Compromises

Den Beste writes a marvelous blog entry about the necessary compromises that go into engineering projects:

Actually, there are a lot of other tradeoffs going on which are less evident, like tailoring the feature set of the project to the design team available, and making plans based on the kinds of components which are readily available. All engineering is a tradeoff.

Run any single one of those parameters to the rail and you make it impossible to complete. It's as simple as that. Define "affordable" as "free" and it can't be done. ("Paid for by someone else" isn't the same as "free".)

Define "acceptable delivery " as "five minutes from now" and you'll be disappointed. Define "safe" as "impossible for there to be any kind of failure" and the engineering process won't ever end.

He writes about the "failures" of the World Trade Center in terms of lives saved, and thus questions if they were failures at all. Consider that if the buildings had truly failed, there could have been more than 50,000 people killed. Fact is that they stood long enough for the overwhelming majority of people to evacuate.

You see symptoms of this every where. Any degree of failure is ranked as an overall failure. Unemployment is, what, around 5% right now, but it's unimportant that that means 95% of eligible people are working. 5% aren't, the system has failed!

Food for thought.