I once chatted with the foreman of a skyscraper construction project who happened to always be standing out on the street near my office where I regularly got coffee, and I got to ask him a bunch of questions about the process. It was a lot of "what's that guy up there doing with that giant temporary platform" and "why do they X" kind of stuff, but when I was asking about the crane that was eventually going to have to be doubled in height when the building got too tall, he blew me away with the precision and confidence about that progress. "That will get jumped up on Memorial Day" he said, and that was several months away. I asked him how he could be so certain, and he explained that they build one floor per week, and the various trades (concrete, framing, electrical, plumbing, finish) each worked on one floor at a time in a pipelined fashion. So while concrete is working on the 19th floor, framing is working on 18, plumbing on 17, etc. When I asked what happens if one of those trades doesn't finish within their week, he looked at me like I was absolutely insane. "That doesn't happen. It can't. They have a week." Sure enough, the crane got taller on Memorial Day. After hearing that explanation it was fascinating to watch the progress and confirm that every tuesday, they'd start pouring concrete on the next floor up.
Coming from a software perspective, I thought this was pretty impressive. When was the last time anyone told you something was going to take a week and it actually took a week? :D
BTW, to answer a question about the crane, there are regulations limiting the crane to a specific height which change once the building gets tall enough to support having the crane bolted to the side of it.
I can say how long my software compile or build time takes fairly accurately. That's the better analogy to use with construction. The rest of the software project is design work, I'm moving walls around, adding more load bearing, and so on.
I’m surprised how often people are wrong about simple things like this. If a build takes five minutes, that’s the absolute least amount of time before you’ll have a binary. The CI tool could have a queuing glitch. You could have a flaky test, you could be failing to isolate multiple integration test runs properly and one could ruin the other.
But that’s just the simple stuff, the stuff without humans. Most of the time if something will take five minutes, we often try to find something to do that will take a few minutes. Well guess what, we always underestimate how long things will take, ususally by a factor of two. So a five minute build can take ten minutes for you to notice if it succeeded. And if it failed thirty seconds in, you might still be looking at fifteen to twenty minutes to the end of the second build (the more failures the lower the likelihood someone will multitask, but for some they only watch the third try closely).
This doubling and tripling is why it’s more important than you might expect for compile and test times to be very fast. An extra minute can turn into three way too often.
the workers in trades in a construction project have plans. they have schematics that say do this here. to this exact dimension. using this exact type of connector. they don’t (usually) say which tools to use or how to do everything, it’s assumed you know
compare this to a software team that has plans (design docs) for everything they want o build. they have schematics (tickets) that say do this here. to this exact interface. they don’t (usually) say which tools to use or how to do everything, it’s assumed you know
i don’t think these scenarios should be that far apart. those people in the skyscraper aren’t moving walls. that would screw over the whole project. they have the output of more planning so they don’t have to. and it paid off during implementation
Buildings are typically cookie cutter designs that aren’t too different. The ones that are have all the same problems - you have to adjust the design on the fly (see Burj Kalifa).
Additionally, when your in the middle of creating your building, the owner doesn’t come in and say “actually, I want this apartment complex to also have a suite of luxury condors on every odd floor”.
It’s a fantasy to think that more planning would make software development cheaper or more on time. We tried that. That’s waterfall. And it failed miserably because software supports business needs which change on a quarterly or yearly basis. Not to mention that we need to update our software to take advantage of newer systems or security vulnerabilities. That building you’re putting has a fixed purpose that’s going to remain largely unchanged for 50 to 100 years or so, there’s generally nothing new to learn in terms of techniques and problems (unless your pushing things like with Burj in which case they did have to make on the fly adjustments and delay), and doesn’t have to deal with the challenges of the virtual space that software plays in.
So sure. If you’re a contractor building the same kind of website over and over again, I’m sure you can give a very accurate estimate of how long a given piece of work can take. If you’re trying to build a more scalable system or something totally new that hasn’t been done before, then there’s no plans to follow and you have to iterate until you figure out solutions to all the problems you encounter.
"Additionally, when your in the middle of creating your building, the owner doesn’t come in and say “actually, I want this apartment complex to also have a suite of luxury condors on every odd floor”."
From what I've heard from people working in the construction industry, this sort of thing ("variations" I gather they're called) happens more than you'd think.
A software project's design doc is like an architectural mock-up: sometimes useful, but not necessary and certainly not part of the construction process.
Programmers write the blueprint. The construction is handled by the computer (compiler, linker, tests).
> compare this to a software team that has plans (design docs) for everything they want o build. they have schematics (tickets) that say do this here. to this exact interface.
This is such a tremendously ignorant (and frankly harmful) take that it was hard to resist downvoting you. Either you have no idea how software is actually built, or you have worked for some deeply dysfunctional companies and you have my deepest sympathies. If you have any semblance of authority over any software developers, then my sympathies go toward them instead, for having to deal with you. Yes, it's that bad.
> compare this to a software team that has plans (design docs) for everything they want o build. they have schematics (tickets) that say do this here. to this exact interface.
Missing from your description is who is writing those precise plans and tickets that specify exactly what needs to happen down to the "exact interface", whatever that's supposed to mean. Whoever's writing those is your actual software developer, and they're wasting their time. If they already know exactly how the code should work, writing those documents takes longer than just writing the code itself. Throw the documents away and just write the goddamn code. Everyone else is doing literally nothing. What you described is not software development, it's a nightmare-creature feeding on wasted hours and crushed dreams.
If software engineers get too comfortable with one framework or tool a bunch of them will just try something new or some new paradigm since they're bored. This has always been a source of delays in projects I've seen, not sure what the construction equivalent is.
The other side of this conversation is that construction does get delayed or not finished. Talk with anyone that has built a house and they'll have horror stories of months of delays. Commercial is the place to be for construction, residential seems like endless issues up and down.
> Talk with anyone that has built a house and they'll have horror stories of months of delays.
This can easily be explained in the part of the world I live in. Small/medium construction companies prefer to work on bigger projects than a house for obvious reasons. So they'll come over and do parts of your house in between jobs on the bigger sites which freqently means massive delays.
> If software engineers get too comfortable with one framework or tool a bunch of them will just try something new or some new paradigm since they're bored
I often wonder wether this is because software is such a new field (people have been making houses for millenia), or because of the kind of people software appeals to?
Many other professions are much more interested about providing services in time and reliably, than about innovation.
Similar story: I asked a friend, who ran public comms on a rail extension project, to see her schedule.
Two Fridays away at 11:05 a concrete truck turns up and pours. At 13:10 something is laid by some specialist in the concrete. At 14:50 another thing happens.
I asked her if she was joking and she looked at me like I was mad. Of course not. The concrete needs to be poured and then the truck goes somewhere else. When it hardens a thing has to happen and then the guy who checks the thing turns up and they’ve only got him for half a day and so on and so forth.
My mate says that “if they built bridges like we built IT infrastructure a lot more people would die”.
My mate says that “if they built bridges like we built IT infrastructure a lot more people would die”.
If people regularly died because of IT infrastructure, we'd be regulated and licensed like civil engineers and we certainly wouldn't be writing software in C/C++/nodejs. We'd all be coding in stuff like Ada and Erlang and most of our day wouldn't involve writing logic at all - it would involve filling out documentation and forms around the occasional bit of logic that would get written, probably by someone else.
They send another truck because of the first one didn’t make it in time the concrete company is going to have a fun day cleaning stuck concrete out of their truck.
My father-in-law was in commercial construction for decades, now turned general contracting post 2008 recession, and he has binder and binders of contractor business cards, including a concrete section. I can assure you project managers would be frantically calling all concrete companies trying to find a replacement. And they will.
If it's a railway project they have likely booked several trucks already, doing several deliveries, so one of them having an accident is not likely to matter.
Forgive me if I’m wrong — I have a sibling comment here and am not a construction PM — but no. This comment beautifully demonstrates the point: the disconnect between our industry and the physical world.
There are not just concrete trucks just lined up down the road, waiting for a PM to say “okay we’ve got enough, you can stop now”.
The amount of concrete is known. It is planned. The 3rd party concrete supplier is given an order well ahead of time. They plan their trucks and drivers. None of this is made up on the day.
One of them having an accident matters.
This is why IT projects are such a shambles. When we forget something — a change request, say — we just say “oh well, that’s a pity”. Some poor schmuck has a bad afternoon running around making it good and life goes on. We get away with it because it isn’t concrete in a truck.
One truck can deliver about 8 m3 of concrete. If you need 100 m3, that's about 12 deliveries.
This can be done if 4 trucks make 3 deliveries each, or if 3 trucks make 4 deliveries each. The supplier has several trucks and while each one needs maintenance rarely, the fleet of them needs maintenance almost daily, so the supplier is likely to either over-provision (have a spare truck), or be able to procure one from his competitor across the street. "One of the trucks having an accident" is already planned in on the supplier level.
I did not, but now that I know more about project management — PMP® specifically — I can probably answer that for you.
Risk management. Which in the real world actually means something, unlike those horribly pointless risk workshops your PM makes you turn up to.
The work package that contained the concrete truck would have assigned to it a risk. These risks have been carefully thought out ahead of time. I dare say in the building industry they re-use them. What an idea! Learning from your past. Anyway.
So the risk here is that ‘the truck gets stuck in an accident’, and that risk has a rating. An amount of money is assigned as a reserve to this risk in the event that it happens. This money is part of the project’s budget but ideally you never spend it. But it’s there.
So if the bad thing happens — freeway accident — the PM pulls out their risk register, looks it up, calls the boss, says “hey that risk eventuated, we need to use that reserve”, the funds are released, and the risk mitigation is initiated.
It makes sense when you consider each floor is essentially identical. I imagine skyscrapers and the like should be pretty predictable once the foundation is set up - it's just rinse-repeat for the next hundred floors (mostly). You don't have to deal with any preexisting limitations either, way up in the sky (unlike ground infrastructure, which has to deal with rights of ways, underground services, etc).
A better software analogy would be "how long will it take to deploy the next Kubernetes cluster?" which can be fairly accurately predicted if you know the number of nodes etc. and how long it took to deploy previous clusters.
Different measurement, same process. It almost doesn’t matter how much minor fluctuations there are, they basically know they will need X plumbers and Y electricians and how to space them out. Given that they can adjust weekly as needed for these minor fluctuations.
If you're interested in learning more the term to search is "takt-time planning", specifically as it relates to lean construction methodology rather than manufacturing.
I've never been on anything that tight, but I'll say that the projects I've been on where we used Gantt charts and had a dedicated project manager got done with a lot more precision than anything managed by an agile process.
Maybe it's just me, but having my reputation staked on my estimates with an easy to read chart of dependencies and deadlines helps me 'servo' my effort(i.e. work overtime) and come in closer to the estimate.
I wouldn't suggest that for everyone, but some of us like that sort of pressure and the feeling that comes with nailing it. Then again, I don't have kids.
