No assembly lines. No wireless Internet service or lattes Most work was done with hand or horses. Unlike modern ?death march? projects, 27 people actually died in the course of engineering the Brooklyn bridge.
Modern web developer
Washington Roebling’s team
3 week / month release cycle
14 year release cycle
Electricity
Horses
Coffee, doughnuts and air conditioning
Water and the elements (think muggy NYC summers)
Carpal tunnel syndrome
The bends
Layoffs
27 Deaths
If nothing else, the Brooklyn bridge is a reminder of what difficult projects
are truly like. Sitting at a desk all day arguing through bug triage meetings
might be frustrating, but it‘s nothing compared to what these people had to go
through.
Via Tomalak.
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No analogy is going to be perfect, but it’s the spirit of the article that really interested me. Thanks for clarifying the “death march” metaphor, Will.
It’s a good point! Although “death march” really refers to your emotioinal state, both extreme mental fatigue and hopelessness.
The article, however, is a bit flawed. The reason why computer science students aren’t pushed to learn a lot about other disciplines is the complexity of our own discipline – a persons brain can only hold so much information. In fact, now that I think about it, I can’t imagine almost anyone’s boss at the full time job rewarding their employees for learning about an unrelated field.
Secondly, as we all know, engineering is an identical field to computer science.