Collison's theories page nudges the reader to look at "red tape" as an explanation for why things go slower these days, but I think there are hidden variables behind a lot of these which are simpler explanations.
First is the price of labour. Most countries have gotten wealthier over the 20th century, America is not full of desperate people willing to work 16 hour days in dangerous construction jobs any more. The Empire State Building, as an example, required 14 human sacrifices to build in 400 days (and likely many more injuries). I hazard to guess the average 80 story building today is built with much fewer deaths.
Second is state or military intervention. Apollo, the Pentagon, and the Berlin Airlift are all projects of the US military at the height of their influence. Shenzen's fast growth is certainly some Chinese planning department's work. It isn't surprisng to me that motivated non-democratic institutions can make big things happen quickly.
I genuinely don't know why there are fewer instances today, and the question at the bottom is literal rather than rhetorical. (I don't even know whether there are fewer instances today -- maybe they're just happening in less legible domains, or something.)
That said, I'm somewhat skeptical of the safety argument, which I often hear. For example, 60 workers were apparently killed during the construction of the World Trade Center[0] -- 4x more deaths than occurred during the construction of the Empire State Building. Nor is it a priori clear to me that safety and speed would necessarily be in opposition -- maybe better planning causes both more safety and more speed, for example. I'd certainly be interested in a more comprehensive investigation of this question.
I'm also somewhat doubtful of cost-of-labour explanations. Wouldn't it be rational for some organizations to pay a lot more to get people to work longer hours if that's all that's going on? (It would almost certainly be cheaper to do that than to have the project take twice as long in total.) And why did many of the instances enumerated on the page happen in relatively high cost (for the time) locations, like New York, DC, and San Francisco, rather than in cheaper places?
I do believe that state/military intervention clearly plays some role in a few, but there are certainly plenty of examples of remarkably slow military projects, and many of the projects on the page have nothing to do with the military. (Empire State Building, Golden Gate Bridge, Boeing 747, NYC Subway.)
So, I haven't found a satisfying explanation, and I'd be curious to read other analyses or diagnoses.
> I'm also somewhat doubtful of cost-of-labour explanations. Wouldn't it be rational for some organizations to pay a lot more to get people to work longer hours if that's all that's going on? (It would almost certainly be cheaper to do that than to have the project take twice as long in total.) And why did many of the instances enumerated on the page happen in relatively high cost (for the time) locations, like New York, DC, and San Francisco, rather than in cheaper places?
As far as I can tell, for a lot of transit projects in the US, at least, the capital isn't there up-front to just pay more to parallelize things. The money is being raised by a long-duration tax so it comes in incrementally.
And then there's a second closely related factor: do we have the production capacity to switch from a five-year-project-horizon to a one-year one even if we wanted to spend the money faster?
It seems like it feeds itself, when it comes to cities and infrastructure:
- huge early growth spurs a big demand, construction industry spins up around it (this, I think, answers the "why did stuff happen in high-cost areas" question - high demand is what causes high cost, so in an area where nobody is demanding infrastructure, there's gonna be a lot less reason to build it)
- a lot of stuff, once built, will last decades or longer, and would be extra-hard and expensive to replace. so once demand starts to be met, and growth starts to slow, the construction industry gets less and less business, so it shrinks
- this is a limiting factor on new projects, but they're also seen as less urgent than the initial stuff (road widening is less critical than creating a road where there was none, say), so the slower pace is accepted.
- red tape also starts to develop, since in a new-frontier situation there are fewer entrenched powers to create regulations to protect things (whether or not those regulations are net-beneficial!)
That's my current pet theory, anyway: It's not that we've deteriorated, it's more that priorities, effort, and industry have shifted. There are a LOT of other things that happen far faster now than they did 30 years ago in 1992, after all; and unbelievably faster than they did when the Empire State Building was constructed. Sometimes it's harder to repair a body than to make a new human in the first place, if you will ;)
Construction time is dominated by staging materials (shipping, delivery, and movement of those materials around on site and into place), and sync points. Houses will sit for weeks waiting on a chain of specialists to get time to finish some critical piece.
In larger projects, there are generally larger staging issues (less footprint to put materials relative to the amount and size of materials), and there are many more specialists involved (including inspectors), increasing the frequency and delays of sync points. The materials for large projects are also much larger now. The Empire State Building exterior was built of bricks, layer by layer. The exterior of most modern buildings are giant panes of glass, requiring cranes and such to move them into place.