Never once got someone with a hardon for Gantt charts to make an honest graph of what depended on what, so I have nothing but bad, borderline traumatic experiences with Gantt charts.
Management always tried to ride them like it was sheet music for an orchestra. This has to be done before this, so we’re going to schedule one to start the day after the other finishes. Sure. This whole scheduling process is a farce so I’m now entirely checked out, so it’s just going to get worse as the meeting goes on.
Bruh stop being a bootlicker; even if you enjoy doing unpaid work, you're undermining your colleagues who probably don't. When the work takes longer than estimated, that's a problem with the estimate, not a reason you should be giving more hours of your life to rich owners.
> even if you enjoy doing unpaid work, you're undermining your colleagues who probably don't
Busting my ass in my younger days to make "impossible" deadlines was far from unpaid work. It was a conscious tradeoff that paid off extremely well in cash and stock, and nobody cared about "undermining" their colleagues who had the exact same opportunities but chose not to chase them.
I don't "enjoy doing unpaid work", I "enjoy impressing people who casually throw big bags of money at people who are useful to them."
IIRC this falls into classic fallacy where teams set low goals so as to always exceed them. The better way is to have people estimate and bet money on delivery.
Maybe a bigger company could do it like some card games decide on who will choose the game: Make several teams "bid" on the contract, the one with the best bid gets it, but winning the game (e.g. getting bonuses) depends on if they can actually deliver on their bid.
> Coming from a software perspective, I thought this was pretty impressive. When was the last time anyone told you something was going to take a week and it actually took a week? :D
If you are asked to write the same exact piece of code (like each floor) 18 times you'd probably have no problem meeting schedule.
And, crucially, the entire project is preplanned. That preplanning is the software phase equivalent - the construction is running the code. (Or at least, the preplan is defining all the necessary function definitions and connecting them confidently, and construction is just writing each implementation.)
I can tell you with great precision how long it will take me to build software that has requirements as precise as a skyscraper's. The problem is that most of the time the software to be built has nebulous requirements
> "That doesn't happen. It can't. They have a week."
Maybe it didn't happen that time, or maybe it did and they remediated somehow (at higher cost), but I have a dataset that says it happens all the time. And that "it can't happen" attitude is part of why it actually happens- nobody is looking ahead at uncertainty.
This could be because construction (civil engineering?) is a fairly mature field that's been around for hundreds of years. Of course there's new materials and designs and everything but there are also established methodologies and standard practices.
Add things generally go according to plan in Western countries so I'm not surprised.
(I'm from a non-Western country where long term planning of anything is futile — too much entropy and chaos).
Computers, software etc is a very young field in comparison. By the year 4723 things would hopefully be standardized (and possibly build themselves).
While the maturity of the field is surely part of it, the fact remains that a typical piece of computer software almost certainly has a lot more unique complexity and functionality than a typical building. It's pretty rare a building is expected to provide the ability to do something that no other building has ever done before, yet we expect this sort of thing of software all the time. Nor is a building expected to perform complex logical and arithmetical operations while in use, or if it is (e.g. software controlling the elevators or climate control system), it's using more-or-less off-the-shelf componentry to do so.
I would say that both you and the parent are right. Software engineering is both new, and non-standard. So we get worst of both worlds, on one hand there are no good truly standard practices, and on the other the technology is very complex and rapidly changing absolutely all the time.
Knowing this, one could say that its a minor miracle anything gets shipped in this industry.
He said of course they can finish, they have an entire week. Apparently he was incredulous. How does that NOT point to a week being more than enough time?
A Chinese construction company built a 10-story building in a day, and a 57-story skyscraper in 19 days.
I am not sure what "union break" is in Chinese...I would brush up.
You can say that we need experts, teams of consultants to issue reports at $1,000 per hour on disturbances to the local newt population or whatever, we need to pay off the bureaucrats in planning, we need to pay the unions and organized crime in NY...the reality is that someone has to pay this, and the US isn't efficient anymore. Layers of graft at every stage. China has just cut out the corruption, and they can sell the same goods at half the price, make double the profit...they just do it better.
For the record, yeah, I’ve worked on putting up multiple skyscrapers. From the on-site work (physically speaking: I was a field surveyor laying out grid lines and offsets for the other trades), and off-site (as a construction project manager).
Hey that’s great to see a construction manager on here. I write software specifically for our superintendents and construction managers and foremen at some of the mega projects my big construction company works on (I’m sure you’d recognize the name if you’ve worked in the industry).
I find it really rewarding work because with software I often feel detached from the work I do. I’m going to get to go on site and see something getting built soon and I’m excited!
> Let's get this straight: you haven't worked on the construction of a skyscraper, but you just go around shutting down arguments you don't like
Where do they say that?
> The reason why it can be done quicker and cheaper is because that is already happening
Have we seen any evidence that the construction is just as consistent & reliable long term or that the speed isn't at the cost of the worker (safety or benefits)?
I will ask you a question: you go into the doctor, he says you need surgery immediately, you ask why, and your doctor asks what your medical qualifications are...does this seem like something a doctor would do?
Have we seen any evidence that this isn't the case? And the inherent assumption in your argument is that preserving "the worker" (I am not sure what this means) is a fair price to pay for hundreds of billions in graft every year...okay, why? The point of comment is to demonstrate that the purpose of building infrastructure is not to employ consultants, but to build buildings...the false narrative about "the worker" is exactly why several hundred consultants with Ivy League degrees are taking home $1k/hour for no-show consultancy jobs...thank God "the worker" is okay though.
Buildings collapse in the US too. And it actually results in buildings get built.
You think the US isn't corrupt: how many consultants are taking their piece? The contractors, planning bureaucrats, the environmental consultants, architects, lawyers...it is endemic. At least in China you only need to pay off a few people, in the US you need to pay tens of thousands of consultants whose have acquired this role of tax collector through collecting various bits of paper from corrupt institutions (thank god for legacy admissions, right?).
No-one cares how sausage is made, they just want to know how it tastes. Chinese corruption gets things done. US corruption breeds more weakness, more waste, more corruption.
The US vs the entire developing world? LOL, of course there are going to be more in the developing world, since that covers most of the habitable parts of the planet.
Citation needed…or not. It’s an obtuse claim on its face.
I’d argue corruption is an inherently corrosive influence, and the necessarily large bureaucratic apparatuses involved with things like large construction projects are particularly vulnerable to corruption.
I'd cut the country stereotypes out of the picture, but there's definitely more than one kind of corruption, and the kind of damage it does changes.
You are absolutely correct that large construction projects are very vulnerable to corruption: Anything that has as high a budget is going to be rife with opportunities. But a project's culture will alter the kind of corruption you get. I was quite close to the construction of bridge spanning over a river, a little under a mile wide. Significant slippage in the delivery date was going to be very annoying to the powers that be: Being able to finish the construction prior to the next election was important, and being seen as the cause for a delay was going to lead to losing more projects that some of the very same people were going to keep overseeing in the future. So the bridge was done on time. It's just that a lot of palms got greased, and extra 'cement money' really went into things it shouldn't. For instance, the bridge's main engineer had just bought a derelict house that was completely restored by 'elves', from the construction company.
Sometimes the fact that something took 4 years too long is tolerable to the powers that be, while the construction definitely remains safe. Other times, the construction is just going to prove really faulty in 15 years, because things didn't go over budget, and someone took the difference between what the spec called for, and what could possibly appear to be a completed project.
Same with permitting. In some cities, corruption means you don't let people build something because you don't want it. In others, the mayor tells their friends to buy land zoned for low density, and then rezones to let them build 20 story buildings, making a mint. Still corruption, but different parts of a project suffer the consequences.
Only truly cursed projects manage to take 4 times as long, 20 times the costs, and end up with something awful in the end.
Are you aware of how much building China has had to do? There is no citation needed, you just look at the what they have done already. They have built so much that mining companies have had invest hundreds of billions into single-resource mines to meet demand, they have already had one of the most successful infrastructure build-outs in human history.
Shenzen was a rice paddy in 1990 and two decades later was a city of 20m people (2nd highest number of skyscrapers in the world too). The exact reason why China have been able to do this is the reason why you think it is impossible. People in the west are too lazy, too self-indulgent, too anxious about what other people are doing...China did it, they aren't paying attention, they don't care, they didn't ask anyone for permission, they just did it. In the time it takes to build a road in the US, they built a city with one of the most productive economies on the planet...where do you think the future is?
I studied the financing aspect of large building construction in a law school class. It works in a similar fashion. The development money is doled out on a very structured basis, sometimes literally one floor at a time. There are numerous milestones and you have to stick to the schedule or the money stops.
One thing to consider is that when you're building up into the air instead of digging into the ground, you have much fewer opportunities for unknowns to affect you.
To contrast that, in the last few days I have spent 14h that I never considered in the schedule to wrangle TypeScript issues and bugs (4 to be precise).
> A contractor with a proven track record of rebuilding damaged freeways (most notably the Santa Monica Freeway after the 1994 Northridge earthquake) well ahead of schedule, C. C. Myers, Inc., submitted a winning bid of $876,075 to repair the damage to the I-580 connector. The bid was estimated to cover only one-third of the cost of the work, but the firm counted on making up the shortfall with an incentive of $200,000 per day if the work was completed before June 27, 2007.
> On the evening of Thursday, May 24, the I-580 connector re-opened, just before the busy Memorial Day weekend. The deadline to finish the project was beaten by over a month, with the contractor earning the $5 million bonus for early completion. The entire reconstruction project was completed only 26 days after the original accident.
There wasn't a negotiation. Caltrans wanted it done before Memorial Day weekend and saw that the economy was losing money from the extra costs of not having that part of the maze in place and so created a structure that had very large bonuses and very large penalties.
> The collapsed section of Interstate 580 will be rebuilt and reopened to traffic within 50 days under a Caltrans plan to speed up repairs on the MacArthur Maze, officials announced Thursday.
> Nine construction companies have been given the weekend to prepare proposals to do the work, which Caltrans Director Will Kempton said should cost less than $20 million. Caltrans will choose one of the companies by Monday evening, rushing a bidding process that normally would take months.
> The firms must repair the collapsed freeway by June 29 or face $200,000 a day in penalties from the state. But should they finish the work ahead of schedule, they'll earn a $200,000-a-day bonus for each day they were ahead of the deadline, Kempton said.
> "There is absolutely no question in my mind that any incentives paid to achieve early opening is money well spent," he said at a news conference in Sacramento.
> The clock starts running Tuesday morning, Kempton said, and the contractor is expected to start work immediately.
> ...
> Kempton said that the bonus money offered to open the freeway before June 29 is based on what officials estimate the closures are costing the state. Caltrans will pay for the project initially from a highway safety account, but federal officials have said they will reimburse California for the repairs.
> A state projection concluded that the connector collapse had cost $90 million, based on a $6 million per day economic impact estimate. This includes a $491,000 loss in toll revenue for the Oakland Bay Bridge
Sounds like $200,000 a day for bonus payments was nothing.
