alt Hacker News> And to your point, if anyone ever asked an engineer to insert another floor between 8th and 9th floor of a 15 story building, they'd laugh at them. In software engineering, this is possible even if hard.
Ah yes, another cocktail party idea [1] where a software engineer pretends like they understand civil engineering.
Replies
godelski • 04/03/2025
Obviously never been to floor 7 1/2[0]
It's great when you make a general statement about somebody you are conversing with without really knowing their background.
As Dan notes himself, even scenarios which are simpler than this (moving a bridge, moving a building) are done much more rarely compared to similar requests in software. I did not accidentally use "modify something in a dimension that's really hard to modify in civil engineering" as an example — perhaps your response was a cocktail party response of someone not understanding either civil or software engineering?
IMHO, it is all about costs (which I start off with being small in software — comparatively): traditional engineering doing changes like these is extremely expensive and thus they don't (it's usually cheaper to demolish and rebuild).