Perhaps I'll think lessons from an auto repair shop can apply to software development after they've spent 2 years rebuilding a vehicle from the inside out while it continuously journeys across the interstates.
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.
I feel like everyone that frequents HN would have a good time spending a year working in that industry.
My assumption is that opening the window fucks it up for the whole system, but very few people are aware of this, and the office folks aren't made aware of it by the air-con techs.
Am I way off? Am I overstating the effect that an open window has on the system?
Leaving the window open and AC on in high humidity areas can freeze up the coil generating a service call, trick zone sensors, etc. If there is a large temperature difference the sharp gradient will not be comfortable.
Buildings are poorly sealed in my experience. In California code requires economizers on RTUs and they are almost always broken / stuck partially open. In the Inland Empire for example the actuators bind up from sand and often seize. Nobody wants to pay to fix just that, if they even know it’s busted.
I stay under 10 tons. Things are different in bigger buildings!
That’s unfortunate because nobody actually knows what is doing and everything is fine as long as it falls in the guidelines, if they found a problem that is not “in the books” they have no clue how to proceed and this problem not only applies to mechanic shops, i’ve seen the same situation in the medical field.
They certainly didn’t read my notes that indicated that I already swapped around the plugs and coils but the problem stayed in the same cylinder.
Their first course of action was to replace all plugs and coils.
Ugh.
They are going to do it the way that makes sure they get paid.
Ultimately, they missed out on a lot of work. Actual issue was a broken exhaust valve spring.
Indy got the same notes as me, immediately did a compression test and easily knew it wasn’t plugs/coils.
I think it's also not the case that software development is so heroic, most deployment strategies draw a line between development and the version people are using, and there is quite some power in the ability to go back to a previous version.
EDIT: Obviously there should be acceptance criteria for the product, especially where safety is a concern; but the day-to-day process is just going to be what 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.
For a sorting algorithm, you know what to analyze, and you know the result is generalizable.
We also have lots of and continue to have more software monoliths that at first are just to good, one wouldn't bother writing their own. Later we wont even remember how to do it and end up with a final design. Could be epic, could be aweful. (I mean every ready made thing available for use either for end users or programmers)
Why? Software is a fantastic prototyping tool, its so good we don't bother making things into a chip. This for the most part because we wouldn't be able to update it. The need for updates will eventually go away. Things for now continue to be improved but at some point it stops making sense to do so. What [say] an email application should look like was completely unknown in the 80's but we all have expectations today. It seems unlikely for us to continue to write [say] new email clients from scratch forever?