Thank you for clarifying. I watched the documentary. So incredibly inspiring. Everyone working on this job knew they were helping solve a major issue and contributing to an extraordinary effort - from the steel workers to the government officials eliminating multiple blockers to the workers to the company owners.
Incredible sense of teamwork, collaboration, support, care, pride in a job well done.
To me, it is efforts at this scale and quality that make “America great” and lets me reclaim the meaning of this phrase.
that supports at least part of the thesis of this video though, that unknown factors in the design contribute to cost overruns - if you're rebuilding an exising piece of infrastructure in essentially the same way it was before it was damaged, you've got a lot fewer unknowns to work with.
To be fair, a 26-day project is far more easier to manage (to be on-time and not over the budget) than a multiple-year project, despite the former could be more technically impressive.
> A state projection concluded that the connector collapse had cost $90 million, based on a $6 million per day economic impact estimate. This includes a $491,000 loss in toll revenue for the Oakland Bay Bridge.
$200,000 per day bonus vs $6M per day economic impact seems like a incentive that was priced very well for the state.
Maybe, but "economic impact" is an extremely vague measure that some analyst just guessed. People obviously found alternate transportation paths or were dealing with their own damage at home anyway. ...but maybe it's correct.
People did. But it was things like instead of going from some of the mid to upper parts of the east bay just taking 880 across the bay bridge to instead take the San Mateo bridge and go up 101 instead. A longer trip that took more gas.
Our small Maine city recently replaced an entire bridge in a couple days, https://verandaplan.org/
It worked great. They shut down the road for a couple hours, literally moved the newly built bridge from beside the road into place, and then were ready for rush hour in a couple days. I had a friend who worked the project.
America can build great things if we were willing, but the past 70 years has seen strong anti-government rhetoric (weirdly after the most successful big government projects seen probably in our history) has helped hollow out local governments and remove any chance they had to cultivate internal talent that could get more efficient at doing things.
Imagine having the pay of a local grocer, the turnover of Amazon warehousing, and the public animosity of Google and Facebook combined, with an entire TV channel watched by 60 million daily screaming that your very existence hurts the country, and plenty of grandmas taking that to heart. Government is overtly attacked every single day. Is it any wonder it often struggles?
It’s bizarre to point to criticism of the government to justify the failures of the government. What exactly are people supposed to do in response to public services that are over budget and don’t serve their needs?
Surely the solution to criticism of government inefficiency is for government to operate well. If visiting San Francisco was like going to Tokyo or Copenhagen—clean, efficient, convenient—Fox News would lose credibility. At some point, people in Missouri would point to San Francisco and be like “that’s great, why don’t we do that here?”
Sure, but to operate well you need to be able to hire top talent (and therefore pay top dollar) and you need to give them the freedom to do what they think best without being micromanaged, both things that require a level of public trust. This seems to be one of those "multiple stable equilibria" problems - a government that is trusted can be effective and justify that trust, a government that is mistrusted will be ineffective and justify that mistrust.
>It’s bizarre to point to criticism of the government to justify the failures of the government.
I think that would be a fair statement to make in the global context, but Americans' distrust and paranoia around anything the Government does really is exceptional.
> I think that would be a fair statement to make in the global context, but Americans' distrust and paranoia around anything the Government does really is exceptional.
I'm not sure how accurate that generalisation is. The US has a lot of government – in some ways, a lot more than many other countries do, because local government in the US has a lot of responsibilities which in other countries are centralised at the state/province or even national levels - such as law enforcement, courts and prosecutors, public education, correctional facilities. Much of the US has two layers of local government (county and municipal), some parts even have three layers (e.g. the state of New York has village governments underneath town governments underneath county governments), when many other countries only have a single layer. The US has lots of special-purpose local governments (school districts, drainage districts, emergency services districts, etc), where in many other countries those kind of functions would be performed by state/provincial/national agencies instead.
Most of the anti-government rhetoric in the US is primarily directed at the federal government, not state or local governments. Even when state or local governments are targeted, it tends to be only directed at some of them. Some American conservatives will be very critical of the state governments of California or New York, but I doubt they'd be anywhere near as negative about the state governments of Florida or Texas or Utah or South Dakota. Or very critical of the county/city governments of big liberal-leaning urban areas like Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, but far less likely to criticise the local government of some rural "Red State" county or town.
Despite its reputation for hyper-capitalism, the US is arguably "behind" much of the rest of the English-speaking world when it comes to asset privatisation, public-private partnerships, public funding of private schools (US % of K-12 students in private schools is significantly below the OECD average, and severely limited public funding for private schools is likely a big factor in that), etc – and those issues are far from being the top priority for contemporary American conservatism. Which suggest that the US is actually far less "anti-government" than its popular image suggests.
War on drugs, 20yr of military involvement in the middle east, meddling in Latin America, three letter agencies manufacturing domestic terrorism of all types and the list goes on...
I would always choose San Francisco over Missouri. Every day of the week. St Louis' crime rate dwarfs san francisco, and the economy is much weaker. You can cherry pick stats that support your cause all day.
The fact is people in other states have infrastructure that some of my taxes went to. I will never use those roads. Perhaps we should all be selfish and just take more and more for ourselves?
Principled, fiscal responsibility is a great thing and what I would champion - but these bad faith arguments are not fiscal responsibility. We need some level of service and infrastructure. Even if costs overrun, we still need highways.
>> It’s bizarre to point to criticism of the government to justify the failures of the government.
This is precisely the conservative game plan though: starve the government of funds, force it to outsource as much as possible to the private sector, then when projects end up delayed and overbudget (or failing), point to lack of government efficiency and competence to justify further funding cuts.
This has been happening since basically the Reagan era.
>> Surely the solution to criticism of government inefficiency is for government to operate well.
No organization can operate well if it doesn't have necessary levels of funding, and the government is no exception. Said lack of funding is the primary cause of the inefficiencies, which often times manifest as lack of inhouse expertise that can provide strict analysis of and oversight for projects outsourced to the private sector.
> Said lack of funding is the primary cause of the inefficiencies
San Francisco? Lack of funding? $14 billion isn't enough?
The budget of San Francisco has roughly doubled in about the last ten years: is the government now twice as good at whatever it's supposed to do than it was ten years ago?
If anything the problem with San Francisco is that there is so much money that an entire ecosystem of nonprofits and contractors has evolved to feed off those funds.
> Said lack of funding is the primary cause of the inefficiencies
No, the primary cause is politicians promising things that sound good so that they'll get reelected, because that's the number one thing they care about, not efficiency. On the other hand a private company will only build something that makes economical sense.
Yes, if lack of funding is the primary cause, then the federal government should be quite effective indeed, considering how much money it receives and spends.
"makes economic sense" is not a useful metric to build society on. There are so many things in our day to day life that should be considered well beyond "does this make a profit"
How does that explain the situation in deep blue states with respect to services such as transit and education that are primarily state funded? Is the ghost of Reagan haunting California and keeping San Francisco from having well funded, efficient services like Copenhagen?
>If visiting San Francisco was like going to Tokyo or Copenhagen—clean, efficient, convenient
A lot of the positive traits of these cities come from the citizens themselves. It's them as much as the government of these places that want that - therefore they create a system that achieves what they want - 'the government', and are willing to cooperate with it to get what they want.
If all San Franciscans wanted a clean, efficient and convenient city, I'm more than convinced that all citizens working towards that goal could readily achieve it, and would make a government tasked with those goals.
Governments I would argue, since they're usually made up of the local people, reflect the goals of these people. And if 'good enough' is OK for them, then that's what they get.
> A lot of the positive traits of these cities come from the citizens themselves. It's them as much as the government of these places that want that - therefore they create a system that achieves what they want - 'the government', and are willing to cooperate with it to get what they want.
I would agree with that.
> If all San Franciscans wanted a clean, efficient and convenient city, I'm more than convinced that all citizens working towards that goal could readily achieve it, and would make a government tasked with those goals.
I think you have to carry through your reasoning from the first point. People in San Francisco have different goals than those in Copenhagen or Tokyo. I strongly suspect that they also have differing (and lesser) ability to put aside their individual concerns to work together on a mass compromise like public transit inevitably must be.
Which is a good reason for the rest of the country to not want to throw a bunch of money on transit projects. American infrastructure reflects the American psyche. We drive around in individual steel tanks on roads that can take us anywhere we want to go because that’s who we are as a culture.
Fox news can openly tell a court that it knowingly lied to its audience and lose only ten percent or so of its audience. They faced bigger backlash being critical of Trump. Meanwhile there are 49 other states, some of which that do things well, but fox news doesn't talk about that because they don't run positive stories about government because of their ideology.
The time it took to place the bridge has almost no indication of whether this project was on time or on budget.
This bridge project started December 2017! So 5+ years of work for a weekend of final execution. On top of this, while the bridge may be in a small city in Maine, the initiative is run by the Maine DOT, which is likely substantially larger as an organization.
The best construction hustle I've ever seen is Georgia's relatively recent repair of a bridge over I-85.
I-85 is an interstate highway serving a central economic corridor through Atlanta. A portion of the bridge collapsed when a homeless person lit a fire next to highly flammable plastics stored under the bridge, which later grew into a bridge-melting inferno.
The state of Georgia provided incentives for contractors to finish the project early due to the incredible economic damage it was causing. The loss of the bridge took out all travel on I-85 - it was a devastating and crippling loss that gave many Atlanta area knowledge workers their first taste of "work from home" (or five hour commutes).
The incentives provided absolutely made the contractors hustle. There was work ongoing 24/7 for the entire period, and they completed ahead of time and budget. I don't think I've ever witnessed something happen so fast.
It was a marvelous feat, and it's too bad we don't see more like it. It's what happens when the correct incentives and pressures are put in place.
1000%. It's all about creating and aligning incentives.
Government gets this sometimes - subsidy for the things it cares about. Food, energy, defense. Those are all pretty solid, even if some of the vendors aren't the greatest. The sheer scale of the investment means we'll be okay. Too big to fail.
Often these big budget items get bloated by congressional sway pulling work into disparate districts as job programs. Or locked away in under-performing incumbents (Lockheed / Boeing vs SpaceX), but if we expose the system to more evolutionary pressure and competition, it might thrive.
SpaceX is an example of the RFP process turned on its head. Designing ahead of time for an understood public demand, in a bloated industry, in a way that serves both the public and private sector. A solution where the private sector needs serve to justify the cutting of costs and hone the product into a shape that is undeniably cost attractive and competitive.
The things the government subsidizes that don't compete or aren't forced to stay lean - education, transportation, infrastructure, healthcare - tend to bloat up and soak up all the money they can as well as underperform on all of our expectations.
Maybe the solution is to stop paying the current service providers and hire new ones that service private industry. They'll already be in a shape to optimize for costs and fend with competition.
