
What a Year at a Mechanic Shop Taught Me About Process (2016) - philk10
https://spin.atomicobject.com/2019/11/16/getting-work-done-process/#.XdAJau45PZc.hackernews
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qes
Software development sure would be a lot simpler to manage if it were like
auto repair, where every bit of work is well scoped, short, with absolute
boundaries and near complete independence from any other work happening.

Perhaps I'll think lessons from an auto repair shop can apply to software
development after they've spent 2 years rebuilding a vehicle from the inside
out while it continuously journeys across the interstates.

[https://i.imgur.com/cD8Y7fh.mp4](https://i.imgur.com/cD8Y7fh.mp4)

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modoc
I think you’re over simplifying auto repair work. Sure, sometimes it’s an oil
change, which is short, well scoped, etc... But a lot of times it’s
“Sometimes, when I’m turning left, the car makes this noise... you know, like
a whining grinding popping noise. It’s not doing it today though.” And you
don’t know if it’s a 5 minute fix or a 5 day investigation and replacement of
major drivetrain parts...

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t34543
Auto repair is 90% diagnostics and 10% wrench turning. A lot of newer vehicles
have symptom matrixes with a process for repair. Lowering the skill floor for
mechanics.

What’s interesting to me about auto repair is how techs are paid. A lot of
shops do book rate. Example let’s say you have to replace a front half shaft.
Book rate pays you for 30min. If you take an hour to do it - you lose money.

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jcims
HVAC repair starts getting into black magic territory. Giant, incredibly
dynamic systems with hard physics, positive/negative feedback loops, control
theory operating with very few inputs and very uncomfortable humans dripping
sweat on the back of your neck while they watch you work.

I feel like everyone that frequents HN would have a good time spending a year
working in that industry.

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BLKNSLVR
I've had a tangential interest in the physics / mechanics of air-conditioning
since working in an office with two people on opposite ends of the
"comfortable temperature" scale, and noticing that one of them opens their
window in order to "solve the problem". I've since noticed various other
people open windows to try to "fix" the air-conditioning temperature.

My assumption is that opening the window fucks it up for the whole system, but
very few people are aware of this, and the office folks aren't made aware of
it by the air-con techs.

Am I way off? Am I overstating the effect that an open window has on the
system?

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t34543
It will upset the building balance at a minimum. Air balancing techs are
typically a different discipline from HVAC in large commercial spaces.

Leaving the window open and AC on in high humidity areas can freeze up the
coil generating a service call, trick zone sensors, etc. If there is a large
temperature difference the sharp gradient will not be comfortable.

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jcims
I never worked on very large systems, mostly small commercial and residential.
A buddy of mine supervises HVAC for a large commercial facility and we were
talking about their makeup air. Basically it sounded like the building is
effectively hermetically sealed until the makeup air vents open because of
interior pressure or O2/CO2 levels. Seemed kind of creepy that there was some
active system in charge of that. How do you know when it's not working?

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t34543
The same CO2 sensors that call for make up air are hopefully monitored. Sick
building syndrome.

Buildings are poorly sealed in my experience. In California code requires
economizers on RTUs and they are almost always broken / stuck partially open.
In the Inland Empire for example the actuators bind up from sand and often
seize. Nobody wants to pay to fix just that, if they even know it’s busted.

I stay under 10 tons. Things are different in bigger buildings!

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OldGuyInTheClub
I was surprised by "It was really interesting to work in an industry that was
completely different from technology."

Cars aren't technology? When did the term get redefined to mean software?

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orev
You are of course technically correct, but it’s pretty well established at
this point in time that the “tech sector” refers to IT and Internet companies.
Taken to the extreme, you can technically call pretty much all human endeavors
“technology”, so you need to follow current conventions in order to have a
productive discussion.

~~~
erikpukinskis
Words often go through phases where they stop meaning what they mean to groups
of people. Sometimes large groups. “Feminism” is the classic example in my
head.

You don’t have to bend to that. People often try to destroy words for
political reasons, but in then end, I think, the words often stand resilient.

Our languages are really impressive structures that define real spaces. There
is power to learning them and knowing how to use them well.

That power does diminish when words are abused, but it doesn’t disappear.

Personally, I am happy to have words be refined, but when people try to
redefine them to the point where they are useless... I listen, and parse their
words as intended, but I keep using those words correctly with others.

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mattrp
I’m a developer but have built a side gig renovating 100 year old homes. My
partners in the effort are a carpenter who can do pretty much anything and a
former machinist who can take anything apart and put it back together (whether
that’s a motor or a house). He recently completed a vr6 engine swap on a gen-
ii golf. What the article mentions about the parallels with the auto body shop
and agile are true. We don’t intentionally run it this way it just organically
works like this. Over two years of doing this we’ve had numerous conversations
about how the mind of a carpenter or fabricator is very much like the mind of
a developer. You have to visualize the problem, evaluate multiple approaches
and then ultimately work uninterrupted to create the solution.

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gdubs
Do you have a blog or an instagram? I’d love to read more about your work; I
imagine many others here would too.

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mattrp
I never thought of that.. you know another way Reno’s are like software... you
often have to debug other people’s work. Simple example, in one house there
were wide door jams that met in the middle of the top of the door frame. Why
would anyone do that. Turns out, you take the two long pieces and the two
short pieces and you get two 96” pieces... answer, they didn’t want to buy a
third piece of lumber. Now to tell you how really stupid this is, you buy
lumber at Home Depot by the foot and they even have a saw station in the store
for you to trim pieces and even if you didn’t trim there you can bring the
unused portion back and get a credit. Now... I would bet most software devs on
here have seen code equivalents at least as dumb as that. It’s been fun doing
this but it’s been cool to see just how many parallels there are.. don’t get
me started on the 1x, 10x, 100x analogues!

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peterwwillis
Read the 12 Agile principles and replace software with cars, development with
mechanic. It all makes a lot of sense because they're general business
principles.

Comparing it to Scrum is pretty inaccurate, though. Scrum is designed to
deliver a unit of shippable work over weeks; auto mechanics ship every day.
Mechanics work much closer to an Agile kanban-based tech desk, where you have
a pool of random requests to execute as efficiently as you can, and you pull
new work from backlog as you go. None of this "oh I can't pull in / take out
that work, it would throw off the sprint". Every day is a sprint. And most
every job that has coordinated high-paced work has a morning meeting.

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type0
Good points, I think the author of this article draw parallels to closely.
That auto shop had good routines that's all. A bunch of them don't have good
routines but instead have good enough ones and they can still manage and get
by if there are not too many competing car services around. In software
development it would often mean that the business won't succeed because you
are competing at almost a global scale and location means little or nothing to
your customers unless of course you're in SV.

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xyzal
I used to be a biomedical engineering technician before becoming a software
dev, and I have to say I somewhat miss the immediate positive feedback from
actual users when you solve a problem. If anyone feels similar after moving
into software -- what do you do to keep your motivation up?

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systemsdude
1\. Find a metric you care about 2\. Graph that metric 3\. Be happy when you
deploy something that makes the graph better

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harsan
Would love if anyone could elaborate on the difference between a manager and a
coordinator within the shop.

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yodon
I've been looking for similar dev relevant discussions of traditional
manufacturing or ops processes - any other favorite articles?

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Animats
That's a very well run auto shop.

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jeffrallen
tl;dr: healthy organizations act humanely.