I think examining the sync points and staging requirements could shed some light on why construction projects are taking so much longer nowadays.
My theory is it’s common law contracting systems combined with government and industry wanting to push time and cost risk down the chain of subcontractors as far as possible. This leads to a situation where market forces are aligned to generate epic amounts of bureaucracy and unwillingness to be flexible. ‘I can’t do that because this was supposed to be ready for me to start’ or a part that costs 3x more even though there’s an exact equivalent generic component from a different brand but the expensive one is in the specification and a contractor won’t suggest a substitution because then it’s thier design risk. As an architect I’m very cautious about specifying anything innovative, because when it goes wrong in my experience the suppliers always find a way to get out of any warranty promises and everyone tries to blame me to get my PI insurance to pay for it. I’ve been stung before by being too trusting of product manufacturer’s claims and this had poisoned the well for anyone coming after them with something new they want me to try out.
Beginner gains. It doesn’t say much about the physical achievements, buildings and such, but many of the technological feats can be attributed to beginner gains. The investment to build iteration one of something is a lot lower than iteration 100. And you are getting less return on that investment. This is why VC is so fixated on being “first”.
Yeah this is another one I was thinking of, that early projects in a tech adoption cycle are completed faster than later ones, because they are simpler and the benefit more obvious. I wonder if anyone has studied this.
> San Francisco proposed a new bus lane on Van Ness in 2001. Its opening was delayed to 2022, yielding a project duration of around 7,600 days. “The project has been delayed due to an increase of wet weather since the project started,” said Paul Rose, a San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency spokesperson. The project will cost $310 million, i.e. $100,000 per meter. The Alaska Highway, mentioned above, constructed across remote tundra, cost $793 per meter in 2019 dollars.
A similar example – the Golden Gate Bridge was built in 4 years in the 1930s at a (inflation adjusted) cost of $500M, ahead of schedule and 10% under budget. A project to install suicide nets below the bridge started in 2008 and is still ongoing after multiple delays, with a total projected cost of $211M.
Regarding the Van Ness "bus lane"... the site's blurb fails to mention that the project also replaced infrastructure like plumbing which was around hundred years old, requiring digging up a lot of the street and contributing a ton to the cost and time.
I'm pretty confident that still doesn't justify all the delays or huge cost overruns. SF is not well known for completing anything in time or on budget. But it's frustrating and inaccurate to see "San Francisco's expensive bus lane" becoming a talking point while omitting the costly and necessary infrastructure upgrades included in that cost. The omission feels designed to malign projects that improve public transit. (And probably also to fit into talking points about "liberal San Francisco"). [Edit: I mean in general, not necessarily assuming ill will on the part of this particular site/author.]
Getting the bridge built was also a highly visible and thus naturally a higher priority project for the implementers than either a new bus lane or suicide nets. Probably a better comparison would be the building of the signature span of the Bay Bridge.
why does this happen? Our technology is magnitudes more advanced, we have better preexisting infrastructure, materials, measuring equipment, yet the nation with the world's most powerful economy doesn't hold a candle to it's past achievements.
Because we have spent decades retooling our entire economy to send manufacturing and heavy industry to cheaper countries. Get an entire Chinese construction crew to come build a bridge in San Francisco under their own labor/safety/environmental laws and they will show you that early-mid 1900s efficiency.
Exactly that. In France the new EPR nuclear reactor has been 15 years in the making and should (hopefully) start in 2023. The Chinese built 2 of these in 9 years. As some engineer from Framatome overseeing the project said, "they achieve in 3 days what Bouygues (the French contractor) does in 3 months".
No, it’s because of everything. Increased specialization of our construction crews, increased oversight and regulation, increased labor costs due to improved working conditions, improved safety requirements reducing productivity, increased shipping and manufacturing time for increasingly specialized tools and building materials, reduced working hours to cause less impact to traffic and noise, increased sync points to inspect the work and ensure it’s good before moving to the next step, mechanization reducing the number of people that can work at one time because the equipment is large and expensive, increased project complexity because complex materials and construction practices are more efficient in specific ways, etc.
For starters, it's no longer politically viable to expect 11 people to die during the construction of a bridge. To avoid that, there's a lot of regulation in place. And a lot more that probably got in for other reasons.
To be fair, the Golden Gate Bridge project is famous for its safety record and care given to the safety of its crews during construction. It was one of the first bridges ever built with safety nets during construction.