There's also the MacArthur Maze collapse in the Bay area 2007 [1]
The overpass collapsed on April 29th. They had it reopened to traffic 26 days later. This was American leadership, project management and engineering at it's finest [2].
It has a bearing on the cost associated with road closures, which can't be insignificant.
Anyway, some quick looking found:
> Gov. Janet Mills toured the Veranda Street site of the new bridge being installed along Interstate 295 in Portland on Saturday afternoon and said she was pleased with the rapid progress of the project.
> “I’m thrilled with the technology, thrilled that it’s going on time and on budget,” Mills said. “Three days’ time, and this bridge will be done. It’s amazing. It’s like giant Legos going together.”
You can always say you are on time and on budget as long as extensions come your way. My point was not saying that this project was not on time or on budget, it was mainly to illustrate that the 3 days of work that locals saw was based on 5 years of research and preparation. I recently read 'Built: The Hidden Stories Behind our Structures' by Roma Agrawal and it would be fairly rudimentary for a structural engineer, but for the average passerby it was a very interesting read on some of the structures that we use every day! (and how some of them are miserable failures haha)
Do you think the complaints about government come unfairly out of the blue while it busily provides efficient and timely service with a friendly smile to its constituents?
No. However, consider that since the 40's there has been a concerted effort by a variety of actors, such as Rothbard and other people backed by institutes such as the Volker fund, the AEI, Federalist Society, Murdochs, etc. to sap both the perceived effectiveness of government and the actual effectiveness of government.
"Government doesn't work - elect me and I'll prove it!"
Well hey, he's the only person I know of to have argued professionally that a government shouldn't even be powerful enough to prevent people from selling their children on the open market to the highest bidder. He's kind of the most extreme example one can pluck, and quite an influential one, at that.
Isn't that an argument against Rothbard being successful? You can't meaningfully auction off a child in the US. Although I guess some may argue he's been successful to the extent that in some parts of the US you can electively terminate your unborn offspring, which is a firmly Rothbardian viewpoint.
If my goal is murder, but I only render you completely brain dead, or maybe only paralyzed from the neck down, have I failed? Yeah, in some sense. But in terms of the grievous harm rendered, I've succeeded to a pretty serious degree.
Based on your recommendation of the "pretty serious degree" to the extent Rothbard has managed to decrease government, I have decided to donate a token amount to the Mises Institute in your honor [0]. I gotta say until now I thought he was just a fringe actor with minimal influence and perhaps at most 1 or 2% of representatives even know who he was.
I guess the better question is, are the complaints limited to those that provide a poor service? Or are they fairly evenly distributed regardless of how good or bad the government in question performs?
And sometimes it's intentional: Take the DMV in Texas.
Texas specifically shut down DMV offices in some of the most populated areas. Yeah, that's going to make the DMV suck in those areas. Of course, they left open then ones in the more rural areas, and those DMVs are going to be quite pleasant.
The point isn't the government services are currently high quality. The point is that the current environment foster low quality service. In some cases voting in politicians that drove top-down management changes would help. And that would require the populace to value such changes. We might need to structure the incentives for government employees, contractors, or the regulatory environment to better align with delivering good service. That might mean more pay, which means either higher taxes or strong prioritization of efforts. We can't do that intelligently if nobody cares, or is skilled enough to drive these large institutions. Because it is hard. We almost certainly are using the wrong tradeoffs: some things privatized and outsourced should be done by government agencies. Some functions should be privatized or just regulated on the open market. Some things are better handled at regional levels that today are handled at local or national levels. The mix of tradeoffs is wrong. Incremental work to fix this requires a society-wide agreement to make progress. Not necessarily agreement on any particular (and even when there is agreement, we are going to get it wrong a bunch) but agreement on the project of bettering our society and social collaboration. That seems like it is missing and thus progress is made only in fits in starts, in a hostile environment. A hard-one deregulation here, a new bill to fund a project there, contested on ll sides, and undermined before the initiatives get started.
Anti-government rhetoric? In New York State, construction projects have been notoriously delayed and gone over budget ever since the days of Boss Tweed, which historians have generally linked to corruption and graft.
At least with major projects this is 100% the case. Had a buddy involved in a state legislature said one of the reasons there is so much road work and construction going on all the time is because it is one of the easiest ways to disguise corruption and embezzlement.
As an example in a 5 year project for a new overpass you can have literally 1000s of different contractors involved in the work and it becomes very difficult to notice and prove that Joe's Cement company never showed up to pour the liminal substrate pylons like they were paid $10k to do.
My favorite New York "Joe's Cement" story is that when they were expanding Islip airport, a mob-owned cement company that was giving kickbacks to the local county government poured the ramp pad WAY under the specified thickness using unreinforced concrete, so of course the first Southwest plane to arrive damaged it.
Don't hire a mob-owned cement company, you say? Tough noogies, In NY, at least at that time, they were all mob-owned.
> with an entire TV channel watched by 60 million daily screaming that your very existence hurts the country, and plenty of grandmas taking that to heart
Just say the name next time, I think it's obvious whom you are referring to. It's also obvious replies to your assertions are off topic in part because of this part of your reply.
So here's my list of what the article suggests cause large construction projects to go over budget.
> SUMMARY:
> It’s a tale as old as civil engineering: A megaproject is sold to the public as a grand solution to a serious problem. Planning and design get underway, permits issued, budgets allocated (that took a lot longer than we expect), construction starts, and then there are more problems! Work is delayed, expenses balloon, and when all the dust settles, it’s a lot less clear whether the project’s benefits were really worth the costs.
> REASONS:
> underestimation
> limit in design prevents accurate overall estimation
> subcontracting availability
> subcontracting sufficiency
> subcontracting estimation (bids)
> missed pre-construction costs
> inflation of labor and materials
> course correcting takes longer on big projects
> stakeholder compromises
> not taking exploratory work into account
> opportunistic greed
> ...but that's not nearly as common as: "just too darned optimistic and short-sighted"
The suggested solution from the source, as the author points out, is to spend more time in design and planning.
As far as software, that suggests waterfall like planning could give you a better estimation on total project expenditure. But delivery has won that battle, I think. Maybe as our industry contracts (layoffs and svb) we'll see a push towards that kind of project estimation too?
More time in design and planning? That phase can already often take a decade. I realize most of that is probably political horsetrading around which backyard is going to be torn up and which budget the money will come from, but long planning phases are already a problem.
[This is good natured ribbing] Small? Small Maine City? I clicked this expecting to see Machias or Limestone, but I get your biggest city? Sure, it's small by comparison to other cities, but it is your biggest!
Tone is difficult to convey online, so please understand this is all in jest. :-) I grew up in DownEast Maine (Machias was my local 'small city') - so I actually was expecting some small city I'd never heard of. Jokes aside, that is very cool about the bridge, and you make good points in your last 2 paragraphs.
> Imagine having the pay of a local grocer, the turnover of Amazon warehousing, and the public animosity of Google and Facebook combined, with an entire TV channel watched by 60 million daily screaming that your very existence hurts the country, and plenty of grandmas taking that to heart. Government is overtly attacked every single day. Is it any wonder it often struggles?
Right. Completely nothing to do with underdelivering while bending the knee to whoever corporation brib... I mean lobbied more.
There are MILLIONS of people who work in government that aren't politicians and are just trying to do the best with the purposeful obstruction that is handed to them.
I was happy to see the author mention optimism bias.
One part I didn’t see is how project managers may deliberately underestimate to take advantage of the sink cost bias. If competing for funds, a PM may intentionally low-ball an estimate to get their project selected, knowing it’s easier to continually ask for more money later rather than a larger sum upfront.
I would have also liked to see more discussion about joint probabilities. If one sub-discipline goes over budget, it may other disciplines (particularly commissioning) exceed their initial estimate as well. Change orders beget change orders.
In my experience project managers can often be fairly realistic. But everyone up the management chain (understandably) wants projects to cost less and take less time. So a lot of pencil sharpening happens to take slack out of the system. Then deliveries are late, Joe is out with the flu for a week, v arious unexpected problems are encountered, etc. And before you know it you're overbudget and late.
Project managers often come in too late, in my experience. And they are, by and large, realistic. Specifically for construction, the low-balling stage is when the Estimators are putting together a tender to try to secure the work in the first place.
The PM arrives later, once the project has been awarded and now they have to make these estimator sourced budgets and schedules somehow jive with reality. It isn't an easy task.
One of the researchers mentioned by another commenter has termed this "strategic misrepresentation":
The first theory Flyvbjerg embraced is called “strategic misrepresentation.” Which is essentially a fancy way of saying that you lie in order to get what you want.
>FLYVBJERG: We’d actually interviewed planners who said that they did this deliberately, that they actually were incentivized to misrepresent the business cases for the projects in their benefit-cost analysis. And they wanted their projects to look good on paper, to increase their chances of getting funded and getting approval for their projects. And they said, “We do this by underestimating the cost and overestimating the benefits, because that gives us a nice high benefit-cost ratio so that we actually get chosen.[1]
I've experience this, but I also think it may depend on the unique culture of individual organizations. Of course, it's likely just one of many factors that ultimately lead to poor planning. The podcast in [1] covers some of them and it's a good listen for anyone interested in public work projects.
I've had plenty of pushback from managers (and customers) who didn't have MBAs. The difference is usually between how long things "should" take everything going well and how long things often do take.
On a small/personal scale, you can (and I do) sandbag to a certain degree. But it's hard on a large project when everyone and their brother is looking to trim any fat out of the estimates.
And how do they know how long anything should take, especially when they don't understand the details of the process? Sometimes "trimming fat" just isn't realistic or even possible
All that matters is that you get the contract. Sunk cost fallacy keeps your customers. It probably also helps that everyone operates like this, so its typical to expect things to come in late and overbudget to a degree.
The counterargument on large projects is there's so much coordination between different groups that the location of the "fat" becomes opaque and difficult to identify.
This is exactly it, the optimism bias is usually more likely to come from the client, especially if there's politics involved. What makes it worse is that once the project is underway there's a political tendency to increase the scope.
Prime example is the Scottish Parliament building, first estimate was for £50m. By the time all of the politicians were done with it the project's scope was unrecognisable and it cost well over £500m.
And there's one of the biggest differences between public and private sector scope changes. When the private sector decides to massively revise what they're doing on a project most of the decisions take place behind closed doors and the guy with the most impact on the scope creep probably puts in on his CV as successfully scaling up operations. When the public sector project balloons it's people's tax dollars and there's an opposition party and lots of journalists pointing out the original budget.
“News that the Transbay Terminal is something like $300 million over budget should not come as a shock to anyone. We always knew the initial estimate was way under the real cost. Just like we never had a real cost for the Central Subway or the Bay Bridge or any other massive construction project.
So get off it. In the world of civic projects, the first budget is really just a down payment. If people knew the real cost from the start, nothing would ever be approved. The idea is to get going. Start digging a hole and make it so big, there's no alternative to coming up with the money to fill it in.”
