Lord of Construction
I finally seem to be pulling out of a trying couple of months. It started when, having bought an “almost finished” little house out in the bush, Maru and I hired an architect to take care of the remaining work. This work included constructing stairs to the second floor (previously only reachable by a shaky ladder arrangement), tiling the bare concrete floors and applying some paint. The architect was recommended by a friend, and he seemed like a knowledgeable, friendly kind of guy. At first, I wanted to see if we could contact an agency to do it with known skilled, insured workers, all proper like, but that’s apparently not the way it’s done here. Anyway, people who actually understood what I meant by that advised me that this does in fact not exist.
So we went with Architect, who claimed it would take two weeks. I assumed this meant four weeks, and planned for that.
In the end, it’s taken ten weeks, six of which we’ve spent in an unfinished house filled with construction noise, dirt and local fauna. Suffice to say it’s been fairly unpleasant. However, we now have one (1) finished, working house with a roof and reasonably modern facilities to show for it. All that remains is to unpack (!) and have Telmex get the lead out and actually fix my DSL connection, which drops every ten minutes or so during daytime (I suspect the central).
In the midst of this, something occurred to me: Although my experience is insignificant in the bigger picture, construction projects of all sizes and in all parts of the world are late and/or over budget. We’ve been pouring concrete for centuries (or millennia, depending on your definition of concrete), and we still can’t do it to specifications. Yet, when software engineering goes wrong, it’s because it’s an “immature” field. As if software is easy, and we’re doing it wrong. Maybe it’s just hard, like plain old construction work?
At least your industry sucks too. I’ve been sleeping better lately.