> If there’s one construction job that set the modern standards for work site safety precautions, it is the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. When construction on this bridge began in 1933, it was the first suspension bridge supported by a tower in the ocean and surrounded by harsh weather and water conditions.
> Before this project bridge construction workers, or “bridgemen,” had been considered reckless daredevils who worked without any safety precautions. They had to be fearless to climb the high steel and deal with the rugged weather and risky footing. The Golden Gate Bridge was built during the Great Depression – when 1 in 4 Americans was unemployed – and despite the risks, workers applied in droves.
> /../
> Even with these precautions, 11 men died during construction – including 10 who lost their lives when a section of scaffold fell through the safety net. However, there were 28 worker fatalities during the construction of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. Strauss’ safety regulations can be reasonably credited with saving many lives and setting a new worksite safety standard. He proved to the world that safety gear saves lives.
Using the actuarial value of a human life, those 11 deaths would add $83M-100M to the costs (assuming the costs aren’t already fully baked in to the cost added above), which would put the Golden Gate Bridge over its budget.
Inflation adjustment takes into account the advancements though. The comparison would look a little better if we adjusted for median hourly wages instead of adjusting for inflation.
The Central Subway is 2.5km long tram line that SF has been building for 12 years now, at a cost of $1.6B.
Prague built 35km of tram lines in 14 years after 1893 and another 45km during the next 20 years. (Different era and tech, but still it was building tram lines through existing streets)
Only if there's space within the existing easement. Without knowing the specifics, it could go either way. It might involve an additional lane for the bus lane and thus involve a widening.
”JavaScript. Brendan Eich implemented the first prototype for JavaScript in 10 days”
A good example of when fast is horrible. Developers have been paying the price for all the design flaws in JS ever since — billions of hours of extra work.
(yes, it’s hard to design something perfect in one iteration, but I think we can all agree that 10 days was rushed, Brendan has said so himself)
Some of the other items on the list are really impressive though!
I think it's an exaggeration to say that design flaws in JavaScript are "horrible" and that they have caused billions of hours of work. Of course there are warts in the language (e.g. everything gets cast to a string) but similar design issues have plagued other languages as well. It's not like JavaScript is unique in providing footguns.
And the language is operating in a different context than most other languages (prioritizing not breaking at all costs), so it is really hard to fix defects. That context would have been impossible to foresee.
I agree. We all know that JS was not perfect (that's why we had to stick to "the good parts" for several years). But I think it was still elegant and concise and got the job done. Prototype based OOP, event-driven, etc were all very good decisions.
And also, the argument that "made in 10 days and is horrible" is counter-factual. We don't know if we could have gotten a better language if they spent 1 year or 5 years. The achievement is impressive.
It's only rushed if you think Brendan can see the future, and knows that there will be billions of hours of work done using the language he is creating.
Apollo 8 had a ton of flaws in it as well. But for the most part it did the job that was intended for it. If the world decided to keep flying Apollo 8 for the next 30 years, I'm sure even more flaws would show up, but I wouldn't exactly blame the original designers.
Haters gonna hate. I love JS for small-ish projects after 25 yrs of C/C++ and ~10 year of python. I get shit done 10x to 20x faster than I'd ever get it done in most other languages.
I can't remember ever running into JS's quirks. If I did it was no different than any language's quirks.
It’s interesting how many of these happened during WWII. The fact that the Pentagon was built in under 500 days is astounding, if you’ve ever walked through the place.
True urgency is really such a key predictor to things getting done impossibly fast, and our brains are great at detecting manufactured urgency.
I wonder how USA would fare in the face of a real war on the scale of WWII or bigger.
For once, the government would need a real jolt, a voice of a leader, to send a spine chilling message down to every corner of the gov to stand up and get up. This seems impossible in the day of social media and the internet.
Second, the financing machinery of the government would need to be completely replaced with something temporary the 1000x size of DARPA to get things going. Most people don’t know but the marginal tax rate during WWII and well into 1970’s was insanely high, at one point 91%. Reagan reduced marginal taxes from 70% to 28% by the end of his term.
Laws would be slashed or dismantled. Bureaucracy would see the face of reality it has never seen.
Then, the will of the people. Which I feel the most optimistic about. Humans are pretty good at getting together in a war like urgency. Counter point is COVID, but I can imagine every person to be onboard if a nuclear bomb was detonated in New York.