Unfortunately, public projects also have to manage public perception. Just like you wouldn't appreciate, say, a roofing estimate to be later called a "down payment," the public in general doesn't like that approach either. "We don't know how much it'll cost but just trust us and let's just get started" isn't a particularly palatable sales pitch, especially in domains with a long history of corruption.
At the same time, you gotta give people the medicine they need. They have no concept of what a fair price on the market is for a subway line being build in your city with all the local considerations you have. No one does, that's the whole trick of it. At some point though, people need subways, they need sewers, they need bridges, and if we give them the shot to just turn their nose at anything good that seems expensive, we'd probably still be dumping our buckets out onto the street at night versus requiring plumbing.
I'm curious about the higher level issues at play as well, which I'm just guessing about since I only have a lay understanding of the field
Seems like there's probably a "winners curse" variant: conditioned on a bid being accepted, it is likely to be underestimated even if unconditioned there's an equal probability of under and over resonating
Also seems like there's an incentive alignment problem as well: there's a clear benefit to bidding lower, and if the costs of underestimating are not born by the bidder then you would expect to see systematic underbidding even if we have on-average-accurate ways of estimating.
These feel like important issues that are orthogonal to our ability to estimate things accurately and I wonder how much of the effect is from which type of cause (I wish the author had talked about this)
From experience, what you mention is part of the perverse effects of the bid mechanisms, but these have nothing to do with the initial underestimation and is comparatively minor in relevance.
Something is designed (years time), then it is estimated (often wrongly, however it takes some time as well), then it is approved/funded (some more years).
But, IF the design was valid AND the estimation was correct at the most you could adjust the total amount by inflation/increases of prices.
So, pure theory, you calculate a cost of 100 units (million dollars, whatever), then, since a few years have passed you should add (say) 10% for inflation/price adjustment before proceeding to a public bid (but it is extremely rare that this is actually done).
The construction firms/contractors will offer between 15% and 25% rebate, if the bid is (as often is) given at max rebate, the one with 25% rebate will get the job.
Now, assuming that the estimation is perfectly accurate (it isn't at all) the winner is (on the first day) under for at least 20%, 10% (the price adjustment, if included) and another 10% (their profit), while the remaining 5% is debatable, in the sense that it is what is actually possible that one construction company can save when compared to another for a number of reasons (machinery, organization, whatever).
So, from day one the winner has two possible ways out, the first is to actually optimize the work to recover this 20-25% (difficult) the second is to find errors in the project (relatively easy).
But, once the project is analyzed, what is found is not just the "missing" 20 to 25% (which if spent would not make the project over budget) but more likely something like 100%.
So, at the end of the day, you are going to spend 175 instead of 100, of which 15 is connected to the perversions of the bidding, but 60 is errors in the project or in its estimation.
I was only trying to expand on the article with an example, the article is quite good in evidencing the common reasons why.
In theory every single price is estimated analitically adding to market costs for materials and labor a percentage (usually between 13 and 17 %) and on this total another percentage for the profit of the contractor (usually 10 %)[1].
The quantities are calculated geometrically.
So in theory the estimation quantities by price should be exact or within a very small approximation to reality.
But in practice this sometimes (often) doesn't happen, the main reasons (cited in the article) are time passed since the estimation, optimism about ground/soil conditions, use of "wrong" price lists (and more generally inexperience of the estimator or Law/bureaucratic restrictions), optimism about weather, optimism about interferences with other infrastructures, change of building code, added features, actual mistakes in the project or in the contract, the list is long, but all the items in it tend to be "negative" ones implying more time and money needed for the construction.
Of course there are also many projects that are fine, properly estimated and that are built in time and within budget but essentially all the estimation, even if done in good faith and by experienced technicians, are predictions (and predictions about the future, the most difficult ones).
A better, more accurate process during designing and estimating (the 3 to 5% talked in the article) might help, but likely it would be not enough or reduce the incertainty by the same 3-5% that is spent for it.
To all the above you add what is a sort of the S.E.P. (someone else's problem) syndrome, the one(s) that make the project and the estimation, by the time the site is ready to start are already elsewhere, in another job or another project, it is not unlike what happens nowadays in many industries, a new CEO is chosen, he does some cuts on costs, changes something in the products, and after two years, by the time the effects of the changes become actually evident he leaves and someone else starts again.
[1] it depends on countries, but usually what are used are pre-made price lists that are a (supposed) average for a given work and are either outdated or do not apply to the specific work
There is also an element of how government purchases services from vendors. There is some weird setup where an honest estimate often will not be awarded the contract, as it is too high. A vendor will intentionally bid low, and then change order the job to way over the "honest estimate" price.
Vendors need to be rated and penalized for this kind of bait and switch, but unfortunately there is no downside to low ball the bid, and they often win and continue to win contracts.
It comes across as exactly more transparent and honest to me. The bait and switch is dishonest and this incentives against that. If the starting price is closer to the final price that's a better outcome and more transparent.
Yeah, I’m seeing more and more public projects awarded as ‘best value’ instead of ‘lowest cost’. It helps me get my foot in the door since I’m selling union labor and the non-union shops bend the prevailing wage laws pretty hard.
Exactly. There was some talk of this on some government aviation projects where our company was generally outbid by competitors who would allegedly low-ball the development costs, then when the project inevitably ran out of money, just request more from the government. It was really frustrating to our PMs who tried to bid honestly and lost a lot of business because of it.
It would be interesting to compare prices of privately funded projects vs publicly funded ones, both in terms of cost, over-budget amounts and time needed to complete the project.
I see many public locations, where a short street or even a walkway is closed for months, because they need to repave literally 20-30 square meters of a walkway, while companies such as Hofer (Aldi) manage to repave their parking yard in a few days, while keeping half of it still open for customers.
I imagine a lot of the cost & time for public projects is precisely because they have to be contracted out to private developers. If the government had construction workers & equipment on it's own payroll (like we do for police, postal workers, sanitation, etc), these projects probably get done a lot quicker.
It would have the bonus effect of making infrastructure construction/maintenance projects happen more often. Both by lower the barrier to get started (no need to have contractors bid your project, etc) and b/c it's wasteful to have public employees just sitting around with no work to do.
The government has lots of employees who came from the private sector and know exactly how that side of the house works. They aren't really this disjointed set of workers.
IMO, a lot of the differences come from the different set of rules that govt work has to run by. For example, Aldi can just decide to hire a contractor that they know does good work at a reasonable price. In contrast, the govt has to use a lengthy fair and open bid process and if they want to select a bid that isn't the lowest, it's a painstaking process to justify that selection. Govt work must adhere to certain laws that tend to push up labor wages (see: Davis Bacon Act). Plus, the govt has lots of other competing goals, like supporting minority or veteran-owned business etc. A simple comparison misses all of those nuances.
> For example, Aldi can just decide to hire a contractor that they know does good work at a reasonable price. In contrast, the govt has to use a lengthy fair and open bid process and if they want to select a bid that isn't the lowest, it's a painstaking process to justify that selection.
It's unfortunate, but probably better than the corruption that anything else will enable in the long run. Churchill said that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others. For government spending, lowest bidder is the worst form of contracts, except for all the others.
I think the point that gets lost when you see comments like the GP is that they are operating under different sets of constraints because they are trying to optimize for different things.
FWIW, the govt can do "best value" contracts instead of lowest bid. But there is an asymmetry in risk to those making the selection. If something goes wrong in the design/construction, or if corruption is found, there's a lot more explaining to do. Like the old quote, "Nobody got fired for hiring IBM," except in this case "Nobody got fired for selecting the lowest bid."
> In contrast, the govt has to use a lengthy fair and open bid process and if they want to select a bid that isn't the lowest, it's a painstaking process to justify that selection.
Isn't that a recipe for cost over-runs?
I mean, it sounds like if building a tunnel costs $100M and one company bids $100M (planning to deliver on budget), a second company bids $50M (planning 100% cost overruns) and a third company bids $25M (planning on 300% cost overruns) it's mandatory to select the third company?
Within reason, yes. Engineers will still evaluate the proposals and if there’s a huge discrepancy like you described, they can be thrown out. But often part of the game seems to be first underbid (within reason) to get the contract and then make up the difference on change orders to be profitable.
It's absurd really. Massive pressure to pick the cheapest bid, then very slowly discover that the cheapest option can't actually do a reasonable job in a reasonable timeframe, then some years later try again with the same cheapest must win premise. It's kind of optimising for cost but poorly and with no feedback loop.
There is a feedback loop. Under a firm fixed price contract, the vendor has to eat any cost overruns. Contacts can include bonuses for finishing ahead of schedule, or penalties for being late. And there are administrative procedures for barring vendors who fail to deliver as promised from bidding on future contracts.
There are second order effects on those, though. Fixed price contracts incentivize contractors to cut corners to make up for cost overruns or to pad their profits (doubly so if it’s a contractor who underbid to win the contract). Unless you’re willing to pay for a lot of govt oversight, many of those won’t be noticed until the contract is long complete. Even if noticed, you need an organization willing to engage in that legal fight.
The administrative controls are lagging indicators at best, and administrative controls are usually one of the least preferable control mechanisms.
Not exactly true. They typically have a goal to award a certain percentage for those programs. It’s not as if every contract is graded by that criteria.
But yes, it can open the door to corruption and inflated costs. For example, a tiny veteran owned corporation may be hired who subcontracts to a massive firm instead of the other way around. The govt would probably be better off just contacting to the large firm directly.
> nobody has an incentive to finish in a timely manner.
I think the real problem is more that there is accountability for job performance in the private sector (you get fired if you suck and waste your boss's money) and very little to none in the public sector. No one votes for politicians based on objective performance data.
It'd wild to me how it's considered American to have this sort of bid process because "free markets" and "small government" but the results are everything Americans accuse socialist countries of being.
Its also that you have thousands of miles of road in disrepair, and you have budget to deal with 1% of that so to be pragmatic you triage but people miss that and equate such pragmatism with incompetence.
I used to be a public sector dev with an agency that stores plaintext passwords and direct deposit information. People simply didn’t know any better and because government doesn’t have merit raises, the rest of us simply didn’t do anything about it.
That may be true in software (where the pay gap in the private sector is particularly blatant) but it's not true in most industries. The stereotype of lazy government workers is essentially conservative propaganda - I've known and worked with plenty, and with a few obvious exceptions (political appointees, software, etc.) across the board they're passionate and great at what they do. Civil engineers, road builders, park rangers, EPA researchers, administrative assistants, even IT.
> have you ever been to a government office to pull a permit?
Yes, several times, and it is always completely straightforward. Fill out the appropriate forms, provide the correct documentation, pay fee. If it can be approved by the administrator, it’s issued promptly. If it needs a hearing, it’s scheduled for the next one, you show up and answer questions, they make a decision promptly and it’s either issued or not. I’ve rarely had such efficient interaction with private companies.
