compatible philosophically and personally. Talk to their previous clients about their experiences before making your decision. Your project no matter how small should be an enjoyable one!

Interestingly perhaps, in my last serious practice (left 10 years ago), my design partner (for whom I have the utmost respect), would always refuse to look at drawings brought by a prospective employee, reasoning that if they had a degree they could probably learn to draw in the style we wanted them to anyway.

If that didn't put off the poor sausages, his next question always did; "Write down on this piece of paper all the tools you own"..... interesting discussion always followed (Stinky would've been a shoe in for this one!), and if the applicant was successful, we'd hand them a tin of gyprock screws and a battery drill, point them at a pile of old roof battens and doors in the yard, and tell 'em to go and build a desk for themselves!

We would like to think that many of our staff learnt stuff while in our employ, but at the same time quite a number of ego-infested graduates figured we weren't for them!

In my present life, I often engage a "design" architect to produce the concept that will give us an edge in the marketplace, but bring in one of the other types of firms to make sure that the thing won't leak, and that we have the right number of loos for the girls!

Cheers,

P

[craigb]

I'm not sure what we're arguing about anymore because there seems to be more areas af agreerment than disagreement,

Still it comes down to: would you prefer a master builder to desgn your home or a master designer designer to build your home ?

For mine, I'd like a master builder to execute a master designer's plan.

Remember, no tradie, no mater how good he or she is on the tools is ever going to be able to "do" (ie create) the Sydney Opera house, Fallingwater et al.

Pace.

The world needs architects.

Architects might need a kick up the bum from time to time, and there's nothing wrong with that,

But my idea of hell is when the aesthetic is detrermined by dumb **** tradesmen who don't know their **** from their elbow.

Because then what happens, then all you end up with is struff that is easy to build.

So that you can knock it out and quickly get on t the next job.

So we're are talking a mass produced box.

Lets face it,when have any of you people who have worked in the trade, EVER heard the tradies talk about what they would do to make a building beautiful (or even more beautiful)?

I bet the consversation has been more likely to go along the lines of how inadequate the architect is. (maybe you even nicknamed them "angles"?)

Bottom line:
Architects need tradies
Tradies need architects

$0.02

Craig

[journeyman Mick]

Stinky is right about poor education being the root cause of the proliferation of Blithering Idiots in all fields. If there's anything worse than a bad tradesman or architect then its a blithering idiot that works in education, because their stupidity is passed on to so many. A few of my own experiences:

Builder's licencing course via correspondence, first assignment the lecturer wanted me to write a letter of application for a cadet position with a building company, describing at length all work experience. This was so he could see where everyone was coming from. I duly wrote and submitted this and his feedback was "maybe you should have written a resume instead" My feedback to that was "maybe if that's what you wanted, you should have asked for it, I addressed all the criteria you set for the assignment". That was just plain sloppy thinking I reckon.

Vocational Education Degree course, Religious education assignment (lecturer a Catholic Nun, I kid you not). Assignment: write about your persoanl relationship with God and how this will affect your religious education teaching. Feedback after reading my essay: "You have too many references to "He" and "Him". You should talk more about a "Universal Being" as this is more acceptable to a wider audience. My reply, "maybe you shouldn't have asked about MY relationship with God if you didn't want to hear about it". More sloppy thinking and assignment writing.

Voc Ed degree, behaviour management course, assignment 1, write about an incident that occured during your teaching prac, and how you reacted. I wrote about an incident in which a young indigenous boy started beating up one of the girls, and how I physically restrained him and ejected him from the classroom and followed up by telling the teacher. Assignment 2: Study these five models of behaviour management and tell how you would approach the same situation using these different techniques and secondly explain which technique or combination of techniques you would use in future. I complied but showed that two of the techniques had no practical application in this situation. Got marked badly for this assignment, just scraped through. Showed my next door neighbour who has taught for years in remote indigenous schools (Principal of several as well) and she couldn't see how I could use the techniques in the situation either. Lecturer probably hasn't seen the inside of a classroom for a decade or more and couldn't control a classroom of angels, let alone a room full of kids with learning and behaviour problems, that come from dysfunctional families and have a room full of sharp tools and dangerous machines to injure themselves and others with.

Applied years ago for a teaching position at TAFE to reach screeenprinting at a diploma level to indigenous students. I have a BA in visual arts and had at that stage worked about 6 years in graphic arts and screenprinting. Brought in a portfolio that blew them away, they couldn't even understand how most of it was done. The interview was conducted by two lecturers, one black, one white, both lesbians. (A friend of mine was very good friends with one of them.) They rang me a week after the interview to say that I was their second choice for the position. They'd offered the position to a woman who was considering it but she was going to do some reading as she was not confident she could handle the registration of screens. Would I consider doing some part time work to teach registration? Now registration is theprocess of getting all the colours to line up with each other, a very basic skill in printing, if you can't register your colours you know squat about printing. I told them I could come in as a consultant to sort out any problems but my hourly fee was about 3 times what they paid their part time lecturers. So they hired a black lesbian who didn't know what she was doing over a male who had worked in the industry and had a degree becauseit was better politically. Never mind that they were churning out a whole bunch of students with absolutely worthless diplomas. Blithering idiocy perpetuated.

Then there was the home ec. teacher who thought that it was better to hang your clothes out to dry rather than use a dryer so that your body could absorb the vitamin E (A?) that they absorbed from the sunlight. Wouldn't have a bar of it when I tried to explain that your body needed sun in order to synthesise the vitamin, it didn't stream out from the sun and get caught in your clothing. She also taught that salt was bad for you - period. I tried to explain that it was an excess of salt that was the problem and that if you did manual labour in the tropical sun it was nigh impossible to have an excess, and that when the army was on exercises up on the cape the soldier had compulsory salt tablets. She wouldn't have a bar of that either. I shudder to think what other idiocies she was teaching the kids.

At least stupid architects will only result in ugly, overpriced buildings that leak and don't successfully fulfill their requirements, stupid educators are producing a whole nation filled with blithering idiots.

BTW, Craig, I can think of many discussions on the aesthetics of buildings or boats that I have worked on (probably outnumbered by discussions about power tools and furniture building though.)

end of rant

Mick

[Cliff Rogers]

Originally posted by journeyman Mick
Cliff,
It was BB, works for WHI.

Mick

Cool, thank goodness, we have GP, works for herself.

I suspected that was the case.

[bitingmidge]

Some words of wisdom from a site toilet door many years ago, explains much of our current predicament:

An architect is said to be a man who knows a very little about a great deal and keeps knowing less and less about more and more until he knows practically nothing about everything.

On the other hand, an engineer is a man who knows a great deal about very little and who goes along knowing more and more about less and less until finally he knows practically evereything about nothing.

A contractor starts out knowing practically everything about everything, but ends up knowing nothing about anything, due to his association with architects and engineers.