Hacker News Reader

Comment by SilasX | Hacker News Reader

>Everyone is totally winging it all the time. Confident people are just better at hiding it.

So skyscrapers and jumbo jets are built on guesswork, despite all the things that can go wrong in their design and construction?

I wish people would be more precise about what is meant by this, since it seems trivially false when taken literally.

View on HN

We figured out how to build good skyscrapers and jets by building lots of bad ones and studying the failures. We stopped building skyscrapers that collapse and jets that fall out of the sky by amassing institutional knowledge, not individual knowledge. We developed processes and methodologies that prevent major blunders from making it into the final design, and mitigate the impact of minor ones.

If some element of guesswork wasn't involved, we wouldn't need massive safety factors, because we'd know exactly how strong and stiff to make things. If engineers could be trusted to avoid disaster purely through their own skill and expertise, then we wouldn't need building codes and inspections, we wouldn't need FAA regulations and the NTSB.

"Some element of guesswork" != "just winging it"

If 99% of the job is applying well-understood techniques to well-trod problems you have an intimate domain understanding of, and 1% is judgment calls you can't rigorously justify, that's not "winging it".

What I think is going on is that people think back to their work, only remember the 1%, and then casually conclude that "aw, heck, the whole thing is just judgment calls", which doesn't follow at all.

Many projects crucially depend on someone having that deep understanding, and their success proves that at least one person (and probably a lot more) aren't winging it. If people would just operationalize what this nugget of wisdom is supposed to mean, I think we'd find a lot more disagreement on what it means, or a much less surprising insight.

hmmm, sounds like a job for J.E. Amrhein (speaking about structural engineering, but broadly applicable to many engineering disciplines):

"Structural engineering is the art of molding materials we don't wholly understand, into shapes we can't fully analyze, so as to withstand forces we can't really assess, in such a way that the community at large has no reason to suspect the extent of our ignorance."

Again, "not fully/wholly understanding" != "lol just winging it".

If the New York City skyline is "just winging it", then it should no longer be reassuring to tell someone that "lol don worry we're winging it too".

I think your question is legit. It shouldn't be down voted. It doesn't apply to science and engineering disciplines because we humans have made those disciplines "human proof" by rigorous analysis and testing. Here when people say "winging it" is I think meant to point out that Humans are limited in their capacity to know everything about things ,especially predict the future yet people sometime act like they do know. "Winging" might be a coping mechanism we have to employ to stay relevant in the rapidly changing world. It may not have been true 100 years ago.

Thanks for the emphasis on the possibility and importance of rock solid engineering.

At times, information technology entrepreneurship seems to believe that no such thing is possible.

There's a joke about whether software engineers that write aircraft software would dare board a plane they've written software for..

I'm sure there's lots of places in skyscrapers and jumbo jets that the engineers in charge feel at least somewhat ashamed for, and are only there because they needed to "ship" and it was empirically shown to be "good enough" for practical purposes .. and then every once in a blue moon a plane crashes.

Similarly to how debuggers help us beat code into doing something "good enough" for practical purposes, but no one really understands what the code does anymore .. and then every once in a blue moon there's something like heartbleed.

Striving for perfection in a market context only sets you up for pain - since stakeholders rarely care about quality, they care about more money and less headaches now, consequences be damned. So everyone is just winging it.

Well, you could be very solid on the technical aspects of what you're doing, but realize that you're wining it in terms of whether your proposal delivers economically, ie how long it will take to implement or what cost savings will be realized. Being brilliant within the scope of your own specialization will only take you so far; you need to understand your colleagues and their constraints well enough to productively address resource conflicts and so on. If you're too competitive with your colleagues that can lead to zero-sum situations that fall short of collective potential even though everyone is sincerely trying to deliver the best possible result.

Not everyone is good at business != everyone in every role is just "winging it" (as the OP claimed)

I'm not talking about business or management.

I think the OP is speaking more strategically.

eg. When do you make the decision that it is the right time to build this kind of skyscraper or jumbo jet with this compliment of people etc...

I saw nothing in the OP's statement to clarify that context, nor have I seen it in any of the numerous other posts that repeat the same claim.

If there are a hundred non-obvious caveats, which people may even disagree on ... maybe it's not actually so wise?

At the very least, those who promote this claim should verify they're not confusing "use gut instinct when you have to make a judgement call" with "the entirety of coding, including iterating 1 to 100, is a judgement call".

I think these things are made in spite of people winging it. Everybody is doing the best they can, but we're all not going to get it right 100% of the time. Given that, there's processes and organizations in place to identify errors and correct them.

If you were running such a project, you would FEEL as though you're winging it all the time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com