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Comment by scrabble | Hacker News Reader

I have been "bricklayer B" in this hypothetical scenario when working at a large corporation with a terrible boss.

"Bricklayer A" was constantly rewarded for working hard. I was constantly reprimanded for wasting my time since I was deemed to have a much larger "potential," despite producing more output and with a higher quality than most others on my team.

This ended up with my leaving that team. So I can't agree that "bricklayer B" is always preferred, but I would say that a good manager would usually prefer that choice. Good managers are not easy to find.

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I think the GP's point is exactly that: With a physical contractor, you want it done, to spec, as quickly as possible. Anyone can tell that B is a better bricklayer than A, because we can see that the same work got done, but more efficiently, and are happy because we had to pay them less.

With software, it's hard for people to tell that the finished product for Team B is as good as (or better than) that made by Team A, and therefore all they can look at is often effort. They see team A responding to alerts, alarms, production issues, etc, all night and weekend, and then see you cruise out at 5.

Walls are easy to understand. Software isn't.

Sometimes comparing one piece of software to another piece of software is like comparing a garden shed to a skyscraper.

I think a software developer is more like a carpenter (and sysadmins are like plumbers, and electricians are like devops etc). I assisted in laying a 150m2 hardwood floor from a 40 year old warehouse earlier this year. There were quite a few invisible processes that were required to get the floor right. And it wasn't clear at the start that the job would be successful. But because of a very skilled carpenter, and my dedication in doing lots of prep work for him (cleaning, grading and flipping the boards) we got a result that cost the same as new boards[1] and looks amazing, and will last another half a century at least.

[1] only because I got the boards for wholesale price.

Neither software nor architecture are easy to understand.

The wall example is similar to "Write a simple calculator capable of doing addition, substraction, division and multiplication". Anyone can tell if that software works as expected or not and have some idea if it's well done or not.

A similar comparison would be a team designing and building a fully functional house on a budget. In that example it's not easy at all to assert how well they are working, as happens in software development.

I don't think it's nearly so hard to understand.

Does the software solve your problem? Then it's good software. If not, then what are you paying the programmers for, anyway?

But some problems can be solved in a day, others require an immense amount of work. Not everybody can tell the difference.

There is more to bricklaying than shacking bricks. Go look at old structures. You'll see some in Rome where the bricks are still standing 2000 years later. Now look at a typical American patio that cracks in four years and starts to shift. Most people just see bricks, but there are many other factors that will determine if the wall stands the test of time.

To be fair, it's perfectly possible that the typical Roman patio cracked and warped in four years. We don't see the things that didn't survive.

This may be true, and while I am no archeologist, the summer I spent digging up Roman stuff disagrees. Their style of bricks, more like tiles, is very strong. I'd guess it relates to the ratio of tile to mortar.

I don't see how that disagrees substantially. If there was substantial variation in projects (intentional or unintentional), both could easily be the case.

Pre 1940s brickwork is all pretty great in my opinion. I have way too many recycled bricks, for paths and gardens. Some are in place, others waiting to be used. They look great and often have names, places etc stamped into them. The brickwork on Edwardian houses, above doors and windows for example, is great. All the angles and precise corners. And all done with hand tools. The best bit is that they wear in. A bit of grime and weather and they look even better. Compared to modern bricks which fall apart when the surface fails or turn out to be made of concrete, old bricks are fantastic. Bricks are another of my strange obsessions. I'll go back to my corner now...

Please don't go back to your corner. If you can, put up a few web pages about bricks. I think the world could use them. I live in a newly built house (+-6 years) and we have a fake brick facade plastered to the front of our house. I have been thinking recently: "Why didn't we just use real bricks in the first place!?!"

I remember a surprisingly interesting website on nails (and I think screws too) and the defects in them from manufacturing problems. The guy was an expert on the manufacturing process. Your giving me ideas now. The ends of bricks on our house (which is as basic as a 1940s house gets, no fancy brickwork here unfortunately) have finger prints in them. I stumbled across some at a demolition yard with the owner cleaning up a load that were apparently made by prisoners a long time ago - a special triangular symbol was stamped into them. That's when the obsession started. Just picked up a few nice ones with a giant W stamped into them which would never normally be seen as its on the top where the mortar goes. The building was demolished in the Christchurch earthquake, so its got that bit of history as well.

It's not all roses pre-1940. I live in a house built in 1880. Some of the brick used in the foundation is of pretty low quality. So much so that their cores seem to be nothing more than compacted brick dust.

There was an article that mentioned ancient roman concrete survived so long not because it was STRONGER (it's about 10 times weaker than modern concrete) but because it survived the elements better. At least partially, because it was made with volcanic ash. I'd bet the same, or a similar, circumstance is the case with the bricks.

Indeed, the post is about crappy management and little else. This is the real story - we talk about scarcity of engineers but it's as nothing compared to the scarcity of effective technical management, which is an industry scandal IMO.

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