Have you ever been to the IT department of a private company, to get a small change made that makes your job more efficient or helps a customer solve a problem?
My girlfriend works public service. The only lazy coworkers she has are Ron Swanson types taking it upon themselves to make public work shittier because they believe the government shouldn't do anything.
And have you ever been to a government office to pull a permit? Or dealt with government procurement? Or attempted to get paperwork through the FAA?
Yes. It was relatively straightforward, as long as you followed the rules.
The hard part is following all the relevant rules, almost all of which exist because people have tried to rip off the government or lawmakers decided to impose unrelated requirements on procurement. That's not the fault of the government workers whose job it is to carry out the requirements that have been imposed on them.
And what does an opinion piece about teachers have to do with procurement? Those are completely separate things.
>Yes. It was relatively straightforward, as long as you followed the rules.
The hard part is not going postal as you find out piece by piece that person A didn't tell you about rule X and that department T actually has a revised form W that... and on and on until you find out that you didn't actually have to do any of that because there's some other less shitty process none of these people told you about.
It's like the bureaucratic runaround is the default behavior in some of these organizations.
It's not person A's job to tell you about rule X or that department T revised form W, or that you don't even have to do any of that at all because there's an alternative process for doing it.
It's your job to do the research and do things out correctly so that person A doesn't have to waste time telling you what you should be doing.
Or do you think that government agencies have the budget to hire customer support representative and receptionists with intimate knowledge of their department's rules and regulations?
something that's helpful to keep in mind is that the government orgs you deal with frequently have what have what they must do set by law, with little latitude to change things other than bugging congress
Yes, I've never heard of a private company that has absolutely useless security protocols, let alone one that was broken into as a result of complete incompetence of their security architects and admins. /s
"The problem with corruption, inefficieny and ignorance in government is corruption, inefficiency and ignorance, not government".
Let's not put the cart before the horse, shall we? Yes, all human organizations can suffer from these things (and maybe some more than others). But that's not a reason in and of itself to dismiss an entire class of human organizations as irretrievably doomed.
Look at what the UK government's digital service has done: absolutely outstanding online presence for so many important government services.
also in many cases if regulation is written to prohibit such practices, the government exempts itself from that.
For example, you can't use SSN to identify someone. Unless of course you were doing it before the prohibition was established. Apparently it's fine if you keep using it, forever.
I’m not sure it’s so much the have to be contracted out part, Aldi may not have in-house pavers either, as the contracting protocols and methods they are required to use. I think an honest, empowered government worker could find and supervise a modest construction project as well as an honest and empowered Aldi worker. But the government workers are not empowered.
The cost of a grocery store parking lot being closed can be easily quantified in terms of lost sales, while the cost of closing a short street or walkway is not as well-defined, and the cost is not borne by those in charge of the construction anyhow. So in the former, there's a clear and measurable incentive to get things done quickly, and in the latter, there's not.
Also: below pavements there are usually quite a lot supply lines as that's the only available space. All work there has to be done careful not to damage anything. On a larger parking lot however there is just a single power line for the lights and little sewage for collecting rain water, while most other area is free.
So my city runs along a highway. They did construction, closing 5 of the 7 north-south roads crossing that highway at the same time. It was either incredibly stupid, or a brilliant move to build a habit of doing everything local.
There's probably a good reason for it. Highway closures are always planned to have the least impacts possible. A lot of caltrans work happens on weekends or at 2am as such.
Absolutely, and added on to this is that cost is fairly proportional to labor hours (plus cost of rental equipment), so if it takes a lot longer to get done, it’s probably also costing a lot more money.
I don't know much about public works, but when you're hiring trades and subs for small residential projects, you pay extra to know they're going to show up and work on your project until it's done. If you want to minimize costs, you have to accept that it may be slow. They say they'll start on Tuesday, and they actually show up Friday. They do two days of a four day job, and then they disappear for a week. It's not because they're lazy. It's because they have different projects that are more or less lucrative to work on, and they generally prioritize the more lucrative ones.
"Stupid rules" for one person are what enable another person to live an independent life. The Americans with Disabilities (ADA) act has been law since 1990 and codifies mobility and access as civil rights in the US.
ADA does add to the costs of projects, but so does, say, safety code compliance. It's the law, and it exists for a good reason.
As for the example of a minor accessibility project costing $1.4M and taking 3 years, I would suggest that there is probably more to the story that helps explain the cost or the time.
Replacing curb ramps can mean relocating the curb cut, which can mean relocating the underground sensor loops.
Adding a beg button can mean upgrading or replacing the signal control module, which could mean replacing the housing if it's not large enough for the new module. (Audible-tactile buttons and controllers themselves cost $5-6k each, just for parts.)
Aside from that, the issue with ADA compliance costs isn't when a municipality or DOT pays for them. It's when they remove the crosswalk entirely because they decide compliance isn't affordable enough.
The rules are fine, the stupidity is latent and revealed:
1. New construction must meet ADA requirements.
2. Old construction can remain.
3. Repairing broken old construction requires meeting ADA requirements.
So between 2 and 3 you end up with broken old construction that cannot be repaired to "what it was" because repairs must meet ADA requirements.
Each step makes sense on its own, but combined they result in something worse (in particular) even though overall it works out better.
The local maximum of "fix it but don't improve it" is a problem, and the requirement for major reconstruction to be done to current codes is foundational to almost all building codes. Note that small repairs and routine maintenance don't activate this requirement - it's activated when major work is being done, and there is a percentage of total project cost cap to the requirements.
If the new local maximum is "well, we won't fix it at all then" - the usual building code solution is property maintenance codes that mandate repairs.
The buildings often get repaired/updated pretty quickly - it's the items like sidewalks that are under the purview of the government itself that "slip through the cracks".
What's the alternative that reaches eventual compliance everywhere on a shorter span than "wait for the grandfathered buildings to be bought and demolished" though?
A daily fine for everything noncompliant. Make the fine approximately proportional to the number of potential users impeded.
Then a popular crosswalk gets upgraded before a rural crosswalk that nobody uses anyway. An easy upgrade is done before a hard upgrade. Sometimes even new stuff might be built non-compliant if, for example, there are other substantial benefits that outweigh the fine.
Just burn the fine revenue. (Burning money is the inverse of printing money, helps reduce inflation, and means nobody has an incentive to maximize fines)
I have trouble imagining anyone convincing a city to 'burn revenue', even if it's a good idea in principle. Maybe the next best thing is applying it to a negative income tax so that it goes to the lowest-income residents.
Impose a supplemental property tax, increasing over time, on buildings out of compliance with current requirements, so that upgrade or replacement becomes comparatively more desirable vs. doing neither than it currently is.
Or, just have a fixed window to achieve compliance or the building is condemned.
Cool. Let’s start with NYC subway stations. Public infrastructure should be ADA compliant yet NYC permitting will hammer a small business for a toilet two inches out of compliance when the city itself has massive issues that are ignored.
As implemented ADA compliance requires that even trivial changes to a moderate complexity intersection require an engineering study at $300-500k, minimum.
There are other requirements as well relating to multimodal travel depending online the funding source.
All the while, we had an increasingly dangerous intersection with no visible crosswalks and outdated signals for years.
The stupid isn’t ADA, it’s compliance activity. Cities and towns cannot afford the engineers to meet the standards, so the Federal and State governments fund projects. So there’s no framework of best practices beyond the state standards - each project is a special snowflake.
ADA just forces better designs. Retrofits are costly.
> As for the example of a minor accessibility project costing $1.4M and taking 3 years, I would suggest that there is probably more to the story that helps explain the cost or the time.
Committees, political turf wars, getting funding for the project through grants (that are complicated to apply for, that's why you need a dedicated bureaucrat to do it!). Then there's union rules since construction workers from the city are government employees.
That's half a million in employee's salaries right there and not a single concrete steps has been taken yet!
I'm not going to argue that it isn't necessary or right. But it absolutely costs more. A bathroom stall, for example, literally takes up more space, and that costs. A ramp and stairs takes up more space, materials and time and that costs.
There are things which are right to do, but disingenuous arguments to support them aren't helpful.
IMO ADA is probably a net harm at this point. When I look at the sidewalks here in socal, where 50 years ago they planted these rooty trees that make the region look like a tony hawk game today versus something you'd be able to get a wheelchair across, I'm starting to suspect its all ironically ADA's fault. They put the costs to meet their criteria so high that cities find it a better bet to just absorb lawsuits and not do anything than to actually make their cities manageable for disabled people. We need a more practical ada, that isn't nearly so costly to implement, so cities don't find it financially sensible to just sit on their hands forever.
A few years ago, my daughter (a young person) ended up in a wheelchair and/or on crutches for several weeks while recovering from surgery. It is moments like that when you realize that the scope of beneficiaries of the ADA is: all of us
Put differently, if you live long enough, you can pretty much guarantee that you will benefit from the facilities the ADA requires at least once (and possibly for a more extended period than my daughter did).
It all looks like extra cost for little benefit until you can see it through the eyes of someone who actually needs this stuff, at which point it becomes at least a valuable and at best a life-enabling set of features.
And the chances are good that you will be one of the people, assuming you live a long and healthy life.
There's nuance you are missing here. Have you ever been in LA county where 50 years ago city planners made terrible choises regarding sidewalk trees? Basically the sidewalks today look like a cardiogram on some stretches. To the point where they are totally impassable for disabled people, and the city is often sued by disabled people due to these sidewalks.
Why haven't they been fixed? Why does the city continue to be cruel to disabled people year in and out, content to absorb the lawsuits from the few with means to bring them up? It's probably a simple case of those lawsuits being a lot cheaper than actually fixing the sidewalk to the standards the sidewalk is supposed to be fixed. This is an example of a regulation that was meant to help people (building nice sidewalks with various characteristics), but in the end the regulation was written with no understanding of the cost of these changes, or how they might stack up against the cost of doing nothing at all, so its an example of a bad regulation that should be changed so it can actually help people.
However there should be a balance. Look at parking lots — the ratio of disabled spaces to standard spaces is not the same ratio as disabled people to non-disabled people.
And sometimes it’s ridiculous: drive through ATMs with braille for instance. Private motel swimming pools requiring wheelchair lifts. That extreme additional cost means that many motels just won’t have a swimming pool at all — so everyone is worse off. But you can’t charge disabled people a swimming pool surcharge since that discriminatory. So it raises costs for everyone. By the way, I am referring to private building codes, not taxpayer-funded projects like sidewalks.
Other things that can add cost fast are having too many elevators. I've been in 4 story buildings with 4 separate elevator shafts before that didn't have nearly the population or staff to ever get more than two moving at once. That just means higher rent to make a return on those 4 shafts mandated by some ordinance, which probably hurts you especially if you can't work and are living cheaply on disability. A lot of ordinances have been written with no understanding of how it would look in practice or the costs to implement them in the market and what that will mean for people who have to rent these units.
