Comment by neilk
6 years ago
There's no question in my mind that North America has gotten a lot worse at completing great civic projects.
Sometimes, that's for good reasons. We don't have slave labor, we have environmental review, and we allow affected communities to protest and block approval. In the old days when the city fathers had a bright idea they'd just plow through the neighborhood of $LEAST_POWERFUL_ETHNIC_GROUP.
We might have overcorrected! But I also don't know what model there might exist for moving quickly with a multi-stakeholder process.
There's not one.
Time and time again, organizations prove that product design/project management by consensus leads to budget overruns and under delivery.
Quality at speed requires dictatorial like organisation with high risk to all. In every example given people died, more were maimed and even more had mental breakdowns. Seems like most people aren't willing to be a part of something like that today and there doesn't seem to be any popular cause that would motivate such projects.
> In every example given people died, more were maimed and even more had mental breakdowns. Seems like most people aren't willing to be a part of something like that today and there doesn't seem to be any popular cause that would motivate such projects.
People are still totally willing to be part of something like that; people are as haphazard and risky as they ever were. The government won't let them because it doesn't trust people to assess the risks properly (there is evidence that the government is right; people are very bad at assessing risk).
However improving safety probably isn't going to cause the speed reductions, safety and speed don't usually conflict. The fastest way is often also a very safe way because it involves less unnecessary exposure of people to hazards. The issue is the government deciding that work flat-out can't be done (eg, can't open a mine, can't build a highway, can't build a building, can't hire/fire someone, etc, etc). There is usually a good reason but at the end of the day building infrastructure is a break-eggs-make-omelette situation. We don't know how to build infrastructure at scale without collateral damage, as it were. If we first gain consensus that something is a good idea, infrastructure will not be built.
> People are still totally willing to be part of something like that; people are as haphazard and risky as they ever were.
I think people were much more willing to risk their lives (and risk other people’s lives) in the past than they are today. We have elevated the role of the individual. Younger generations are all “me” generations. (I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, it’s true for me as well.)
Case in point is the Western expectation of acceptable losses due to warfare. If we needed to pull off another D Day invasion, I don’t think we could. Generation Z is not signing up to die in tens of thousands and I don’t blame them. The casualty rates that were once seen as the normal cost of war and industry are totally unacceptable today.
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And if we don't get consensus we'll pay the consequences for decades or centuries to come. E.g. mining operations in many places polluted the local waterways and underground water sources. Fracking today is another good example - if you ask the locals no way it will happen.
> People are still totally willing to be part of something like that; people are as haphazard and risky as they ever were. The government won't let them because it doesn't trust people to assess the risks properly (there is evidence that the government is right; people are very bad at assessing risk).
The government doesn't let people partake in hazardous work? Which government is that? For example, the U.S. government will not stop you from working in mines, electronics industry, construction, or in automotive production. Corners cut when it comes to safety to save on cost still happens everywhere.
I've heard that SpaceX is a bit like that, and is advertised as such. People sign up. I do think people are willing to plow into things that truly are that inspiring, but we just don't do much of that stuff. It's usually not profitable.
It's also not always pleasant. A guy who went through special forces told me once: "I'm glad I did it, but I would never do it again."
This might be an unpopular comment, but I think at least part of the reason you don't see people plow into inspiring things these days is less about lack of profitability and more about an overabundance of diversity.
Inspiration looks different to different people. If people don't have a shared vision, they aren't going to be able to collaborate on shared projects at the same level as people that do have a shared vision.
Yep. I thought about it after I read someone commenting on SpaceX employees having the "pleasure" of working frequent overtime.
I guess some of the things that keep them going, deep inside are the same the keep people climbing every mountain there is and then free soloing:
They have to prove it to themselves (and maybe others) that it can be done.
Then there's Apple under Steve Jobs and the covert 5-year-long project that lead to the creation of the iPhone. I don't think it was that fast compared to what companies achieve nowadays, but it certainly was accomplished due in part to Jobs' quasi-dictatorial leadership.
In every example given people died
People died writing Unix and JavaScript?
Painful and discouraging virtual casualties which make it difficult to justify more ambitious or even equally functional efforts under 21st century conditions.
We all died a little with the creation of JavaScript.
Agreed. These days it's impossible to select a site and begin demolishing the neighborhood within the same month.
> [T]he Sausalito site selected on 3 March... construction began on 28 March.... Construction start was delayed two weeks to allow the 42 families living on Pine Point, which was scheduled to be demolished to build the shipyard, to move.
> In every example given people died, more were maimed and even more had mental breakdowns.
I can't find any citations for deaths in many of these examples (Treasure Island, Disneyland, Pentagon). Where are you coming to this conclusion from?
People certainly died in the construction of the Empire State Building. I think I calculated that the risk of death for a worker on that was higher than the risk for a soldier deployed in Afghanistan.
Those that died while building the great wall of China were literally used as filler material for the wall.
I think it might also be a reflection of general polarization. Collective action is hard (certainly easier under a dictatorial regime, e.g. China), but in earlier days in the US we had more common purpose -- whether it was a sense that we are building a nation or WWII, those kinds of things -- which to some degree compensated for the inherently inertial nature of collective action within a liberal democracy.
It was also a time when it was more socially and politically acceptable to steamroll those who didn't share or was part of that common purpose. Not only in the US, but all around the world.
Same in Europe. Brussels city in the 1900s moved 20.000 families to build a single street (now the main pedestrian area). Mussolini paved over dozens of ancient Roman sites to build a big street through the city centre. Paris went through an entire planned effort to reshape the whole city, which created all the famous avenues you know today and at the same time created all the social problems (poor 'banlieue' areas around the city) we still know and love today.
