Monju is an extreme case, but it’s not in a category by itself. Far from it. Nuclear power plants are one of the worst-performing project types in my database, with an average cost overrun of 120 percent in real terms and schedules running 65 percent longer than planned. Even worse, they are at risk of fat-tail extremes for both cost and schedule, meaning they may go 20 or 30 percent over budget. Or 200 or 300 percent. Or 500 percent. Or more. There is almost no limit to how bad things can get, as Monju demonstrated so spectacularly.

How Big Things Get Done - Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner

What was so spectacular about Monju was that it was a nuclear power plant that over the entire lifetime of the project from when it started to generate electricity in 1994 to when it was decommissioned in 2016, a lifetime of only 22 years, it contributed to the grid for roughly one hour. For about 10 billion dollars. The table below gives a general timeline of the main events but yeah it was a spectacular failure.

How does the book propose we avoid these spectacular failures? The key issue with these

The easiest, most straightforward way to create a great product or service is to make something you want to use. That lets you design what you know—and you’ll figure out immediately whether or not what you’re making is any good.

That’s a quote from Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson.

when Henry Ford introduced the assembly line in 1913, workers simply walked out. One of Ford’s biographers wrote, “So great was labor’s distaste for the new machine system that toward the close of 1913 every time the company wanted to add 100 men to its factory personnel, it was necessary to hire 963.” https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/shop-class-as-soulcraft

When I think of the assembly line and the supposedly better working conditions brought in by Ford, I think surely workers would have been clamouring to get these well paying well treated jobs. But the opposite must have been the case where they had to hire nearly 10x the number of men for the number of positions that were to be filled.

I’ve read the article this is from but not yet the book that was inspired by the article. The basic premise is how work evolved from a craft, as something to be proud of and based on skill, to assembly line based where no real skill was required.

The article also lays out how this new assembly line work gave rise to debt. Likely used by employers to hook the employees on regular payments too.

The habituation of workers to the assembly line was thus perhaps made easier by another innovation of the early twentieth century: consumer debt. As Jackson Lears has shown in a recent article, through the installment plan, previously unthinkable acquisitions became thinkable, and more than thinkable: it became normal to carry debt. The display of a new car bought on installment

How to write better for software engineers.

https://eugeneyan.com/writing/writing-docs-why-what-how/ There’s three questions any document you’re writing should answer - why it is important; what a good outcome is and how to measure it; and how to achieve the why and what. There’s examples of the three types of documents the author wrote while working at Amazon - one pagers; design docs; after action reviews.