What a Year at a Mechanic Shop Taught Me About Process (2016)

I don’t understand why some areas would warrant the response of “sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t”. What if we left other areas examined? “Let’s not bother to research sorting algorithms further. Some people write a sort and it goes fast, and some people write one and it goes slow, and that’s just the way it is”.

If a team can just “click”, isn’t it critically important to figure out why this occurs, so we can create other teams that click? It would be an awful shame if we were not as a species able to make effective use of all of us because we preferred to leave this to chance.

How far away from that do you think we are and why?

That’s called hardware. The whole point of software is that it’s soft.

Auto repair is 90% diagnostics and 10% wrench turning. A lot of newer vehicles have symptom matrixes with a process for repair. Lowering the skill floor for mechanics.

What’s interesting to me about auto repair is how techs are paid. A lot of shops do book rate. Example let’s say you have to replace a front half shaft. Book rate pays you for 30min. If you take an hour to do it - you lose money.

They'll just wait until it breaks. My car clanks sometimes when doing sharp turns at a low speed. Something in the steering or wheels. Not very loud, but disconcerting. 2 visits to the dealer - zero progress. To be fair, it's probably harmless. Or it could crap out at 80mph and kill me, I don't know. And that's BMW, where mechanics are expensive AF.

The OBD port can tell you a lot. Especially if you can google it to get pointed toward the more common failure modes that lead to code XYZ.

Words often go through phases where they stop meaning what they mean to groups of people. Sometimes large groups. “Feminism” is the classic example in my head.

You don’t have to bend to that. People often try to destroy words for political reasons, but in then end, I think, the words often stand resilient.

Our languages are really impressive structures that define real spaces. There is power to learning them and knowing how to use them well.

That power does diminish when words are abused, but it doesn’t disappear.

Personally, I am happy to have words be refined, but when people try to redefine them to the point where they are useless... I listen, and parse their words as intended, but I keep using those words correctly with others.

Perhaps I should have considered that this forum would use your definition. I do believe that technology is much broader than IT and internet. The author didn't refer to the tech sector, by the way.

I prefer to call all human inventions technology, because even if a technology is old, it's still serving its purpose. Even if we're taking it for granted.

Plumbing put us all out of the water carrying business. But without it, daily life would be very, very different.

Google's definition of technology is interesting. - the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, especially in industry. - machinery and equipment developed from the application of scientific knowledge.

I guess technology is the process of making technology. Pipes are a technology, but most of technology is over.

But it also sounds like technology when a plumber is applying his knowledge of metal and fire and gravity to solve a new problem.

I've been going through a now-decade-long rethink on this topic. It's pretty clear that there are 1) fields and 2) levels of technology.

A decent encyclopaedia or technical school course catalogue will lay out most of the basics (library classification systems are another good option), and models vary. I've been devising my own based on mechanisms rather than application areas. The MIT course catalogue itself is a fascinating artefact.

The levels of technology also matter: there's cutting-edge, high, middle, low, and primitive. Examples such as "Low Tech Magazine" and the "Primitive Technology" YouTube channel are excellent opportunities for enlightenment (and also surprisingly and reassuringly popular).

The domain most at HN are familiar with is the higher end of information technology, itself a very narrow subset, though one which touches on many others through its interactions with communications, media, control, monitoring, surveillance, and manipulation.

> When people say they work in "technology" they're really shortening it from "high technology" (or perhaps "technology development".)

I think what they really mean is “computing”, and mostly specifically “software”; I rarely see any other industry or type of work, no matter how high tech and whether or not the work being done is tech development, referred to as “technology” without some other modifier.

Hah, haven’t seen any myself but I’ll ask him. Why do you ask?

I never thought of that.. you know another way Reno’s are like software... you often have to debug other people’s work. Simple example, in one house there were wide door jams that met in the middle of the top of the door frame. Why would anyone do that. Turns out, you take the two long pieces and the two short pieces and you get two 96” pieces... answer, they didn’t want to buy a third piece of lumber. Now to tell you how really stupid this is, you buy lumber at Home Depot by the foot and they even have a saw station in the store for you to trim pieces and even if you didn’t trim there you can bring the unused portion back and get a credit. Now... I would bet most software devs on here have seen code equivalents at least as dumb as that. It’s been fun doing this but it’s been cool to see just how many parallels there are.. don’t get me started on the 1x, 10x, 100x analogues!