Becoming the greater fool

If you have read a few entries in the blog before, you know already that I am a strong opponent of the positive psychology and the famous idiom "Where there's a will, there is a way", because it negates obvious material implications and ignores certain aspects of basic economy such as that there might be a way, but it could not be worth it.

I bring this up today because yesterday evening Karen and I caught on YouTube the videos from an old TV series called "Restoration Home" about families trying their hand at restoring old English great houses for their own use and, as you can imagine, the projects derailed in every possible way. Please, do not get me wrong: most of the buildings were beautiful in their heyday and most likely worth saving from the point of view of cultural preservation, but it is obvious that such an enterprise is going to be troublesome from the very beginning.

Photo: Alex Proimos

If we think about it, each and every family was playing the greater fool in their own operation: the building had been abandoned or at least severely neglected for years and in all that time the owners did not consider it economically viable to keep the house running, but also were not able to find someone else to do it in their stead. In summary, no one in their right mind would attempt such a renovation because it would be just too costly. And yet, all these families consider that they are going to be able to succeed where everybody else failed or even decided not to start.

One can only wonder how these endeavors come about, because some of these people are absolutely unprepared for the job they are facing: from the footage one can easily infer that they had not even gone through the building before buying it, finding to their surprise that a passable facade hides a crumbling structure. The program shows multiple examples of Hofstadter's Law, that projects always take longer than planned, even when accounting for Hofstadter's Law itself, but luckily most of these families are either well-off (so they do not have a problem to spend a significantly bigger sum that they anticipated) or really hardy (so they are OK with living in sub-standard accommodation while the construction is finished).

Planning problems are also common in space instrumentation, and most of the causes for these problems are well documented, but avoiding them requires a strong management because it relies on a work culture which is more labor intensive than the path of least resistance, so unless it is enforced the project will fail to meed the deadlines. I have personally made some of these mistakes and I am sure I will again in the future, so here goes a word of caution.

Starting Monday I will be taking part on a new project which, luckily, is still in the early stages of development. Being the software manager I will have to deal with all these problems directly and almost on a daily basis, so I can only hope I will be able to learn from my own lessons. At home life has made me already aware of them, so 50% is already covered.

Tomorrow I will be writing from 2021, so Happy New Year to you all, and let us hope that we manage to reclaim some of the normalcy in our lives. Enjoy the evening!