Reminds of the Navy Pier Flyover in Chicago, a half-mile long bicycle/pedestrian bridge that took seven years and $64 million to construct[1].
Not saying that this project was simple by any means, but why did it take seven years to finish? For comparison, the Sears Tower, arguably Chicago's most iconic building and at one time the world's tallest building, only took four years to complete.
I imagine some aspects of building horizontally might not scale as well as vertical construction.
For instance, it looks like the Navy Pier Flyover touches the ground in many different places along its half-mile length, each of those places will have different junk buried there already, unique challenges and access restrictions, and new ownership/usage agreements.
With the skyscraper you dig one messy hole then stack and connect layer after layer of engineered rectangles.
In the mid 19th C Brunel built a ~100 mile long railway line in 5 years, the route was dug out by hand with picks shovels and wheelbarrows. It's a marvel of engineering with a route alignment that would allow trains to travel at well over 100mph. However, over a hundred people were killed just digging one of the tunnels on the route. When the Sears Tower was built there were probably still guys walking along the bare girders with no safety harnesses. So that's probably part of it.
The flyover is free. The sears tower collects rent. If you pay for fast construction with the tower, that means less time not collecting rent which might work out better. If you pay extra to expedite the bike bridge, whats the point? Its a cost center for the city either way. Getting it done faster just wastes the public's money giving them the same thing they would have gotten anyhow.
> It would be interesting to compare prices of privately funded projects vs publicly funded ones, both in terms of cost, over-budget amounts and time needed to complete the project.
Take for example the Munich "Luise Kiesselbach Tunnel": it finished early and under budget, and to my knowledge in its seven years of operation there was no apparent case of cutting corners or botched work. And now one may ask, how is that possible in the country that produced infamous disasters such as the BER airport, the Elbphilharmonie or the #2 S-Bahn tunnel under Munich?
The answer is, the funding makes no difference - the oversight of the funders over the construction process does. When you have to hire external consultants for each project, where the people keep on rotating, instead of having expert knowledge in-house that answers to you, you'll always end up with worse quality - and the external consultants may not have the political standing to override pushes for changes, which tend to be a massive issue in government-funded projects.
Proper oversight and project leadership (as in, it goes beyond "call McKinsey and have them send over a couple of seniors") can save costs at many parts of the process:
- catch politicians' bullshit before planning (plans that, say, lead directly through a nature reserve) or during construction (e.g. a new politician comes in and wishes some random shit to change just to be able to brag "I did something") and intervene
- check bids on tenders if they are actually plausible or if they are so far under a realistic budget that there will be massive problems later on (e.g. the company threatening insolvency to demand re-negotiated higher rates)
- check impediments if they are actually legitimate or if they are overblown and resolve them
- keep vendors accountable to milestones
You can forget about the first two points, which are the most critical, for external consultants.
Private meet budgets way more often, because there's a finite amount of money. Lenders sign term sheets detailing exactly how much money they'll lend and on what terms, so the developer has precisely that amount of money to spend. It's a big deal to need more funds, because it requires a ton of legal work, probably new banks, new agreements, new terms, etc - all of which might conflict with the existing funding structure.
I feel like some of the issue/reason is because the government has to cover every single possible scenario. “Time to make a road. We better do a three year environmental study to make sure this doesn’t hurt the native turtles.”
I’m all for taking care of the environment, but it feels like there’s a lot more “let’s get community and environmental input” than we had in the past (for better and for worse).
The article/video addresses this. You have to be careful that images of past efficiency aren't just examples of externalizing costs.
> There is no perfect project that makes everyone happy. So, you end up making compromises and adding features to allay all the new stakeholders. This may seem like a bunch of added red tape, but it really is a good thing in a lot of ways. There was a time when major infrastructure projects didn’t consider all the stakeholders or the environmental impacts, and, sure, the projects probably got done more quickly, efficiently, and at a lower cost (on the surface). But the reality is that those costs just got externalized to populations of people who had little say in the process and to the environment. I’m not saying we’re perfect now, but we’re definitely more thoughtful about the impacts projects have, and we pay the cost for those impacts more directly than we used to. But, often, those costs weren’t anticipated during the planning phase. They show up later in design when more people get involved, and that drives the total project cost upward.
This is a huge time sink for transit projects. For example, the sepulveda rail project in LA has like 6 alternatives right now going from heavy rail, monorail, above and below grade, a few different routings. Each requires careful study as if you were going to commit 100% to it, millions of dollars probably in expensive engineering labor, even though realistically only 1 alternative (the heavy rail offering the fastest end to end time) is rumored to be considered. Still, the agency got proposed by this monorail maker, so to act in good faith they have to claim they did their due diligence and came up with these plans showing that yes, in fact, the monorail is inferior to the heavy rail alignment. If you have any community groups opposing any aspect of the project, prepare to spend 2 years refining further useless alternatives to satisfy each and every nitpick. Both community groups (and these are not representative of the community, but more the loudest and angriest with the most time to spare of the community) and companies exploit this good faith planning to extend timelines, increase costs, and often dilute the end product to the detriment of the public that this "community engagement" process is supposed to protect.
That (re-paving 20-30 meters of a walkway) is a tiny project, it has nothing to do with the complexities of large projects (which are the theme of the article).
On these tiny projects, usually the difference between what a public administration and a private can do is only the bureaucracy involved which is a lot for the public and very little for a private firm.
Others have mentioned this already but there are plenty of regulations that are relevant just for hospitals because of what they are. For example, the bulk of the historic LA county hospital is vacant, because the building is no longer up to the seismic standards required by the state for a hospital. When you have a big earthquake, you probably want the hospital to be the very last building to fall in the city. The building, however, is used for things like offices or storage because these uses don't have the same standards as a hospital.
It is very difficult to compare different (complex) projects (independently from whether they are public or private) because - Captain Obvious speaking now - they are different (not only the actual thing that is built, also the quality of the project and its engineering, the chosen contractor and a lot of other factors come into play, your new examples add two completely different countries and two completely different periods of construction).
Construction times are even trickier, as they may also be influenced by other factors (authorizations/approvals or changing norms as an example).
A (typical) appropriate construction time for a (large/complex) project is around 4-5-6 years, 3 years means they were fast (in Chicago , in the '70's) 10 years means they were slow (in Slovenia, in more recent years), but otherwise there is no way to make senceful comparisons.
It can also depend on the depth of the bureaucracy; in my little town the town owns a pothole/miniature paving setup, and fixes their own minor things; they don't have to contract out with a company to get it done.
A (larger) town nearby they contract, and everything gets pretty bad before they sign a huge contract, and the company works for a year and fixes everything in one long go.
I've seen this with roads. 1/2 mile closed or under construction for the whole summer. And then 4 miles of another road seems like they do it in 2 weeks.
Thats sometimes because the teams are not in sync because there's often more work than labor or budget. sewer work has to happen but the sewer team is busy with 10 other streets that will be completed first, so the paver team has to wait. It's not like work isn't being done, its more like work is being done elsewhere and you aren't there to see it.
A possible explanation for that situation is that some utility below the pavement needs urgent work, so the pavement is broken open by a utility contractor to do that work, and then they don’t repave it properly … because they’re not allowed to. If that utility contractor did the final repaving they would be taking that work from other contractors which would violate laws that force government to open up contracts fairly. So, a bidding process is started to select the contractor that will repave, and that process takes months.
I work for government myself and have often been frustrated by the inefficiency forced upon us by well-intentioned but misguided legislation. Also, you learn pretty quickly that some contractors play the game better than others and will win one government contract after another, not because they will do the job better, but because they understand the rules around bidding better.
Madrid Terminal 4 cost about half what Heathrow Terminal 5 did. Same architect. Both billion € projects. Both complicated sites next working airports. Similar sizes and infrastructure. Madrid T4 was a public project and Heathrow T5 was a private project. So I think it's more to do with the contracting culture of a country than wether it's a private or a public project. With the UK megaprojects there's about 5-10 project manager guys who rotate between them. It's quite a small group of people who all know each other. A lot of the people working on HS2 now would have been junior project mangers on Heathrow T5 or Crossrail in the past; they bring the culture with them between projects. I think UK construction culture is quite slow and bureaucratic compared to say France or Spain, but not as bad as the US which is on another level.
The scale that government manages, even your small suburban town or whatever, is much larger than an aldi store. Chances are there's more work than money or labor which is why things take as long as they do more than anything. It's not like a private company would manage this better, when the mindset of the american capitalist is to ditch their lifeboats to appear to sail faster.
Thank you for that recommendation. I didn’t know Flyvbjerg had a new book.
For other HN readers interested in the topic I can recommend “ The Oxford Handbook of Megaproject Management”. Bent Flyvbjerg is the editor of the book I believe.
"Nobody wants to go and say that the uncertainty cost is 100% of the project cost"
As a software engineer, I completely agree. This is why we do Agile (and friends), so estimates are just weeks out. But what do you do when you need to plan a decade-long project? Software industries avoid those, so I guess we're fortunate.
Plenty of companies do fake agile where they want an estimate of the complete project before its even fully scoped. Often, that estimate is made up by someone who has no idea about software engineering, like sales or the CEO. Then the sprints are made to "conform" to the estimate. Eventually someone figures out the original estimate was completely wrong and someone else wonders why the project is "late." Often, something have baked is delivered, "meeting the deadline" is celebrated, then another X weeks is spent "fixing bugs."
"Fake agile" is so pervasive at this point. It's just waterfall, but without having to bother planning out the other end of the waterfall and hiding it all behind scrum.
The difference between hardware and software is that you design hardware first, address most of the uncertainty, and only then build the thing. You can't reliably plan the design phase for hardware. Too many unknowns that have yet to be found out about. Just like with software designs.
With software, the process of designing and building are the same. Upfront you know nothing, then you start iterating and at some point you have the finished thing after you've progressively learned all the requirements. There is no separate build phase. People used to pretend there was and that never really worked. The end result of a software project is an executable specification. The process of specifying is all that ever happens. Writing a specification for the specification is not really a thing. At best people attempt partial, very incomplete and hand wavy specifications. But it's not the same thing and it typically lacks the rigor of a hardware design.
Agile hardware design is increasingly a thing as well. E.g. SpaceX is iterating on their rocket designs. This is not some grand design they came up with years ago but a specification that they keep on refining by attempting to build it and by learning from the failures. The number of iterations is not a fixed number. It's as many as they need to. They build parts, tools, and machinery along the way as they discover what they need. Very different from how rocket design used to work. And apparently a lot cheaper too.
Imagine you're starting from scratch. You want create a company that will make a fancy new database. You need to know things like how many people you'll need to hire, how much those people will cost, and some idea of how long a viable project will take.
There's no scrum team yet, as you haven't hired them. You still need to generate some sort of answer.
