Engineering Pornography (2002)
Programmers occasionally have envy that civil engineering is "real engineering", e.g. civil engineers know how to build a bridge and deliver it on time.  Whereas software engineers will come up with 1000 ways to build the bridge, 10 of which work, and take 10x longer to build it.  This article seems like a good counterexample.<p>Like most failures, this is a systems failure.  Someone engineered the hell out of that cable.  But they neglected to realize that it would be drawn through a steel pipe.<p>"So, what went wrong? Varying load conditions in the three legs of the 3-phase circuit caused tremendously strong and dynamic magnetic field changes. The electromagnetic forces between the three conductors and the steel pipe (gack!) cause the conduit to wiggle around inside the pipe."<p>The other lesson is that you shouldn't hyper-optimize locally, and instead design for maintainability.  I'm not sure what they were thinking when laying a cable that requires experts to be flown in from the east coast to repair.  The simplest mechanisms are the ones that are the most easily repaired.  The entire article goes on in great length about how awe-inspiring the engineering of this cable is, whereas I just see a bunch of complexity that probably didn't need to be there.  The 118 layers of paper tape, and the oil pumps, and so forth.  Surely there was a simpler solution.  I'm sure after this failure and the ones on the east coast, they are not still laying cables like this.