It would be a strangely fascinating thing to witness, as much as I wish no war to ever happen.
> Then, the will of the people. Which I feel the most optimistic about. Humans are pretty good at getting together in a war like urgency. Counter point is COVID, but I can imagine every person to be onboard if a nuclear bomb was detonated in New York.
You are way more optimistic than me. If WW3 breaks out government machinery, military, intelligence are all not going to be a problem at all. Before that though you'd have to align most of the country on what the right side even is. And yes, that includes the side that dropped a nuke on New York ("How do we know they did it? It may have been a false flag operation. Here's a Facebook video that proves it. They anyways deserved it for voting blue.")
Approval ratings of Bush went up sharply after 9/11 [1]. This is a fight or flight response analog of a nation. It is hard to predict but it would be pretty clear once casualties start piling up.
The media would be under sorts of a martial law and things would shut down dramatically.
A lot has changed in the last 20 years. What would be the public reaction back then if Bush was making phone calls to Osama asking for dirt on his opponent in the 2004 election?
The wonks at 538 seem to be of the opinion that the "Rally around the flag" effect is significantly dependent on the opposition party refraining from criticizing the leader(s) in question, at least in the medium-to-long term.
Pandemics are sort of like a boiling-frog problem. People do not realize immediate risks to themselves. While a nuclear bomb doesn't cause immediate problems to someone in Montana, it is a visceral event just like Pearl Harbor attack that galvanized the entire nation.
This isn't 2001. Fox News -- which ironically only became relevant at all because the Bush admin gave them exclusive access during the Iraq war -- has effectively destroyed America's unity in the two decades since.
And also to point out in the parent's comment - an external threat would have to -feel like a threat-. Attacking just NYC wouldn't do it for that 35% of America; it's not a threat to them, but to those 'Demoncrats'. Hell, the de facto leader of that 35% just asked the likeliest person to orchestrate such an attack to share dirt on his political opponents here.
British scientists designed a lot of radar tech that their American counterparts simply couldn't get to work properly (when the technology was basically handed to the Americans for free).
A lot of them directly attribute this to the Americans scientists not being at risk of being invaded.
Good point. As anyone who has written an essay before can attest, if you have it all in your head before you start writing it can flow out from your fingers remarkably quickly. If you're still piecing it together as you go along it will typically take an order of magnitude longer.
Some clues are available in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8 (Tech Talk: Linus Torvalds on git). There's nothing conclusive about the length of the pondering, but he does say the writing itself took two weeks:
"I decided I can write something better than anything out there in two weeks. And I was right." [1]
Between he publicly deciding to abandon BitKeeper and making git there were a few months. I imagine he would start pondering it right away, even if only to get a feature list to look in a replacement.
> JavaScript. Brendan Eich implemented the first prototype for JavaScript in 10 days, in May 1995. It shipped in beta in September of that year.
I have a bit of a love have relationship with this one. It was inspired by two languages, Self and Scheme, that are both incredibly beautiful, was then made ugly to be familiar and since then introduced major churn and bloat that was never needed.
---
Imagine a world where HTML, CSS and JS were all just a unified language, with sound, simple primitives at the bottom, extensibility (macros, schema...) built-in, and a well designed standard library.
Think of how much more productive developers would be, the possible performance optimizations in browser engines, much simpler tooling, less arbitrary choices, less hacks and workarounds. We would have more time to create useful and beautiful things than solve problems we imposed on us ourselves.
>was then made ugly to be familiar and since then introduced major churn and bloat that was never needed.
Javascript development used to be simple, elegant and fun, back in the days of JQuery plugins when all you needed was a text editor and an FTP account. All of this churn and bloat isn't the fault of the language, it's the fault of Node.js and the commodification of Javascript by enterprise and startups wanting to force the language to be something it was never meant to be, because Javascript developers are a dime a dozen.
>Imagine a world where HTML, CSS and JS were all just a unified language, with sound, simple primitives at the bottom, extensibility (macros, schema...) built-in, and a well designed standard library.
That's the world we live in now. A lot of the bloat of modern javascript comes from generating HTML and CSS dynamically, rather than
having them be static as intended. That separation of concerns is there for a reason, and the simplicity of that model is what makes the web so hackable. It's easy to drop a script into a page or a new CSS file. Hotpatching a running application not so much. Degradation is easier when things are separate as well. An HTML page should work without CSS or JS. Having everything be a single, executable language means even simple hypertext documents can fail to render because of errors.