During my time living in Europe, I noticed that while larger construction efforts took months (since they kinda have to), smaller day-scale projects easily took inside of a day, whereas similar scale projects in the US stretch for weeks.
My friends who work construction in the US say that contractors routinely do a job wrong the first time, throw some apprentice under the bus regarding the "mistake", and ask for more money to re-do it. It's a common way of milking contracts and happens everywhere all the time. Their experiences are in large (hotels, hospitals, every school in a certain district, etc.) contracts, not the domain of your neighborhood general contractor.
I can't speak to the relative prevalence in Europe but anecdotally I was always pleasantly surprised by how quickly those jobs got finished.
One notable exception is the new housing being thrown up quickly in metro areas of the US. Sometimes they still progress in fits and starts but sometimes they go up super quick too.
This sounds weird to me, I've paid for quite a few large construction projects and they are always fixed-bid contracts. I've never borne the cost of a mistake made by contractors. Everything that has additional cost is strictly controlled by change order requests, to the point of being extremely annoying. Maybe it's personal preference for fixed-bid contracts, but I've never heard of a large hotel, hospital, or other large contract be time-and-material based.
I am not well-versed in this field so I may have misinterpreted and they may have been talking about subcontractors. The friends I refer to work at one of those large consulting firms and they are complaining about the people they pay, not those who pay them.
Government construction projects often take longer and cost way more because they have no incentive to do otherwise. Safe union jobs and a taxpayer who has no say in how the money is spent.
I’ve been watching construction of what looks like a 10x20 shed along the turnpike for 3 months now. If any of us hired a contractor to build us a large shed and it took more than a few days we’d start asking questions real quick.
Funny enough, the cost overruns for the Big Dig weren't even the main problem. The main problem was that the solution of adding more roads to solve traffic issues was already known not to work because of induced demand.
Traffic engineers have known this since one lane roads were expanded to two lane roads. The real question for this project is why a solution known not to work was chosen over solutions known to work.
I think in at least some instances of projects like this, the goal is not really "traffic reduction", even if that's what officials publicly claim to sell it to the public. As you say, the phenomenon of induced demand is well known & presumably the people involved in driving these projects are aware of it.
The goal is increased throughput/economic activity. If it takes X time to get a vehicle from A to B, and then you add lanes & demand goes up to keep X relatively constant, that can still be a net gain for community. It's about as equally frustrating for the folks sitting in traffic, but there's still more vehicles getting from A to B because there's more lanes, and more vehicles moving around can be good for the local economy.
There's also additional benefits from the fact that moving the highway underground made the area more desirable. There's no longer a massive concrete snake splitting downtown into pieces, and the area is cleaner and quieter due to moving all that car traffic underground.
In the specific case of the big dig, absolutely! I moved to Cambridge right around when the dig was completed and saw those improvements accrue over the next few years. I had a bunch of friends eventually move to Southie & The Waterfront, which would have been unimaginable when I moved there. I also think the dig did make navigation around Boston easier, even if it didn’t reduce overall traffic.
> The goal is increased throughput/economic activity.
They've still chosen an incredibly stupid solution if that is their goal. Building more highway is the least efficient means of improving transit throughput.
If all the roads are one lane, and most people can't drive their car every day, are they going to be buying more cars and trucks? I think having every road be narrow would reduce car and truck related economic activity.
Because nobody involved is spending their own money. Has never been a problem in my home renovation, I get a contract saying A/C will be installed for certain amount of money and if it turns out to be more work than expected, the company has to cover that or I guess return my home to original condition and give me a refund. In bigger corporate projects the shareholders, or bank or insurance company lose money if project bombs and those in charge are fired or penalized. It's fair to say that in big corporations, a company can go bankrupt and CEO can still work away with a bonus. But still, there is choice in becoming an employee, customer or shareholder and people try their best to associate with companies where they don't think that will happen. Tax money and no consequences is on another level.
Rule #1: Always go through a lengthy and expensive design phase. There is not much for agile methods in big construction methods.
I've worked on big construction projects as architect, billion dollar projects, and many of them were in time and under budget. This was because of the new CAD planning tools I brought in. But esp. because if falling steal prices, experts in the costly parts, the foundation, earth work, no storms, no flooding,no politicians and customers changing their wishes during construction. No litigation during the process, only after.
That's why they'll never build under budget in Germany. You'll always have one of these obstacles, esp. litigations by loosing bidders. And those clueless politicians.
Alliance model contracting is the future of large-scale infrastructure projects to make them stay on time and under budget. Some very good and positive indications gained in Australia and lately also here in Finland. It can be a bit rough when not executed properly, but in the best case I see so much potential in getting the industry "back on track".
A close relative is an architect. The way construction projects are managed is waterfall.
It is made worse by the fact that you typically have
1) a large number of different expert firms involved, creating huge dependencies (imagine instead of FE & BE, having 8 different types of engineers, that can only work in a certain pre-defined order and have very limited availability (so if you are late and miss a slot, they may only be available again a few weeks or months later)
2) communication is either physical meeting of principles (bosses/managers) - rarely actual workers, email or paper print outs. It is not uncommon for on premise workers to work with month old plans that have since been changed.
Buildings are one of the few purchasable objects that have gotten more expensive over the last decades (compared to pretty much every consumer goods item).
There was an article on slate.com about this same issue [1] where the tl;dr is government organizations outsource project management and any other expertise required to run a large scale (or small scale!) infrastructure project.
If the organization that needs a thing done has no idea how to do the thing, it's unsurprising they do it poorly.
I worked in state government and saw this all the time. Small projects were done in house but above a certain size they were always contracted out. I don’t know if this was political (general privatization push) or practical (we don’t have the in house expertise).
It could even be both political and practical, without a sinister motive.
(We have no inhouse experience to run a large project, so we're not going to risk mucking everything up in a high-stakes large project (which would be political suicide), so we never build up the inhouse experience to run a large project...)
I've often seen the lack in in-house expertise bite the owning entities very early in the process: "Oh god even the lowest bid came in 20% above the Engineer's Estimate!"
Because the engineer(s) doing the estimate in-house didn't have enough broad experience in the various disciplines to accurately price the project to begin with, it was allocated less funding than necessary when it was put out to bid and the entire process starts out too lean for the needs of the project.
Projects don't always got over budget. However it is very easy to go over budget on little things.
I've seen people build a house and the cost of construction was exact on budget, but the upgraded doors, lights, and similar small things made them $30,000 over budget. This is even though their contractor was constantly warning them that those upgrades were going to cost. The general contractor doesn't change any more $ to install upgraded fixtures, that money all to the manufactures of the doors, lights... (changing after they are installed costs money, but when it is time to order doors he is thinking oak, pine, or maple (minimal cost differences between them) and you decide to get the 6 panel door that will cost a lot more.
A lot of contractors don't include the actual doors, windows, fixtures, tile material, etc in their quotes for this reason. They include the labor and supporting structures but there's a huge difference between installing a crappy vinyl window VS a Marvin signature or a wood door VS a printed door filled with styrofoam.
The contractors I know include everything in their bid. They build both custom homes and spec homes. The later are built and then turned over to a realtor to sell, and they need to know the cost of everything on the spec home to ensure they can make a profit in the market. Since they know the full costs they will give that to everyone and then point out how the upgrades are bringing the total cost up.
Of course their price is for the doors/windows they use which are on the cheaper end. Not cheapest - warranty callbacks and installation costs often make something just above the cheapest the best deal. If the difference isn't very much they will install the big brand that everyone knows is good as well as the reputation of putting in the "the best" is worth the few dollars profit lost. Good contractors know all of this and how to find the best balance.
The ones I work with are doing renovations for customers that aren't looking to sell a final product. Some things are based on a standard that can be upgraded (for instance, a deck is being quoted with pressure treated wood, but you can upgrade to Ipe for $x for example. Otherwise all of this would have to be selected before a quote is generated. So a ballpark/estimate is given that assumed certain things (like an Andersen 400 series window) but ultimately it's up to the customer to figure out if they want doors that cost $200 or $2000 inside, etc. and the quote is exclusive of them. This is usually detailed in the SoW as "customer supplied".
This line jumped out at me: “Anyone who’s ever guesstimated the cost of anything knows to tack on an extra 15% for caution”. Struck me as amusing given that conservative estimating in software uses a factor of Pi, not 1.15.
I thought the rule of thumb is “double the number and switch to the next bigger unit of time”. 2 hours –> 4 days, 5 days –> 10 weeks, 3 weeks –> 6 months, etc. This is accurate surprisingly often. ;)
That’s one I’ve heard, another is “square it and then multiply by 3/multiply by Pi”. The lowest estimate method I know of is simply multiplying by Pi, which is why it was amusing to read civil engineers casually mentioning they add just 15%.
Early in my business career (as a small business owner) I read somewhere (paraphrasing):
"It generally takes twice as long and costs twice as much as originally estimated."
Amen! Rarely has the rule of thumb failed me over the last 30+ yrs. Whether it's a project around the house or a client's new feature request*. It works.
I wish I had $20 for every time I've seen someone else's best case scenario estimate knowing that nothing ever goes as planned. Humans and life so rarely work that way.
* Clients aren't aware of the initial estimate, they get the rule of thumb version.
We (nPlan) built AI that forecasts and manges uncertainty and risk on megaprojects. The sad truth that I see is that there is a toxic culture where uncertainty and risk are largely ignored, both in preconstruction and construction by the vast majority of professionals. There's a lot of "I've done this the same way for 20/30/40 years so there is no uncertainty", coupled with a lot of "not my job" attitudes.
If we fix that, we can then start addressing risk properly.
Winning the project with a very cheap offer and making money with exessive claim management. The customer can't leave the contract and at some point has to deal with it and we're over budget...
I think that there are 2 foundationañ problems that make complex projects over budget:
1. Stakeholders are incentivized to negotiate down the budget, skewing the result.
2. Breaking down a big task into smaller ones comes with the risk of missing some activities, but adding a nob-required subtask is almost imposible, also skewing the results.
Estimates of big endevours must be made by comparison instead of breaking down the tasks to avoid the second issue. That's one of the little secrets that make poker planning succesfull.
2x the budget does not seem too bad for such a big and useful project. Most projects should not be built at all. More annoying are simple projects like building a bridge or an airport that take forever.
I really want to know of an industrial consumer price index now. That sounds like a really interesting piece of data that a lot of businesses governments and even people could benefit from!
Between rational actors who know everything from day 1, maybe, but there could be a little game theory at play here. Suppose the original estimate is $5B and it's accurate, so the customer doesn't bite. Both sides lose. Then suppose it's $2B, but it drags on and goes over budget a couple of times, ending at the same $5B. The builders get their money and the customer gets their freeway interchange.
Coming from a software perspective, I thought this was pretty impressive. When was the last time anyone told you something was going to take a week and it actually took a week? :D
BTW, to answer a question about the crane, there are regulations limiting the crane to a specific height which change once the building gets tall enough to support having the crane bolted to the side of it.