> what model there might exist for moving quickly with a multi-stakeholder process.
There is no model for that.
The OP's list of "fast" was more of a compilation of cherry-picked projects that, with the right context and in the right hands, achieved an impressive outcome.
Moreover, each of them AFAIK had long prerequisites to get to the point where they could reach their endpoints. The path to great things invariably includes many failures, false starts, and uncertainty.
The author, perhaps, has watched too many films with breezy montages that end with triumph. It doesn't happen that way, except in the wet dreams of project managers.
> The author, perhaps, has watched too many films with breezy montages that end with triumph.
In fairness, the author co-founded Stripe when he was 21. So, perhaps it's fair that his views are colored by the fact that at a very young age he built the highest valued company in the history of the world's most successful startup incubator, but saying "it doesn't happen that way, except in the wet dreams of project managers" is, well, I'll just say a bit funny given who the author is.
To the high performance operator, inefficient bureaucracy has been a recognized thing for millennia.
The associated deadlines, proven over millennia to never be realistic.
Regardless, this is the mainstream, and this is how institutional projects are built and at institutional speed, i.e. sluggish. You know, like a snail without a shell.
Alternatively, for an equally long time now, in a certain way nature has favored those few individuals who have the instinctual need for non-sluggish, dare I say "fast" myself.
These are so hard to find that most time-sensitive projects simply start without them and substitute traditional deadlines and bureaucracy in order to measure long-term progress which would otherwise not be apparent.
When what is really needed is leadership from the top down building the team exclusively hand-picked for the very instinct which has always outperformed mainstream operation. But it takes one to know one.
When everybody on the job has always had the knack for outperforming anything deadlines have to offer, you don't have to remind them you needed everything "the day before yesterday".
No need for (lack of) progress reports either, when the goal is moving visibly closer continuously and it's turning out not to be a long-term project after all.
Outliers will be outliers.
I’m curious about your last statement. You wrote “the author, perhaps, has watched too many films with breezy montages that end with triumph.” Then you made an even more disparaging comparison to wet dreams that is too distasteful to quote.
How many billion dollar companies have you started?
> In the old days when the city fathers had a bright idea they'd just plow through the neighborhood of $LEAST_POWERFUL_ETHNIC_GROUP
This definitely happened in Chicago. In multiple cases, the city ran highways through ethnic neighborhoods, effective killing the local communities.
This is one of the major criticisms of the Cross-Bronx expressway.
Japan seems to be completing civil engineering projects pretty fast compared to almost any other nation. Maybe there's something to be learned from there?
The lead engineer who completed the Toyota Camry Hybrid in record time dropped dead shortly afterward. Japan keeps its development speed high by burning through employees aggressively.
Print MOAR money!
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MYAGM2JPM189S
Is this much worse than the United States?
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We squandered the last few years of a booming economy:
Study:
America has ‘squandered’ the recovery and is falling behind the rest of the world, according to Harvard study
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/america-has-squandered-the...
I think one person / body in charge but willing to listen sympathetically to the stakeholders before making a decision. I'm having a job thinking of an example but Hong Kong under British rule did pretty well. Run by UK civil servants tasked with doing well for the place and built a lot of infrastructure and housing.
This, exactly. I think we're better off that things are built more slowly now.
Look at China, they still build things very fast but they also don't care about work safety, neighborhoods, ethnicity and all that.
China is incredible in this respect. Nationwide high speed rail in less time than California will build a single route.
Why is it incredible simply to do something fast? China is not a model to emulate. They throw a massive number of people on projects, pays them next to nothing (neither when they are maimed, nor to their families in case of death), and allow them hardly any time off. Wherever they're employed, it's not uncommon for Chinese men, and women, to only see their family 1-2 times a year.
The fundamental model that we forget today is that impressive things are built by oppressing millions of people.
From the pyramids, to Notre Dame, Neuschwanstein Castle, Great Wall of China, Panama Canal, Chichen Itza, Machu Picchu, Cancun hotel zone, etc every single technologically unbelievable achievement was built by exploiting large masses of the population.
The reason we cannot build the same today is that the pool of people that can be exploited has been much reduced.
Perhaps that is a cause for celebration.
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We also used to have stronger public institutions that could maintain long-term vision, weren’t subject to constant political upheaval or budget cuts, could reliably staff planning and execution phases, didn’t have to put everything out to bid, negotiate with overdue/overbudget vendors, set up new processes for each project, etc.
Bureaucracy involves some waste in overstaffing, but also saves on the chaos that results from our starved, politicized institutions with little internal execution/planning capability.
IMHO, if there is one thing a communist government can execute on, it’s infrastructure. China now has 2/3 of the worlds high speed rail, despite being an emerging economy, and only starting 20/25ish years ago.
There's an Irish Channel here in New Orleans literally thousands of Irish people died to make it.
Agree with you. Things used to be faster because people in charge were careless.
But unlike back then, we have power tools and vast mechanization. One Diesel powered machine can do the work of thousands of men. If we wanted to build a canal today we ought to be able to do it much faster regardless of carelessness level.
Classic straw man logical fallacy.
Because machines exist, does not mean carelessness levels go one way or the other.
You're just adding an unrequested extra variable.
We could build it even faster with machine AND being careless.
So what?
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Umm the Irish Channel is just a neighborhood name. It's not a canal. Yes, thousands of Irish died from yellow fever and malaria while digging canals in New Orleans (Basin St and those going to the lake).
They were considered expendable because they were Catholic (unlike the Scotch Irish who were protestant). They were also lied to and told that New Orleans was close to the Irish communities in New England.
Yep Typo, New Basin Canal.
https://www.irishcentral.com/news/8000-irish-died-while-buil...