Which i know seems like a great idea to developers, but there's a good reason XHTML, which had the same "feature", never took off. People would much rather have error correction even at the cost of greater complexity because it's more important that the web work than that it look pretty doing so.
>Think of how much more productive developers would be, the possible performance optimizations in browser engines, much simpler tooling, less arbitrary choices, less hacks and workarounds.
That's not what would happen. Think of the worst, ugliest, most sprawling spaghetti codebase you've ever seen.
The bloat mainly comes from the fact that HTML/JS/CSS are not extensible or only to a primitive degree. I don't care about what was intended or not, the point is that the model fails since almost two decades.
The separation of concerns doesn't hold and is failing us all the time, HTML is not just information structure, it is also interactivity and layout. CSS is rigid, complex and inexpressive. One often has to at least generate it and sometimes manipulate the DOM via JS to build even simple visual constraints and relations.
Why do the specs of the languages keep growing? Some of it is what you said about programming culture, but the more fundamental problem is that we're dealing with an entirely inappropriate, inextensible model that we keep on patching.
> That's not what would happen. Think of the worst, ugliest, most sprawling spaghetti codebase you've ever seen.
> Everything would look like that. Everything.
That's exactly what we have now pretty much everywhere, but with extra layers, workarounds and patches on top. It's not good!
Don't get me wrong though. I love the web - and all of this is hindsight. The above is maybe just wishful thinking and fantasy.
Parts of our code base are still using jQuery and it's the most spaghetti-ish code we have. So difficult to reason about state and remembering what UI elements are present that need to be updated. It's made me really appreciate the developer-experience simplicity of React.
People actually feel this way? I find web development and entrepreneurship to be as accessible and as fun as ever. So many amazing technologies within reach. I really enjoy web development now more than ever.
I think there is an obscene amount of intellectual & economic waste happening right now due to rent-seeking SaaS and draconian IP regulation, at least in the West.
You know what would be really enjoyable? If there was a dominant culture of interoperability within hardware, social media and information-sharing. What "Web3" should have been about instead of appealing to / being co-opted by wealth-hoarding, destructive ideologies, and other crimes.
In the beginning websites were simple enough (and also light on resources) that static layouts and styling were more than enough. In those regards, a simple syntax like HTML and CSS worked well. Just like how we still use JSON/YAML/TOML for configuration files, instead of reaching for the nearest turing complete language. However it's only in the past 10-15 years that complexity has really started to grow on the frontend, making it more and more enticing to have conventional programming language constructions (conditionals, functions, loops) in the layout and the styling.
TeX, though it's not interactive, has "HTML" (document structure), "CSS" (visual presentation), macros, and a standard library, though some people may disagree as to how well-designed it is. Nowadays most people use Lamport's LaTeX standard library rather than Knuth's "plain TeX" standard library, in part because it affords better separation of structure and presentation — journals routinely publish LaTeX stylesheets.
Does anyone have evidence that Faddell's claim is genuine? I have no doubt the iPod "came together" that fast, but I recall reading about this and it seemed like the building blocks were in development for years prior.
MP3 players certainly existed so the idea of the iPod wasn't new. All the chips were off the shelf, the Pixo OS already existed, and Apple already had iTunes. The timeline has been verified by multiple people who were there but maybe Fadell already had the idea worked out before he was hired.
To a lesser extent pretty much every formula 1 car can go into these types of lists. A huge amount of engineering and art goes into them and it better be ready a 9AM in the pre-season test.
It is nonsense to compare the timeline of those products in days. I think three main things are missing, budget, know-how, and how many people are involved which multiplies the working days.
For those who haven't clicked the link: This is a really cool list of ambitious projects that were successfully delivered in relatively short amounts of time.
First is the price of labour. Most countries have gotten wealthier over the 20th century, America is not full of desperate people willing to work 16 hour days in dangerous construction jobs any more. The Empire State Building, as an example, required 14 human sacrifices to build in 400 days (and likely many more injuries). I hazard to guess the average 80 story building today is built with much fewer deaths.
Second is state or military intervention. Apollo, the Pentagon, and the Berlin Airlift are all projects of the US military at the height of their influence. Shenzen's fast growth is certainly some Chinese planning department's work. It isn't surprisng to me that motivated non-democratic institutions can make big things happen quickly.