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Comment by dsr_ | Hacker News Reader

Hrm. I was annoyed by the cost-savings idea and at each of the partial fixes, and then reasonably pleased by the solution (but I would have been happier if the root cause was fixed.)

So I'm not a manager, and not a programmer... I'm a sysadmin at heart.

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I saw the solution immediately, to be honest. Of course, my mother has worked for a railroad since before I was born, so maybe I had an unfair advantage...

You're a customer at heart.

We all know most changes result in assumed consequences and unforeseen consequences. Especially if you mess with the most basic human functions ; )

The planner in me therefore would have liked to see a bit more planning upfront, less knee jerk reaction to each issue, and more consideration to the costs to the org as a whole of each change...

>but I would have been happier if the root cause was fixed.

But it was fixed. It just took a clever enough incremental improvement to move back to square one.

It's not quite square one: there's half as many toilets on the train, which probably does save money.

Not sure. Essentially a new class of 'car' was created, twice as long and roughly twice as expensive. If the cost of dealing with the larger cars was non-zero, then maybe it was break-even. Its premature-optimization at its finest I think.

Yes, but there is half the number of cars in each train, so the doublings cancel out. That said, the overhead of larger cars could still be a significant factor.

Assuming the original cost-cutters decision was correct, it isn't twice as expensive.

Absent from the story is any mention of cost-benefit analysis. I'd agree with the unnamed director's decision to eliminate every other toilet if there was evidence that, in the long run, it actually did cost the railroad less.

Except that you now effectively have cars that are twice as long and articulated in the middle. If one half of the double-car is damaged, both have to be taken in for repair, and both have to be transported and handled as a unit.

Presumably, the previous single-car size had already been optimized for pre-toilet criteria, and changing that by a factor of two probably massively screws with at least some of those criteria. It's hard to believe that the costs savings for having half as many toilets significantly outweigh those other factors.

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