Thats the story, but everyone who transited Van Ness during that time saw the same thing - very little work actually being done. The equipment just sat there idle most of the time. A more efficient process could have come in and finished the work,
block by block in far less time if they actually, y'know, worked on it. People in construction tell me that it's because they're always waiting on the other guy to finish their job before they can do theirs. Where's the Gantt chart for Van Ness? Where's the accountability?
There was a Grand Jury report analyzing the causes of the delay in the Van Ness project. While the unexpected conditions of the underground utilities is cited as the primary cause, it does touch on some project management aspects that you mention as opportunities for improvement:
Ironically, more planning and analysis at the beginning of the project (e.g., by potholing and inspecting the condition of utilities underneath Van Ness may have avoided the construction delays.
I worked on that report! (Throwaway because, well, my real name is on the second page...)
The lack of meaningful technical planning was a big part of it, and so was the contract-awarding math, but I think the most striking - and generally applicable - behind-the-scenes stories were about what happens when trust breaks down at a human level. The city's internal back and forth on approving and then un-approving a subcontractor at the beginning meant that the GC was more likely to work to the letter of the contract when things went wrong later, instead of collaborating to solve problems. The one positive thing the city eventually did to get the project moving forward, according to all the information we got, was put someone with some amount of authority on the ground to talk to people.
Rereading the report now, all of these facts are in there, but I wish we'd found a way to stress this part more. You see the same thing in every industry, whether it's individuals or teams or companies working together - the best laid plans mean nothing unless the people involved are actually interested in tackling challenges as they come up. Culture eats strategy, and all that. A culture of writing a plan and then either strictly following it or throwing a fit when it can't be followed isn't a culture that can do great work.
Can I just point out how awesome it is to be discussing a infrastructure failure and one of the postmortem report authors chimes in with their experiences. Sometimes the HN community truly is amazing!
I was once told that Supply Chain and logistics are a people business. And it's true, for the very reasons you mentioned, the moment partners work according to the letter of the contract, and not the spirit, things become difficult. Trust is so easily lost...
A big part of “modern slowdowns” is everything being contracted and subcontracted - as opposed to one large company, government, or army doing the entire thing.
What are you going have consequences in the project management office of a gov contractor that probably has no real competition, besides maybe multiple years later when it's politically convenient? Fire the lower level union workers slacking off?
The fact every single major infrastructure project is a decade late and 3x over budget is just normal and tolerated by the people running the show across the US/Canada. The gov workers picking who wins these gov contracts (usually the same small set of companies) doesn't seem to care, despite extensive track records of the same behaviour. They probably have jobs lined up at these companies there afterwards.
It's only natural human behaviour to not put effort in if there's no consequences or risk in doing so. This is Public/private partnerships 101.
> It's only natural human behaviour to not put effort in if there's no consequences or risk in doing so.
That’s nonsense. That’s like saying that it’s only natural human behavior to abuse and be abused. If I put myself in the shoes of an underpaid sewage worker, that has a family to maintain, that sees the owner and investors of said private companies getting obscenely rich just by closings contracts under their AC… yeah, I’d slack the s* out of it too.
> ...That’s like saying that it’s only natural human behavior to abuse and be abused...
I think that's exactly what experiments have shown the world. There are many follow-up experiments that prove exactly that.
The Stanford Prison Experiment has become one of psychology's most dramatic illustrations of how good people can be transformed into perpetrators of evil, and healthy people can begin to experience pathological reactions - traceable to situational forces.
Those traceable situational forces can be minor and subtle things, and yet.
No. The SPE was unethical and its methodology was garbage, but the observations were valid enough. When someone refuses to commit an atrocity for you, all you have to do is ask the next person in line. You won't have to go too far down the line before you find someone who is not only willing to follow an illegal order from an authority figure, but happy to. See also Milgram.
The conclusion was self-evident before they ran the experiment, so another criticism that could be leveled at the experiment was that it was redundant.
The word "debunk" is doing some heavy lifting in those articles. "....Overall 58 per cent of people actually disobeyed the pushy experimenter [which means that 42 percent didn't.] How can we understand this variability, Reicher asked, if the agentic state is true?" What else would explain it -- and more important, what difference does it make?
Milgram found that 42% of people will administer electric shocks to someone who appears to be screaming in pain, as long as the order is given by an apparent authority figure. What is there to debunk, exactly?
Keep in mind what motivated these experiments: a desire to understand more about how the Nazis were able to accomplish what they did. It's not as if the findings of Milgram and Zimbardo were novel or controversial; they were merely trying to reproduce and understand something that the entire world had just observed.
I believe the debunking is that there's good evidence many of the participants realized they were in an experiment and the other person was an actor, but Milgram hid this in order to get a famous paper.
Does it matter? If someone may or may not be an actor by your judgment is going to cause you to possibly commit an atrocity then you should play it safe and refuse. Just in case...
It matters for the validity of the experiment, yes. Bear in mind, the chances of the experiment being real were astronomically small, as university professors are not normally in the business of torturing members of the public. As there were (iirc) small rewards given for taking part, the rational thing to do is follow the instructions. This seems like an inherent problem for attempting to study order-following in a lab.
And of course if you were a participant in the original experiment, you'd tell people, "Of course, I knew it was just an experiment, and it wasn't really happening."
You'd start by telling yourself that, so it would be easy enough to convince people looking to "debunk" the experiment later.
They told Milgram himself and he hid the interviews. From the second link above,
The new research builds upon findings from a previous study, which analyzed recordings of 91 conversations conducted immediately after the termination of the experiments. The recordings showed that most of the obedient subjects justified continuing the experiment because they believed the learner was not really being harmed.
> The conclusion was self-evident before they ran the experiment, so another criticism that could be leveled at the experiment was that it was redundant.
"It's just common sense" is not a solid scientific proof. Testing something that we _think_ we know (but have no proven) is not a bad thing.
Ish. It’s usually more useful to test hypotheses about why something is. If that something isn’t then you can’t get an answer & will often demonstrate the counter-factual.
Simple “we confirmed water is wet” tests are not very good science. Whereas “what is wetness & why does it happen” is.
