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Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

I disagree with the original poster about arborists, but I don’t think racing is a better example. Racing is a sport with rules (limitations) specifically designed to promote some type of fair competition. It is a game designed around wanting to drive cars really fast, it looks nothing like “getting a task done as fast/easily as possible.”

If the goal was just to get from point A to point B as fast as possible without and constraints, I guess they would launch the guy out of a cannon or something.

If the goal was to do something useful, like move a lot of people/stuff from one point to another, we’d end up looking at solutions that look nothing like a race car; public transit, stuff like that.

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Well, I made a couple of mistakes in the post.

One, is that line about LARPing. I think that's what's really gotten folks upset, and rightly so. I sincerely apologize. It came across as snide. It was a poor choice of words.

The other, is that I gave the impression that I approved of the practice of removing safety gear. It was an observation; not an approval. I've watched "cowboy" arborists at work, and find it terrifying (and, TBH, impressive, as well). I think they are accidents waiting to happen.

But it still goes on, in many industries, including software development. Another poster talked about the calculations that people make, taking risks, in order to move faster. Their post seemed unpopular, but they were absolutely correct.

A big problem with experienced folks demonstrating reckless behavior, is that it gets aped by folks that may not be able to manage things safely, and that's where the real danger lies.

I definitely agree with your last paragraph here.

One thing specifically about arborists—it is a sort of weird job, right? Homeowners can handle most normal trees. The arborist’s job is specifically to handle troublesome trees in weird environments. The problems look similar to ones that homeowners have, but they are more difficult (because nobody calls in the tree guys for an easy tree, right?). So I wouldn’t be surprised if they are uniquely prone to some extent, to wanting consumer gear with (some specific) guardrails removed, or used in creative ways.

By the numbers, I suspect the vast majority of trees that get chopped down get chopped down by loggers in specialized environments, with hyper-specialized equipment (that looks nothing like modified consumer gear). I suspect most engineers think of themselves as more like the loggers: cultivating that environment is a big part of it, and their tools are just different from consumer ones. If riskier, only because bigger moving parts involve greater energies.

There are a lot of safety rules on how to do any type of work, though.

The goal of work is the task. The rules exist to reduce the number of people who get hurt while doing it.

The goal of a sport is to engage in entertaining competition. There are additional rules in sports, to maintain an entertaining competitive landscape.

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