Political legitimacy, signed off by popular referendum.
When you look north to our German neighbors, with a comparable work ethos and certainly a fair understanding of engineering you see projects go south again and again. Be it Stuttgart 21 (the new train station), or that horrible mess that is the airport Berlin Brandenburg.
Such projects usually require popular support via referendum in Switzerland. That means that if it is voted through this implies that the necessary capital investments are spoken for and that the project is legitimized via public support.
This also means that if the government changes they can't just massage budget positions and siphon funds of such projects for political expedience, or other reasons.
Legitimacy also avoids public resistance against the projects as it happened in Stuttgart and which almost killed the project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuttgart_21#Debate_and_opposi...).
That's not to say that all big projects in Switzerland work like a charm. But political legimacy and honest budgeting that comes with it seem major factors that such projects are succesful more often than not.
> Political legitimacy, signed off by popular referendum.
Yes, that helps them, a lot. However, that is effect. The root cause of political legitimacy is deeply ingrained in their culture, and it is compromise and consensus seeking, even when divided on an issue. That was a very humbling and instructive experience.
So here's the thing to understand about Swiss government: It never changes. Well at least its executive branch doesn't. Bear with me for a moment.
Swiss government (federal, cantonal and communal) differs from the American model in three ways:
* Power is not concentrated in a single person, but a council (e.g. 7 members on federal level). Decisions (as far as they can go before involving parliament) are made by secret votes inside the council and carried through as a single entity. Council members are supposed to never publicly talk about their individual opinions, only what the council represents as a whole. They're not supposed to be politicians anymore, they're acting much more like a board of directors.
* There's no such thing as a government / opposition split in Switzerland. In theory it could happen, but it never plays out this way. Instead, the four largest parties present their council candidates to the national assembly, who then vote for them one after the other. If a candidate doesn't please them the opposing parties form coalitions to vote in a counter candidate from the same party. That's the most spectacle we get. So even a socialist will vote for conservative council members - because the conservative party will do the same in return. It's a political truce that works like this since 67 years [1].
* Council members, while not immune to being 'deelected', in practise tend to stay in office for as long as they want. While there is an election cycle it doesn't really matter the way it plays out.
All of this together creates tremendous stability in the Swiss political system. The main instability comes from people's initiatives, which I tend to see as a good thing, since that at least reflects the viewpoint of the majority.
Really, sometimes I wonder how they came up with such a well oiled system in 1848. Maybe it helped being able to learn from the first gen. modern Republics and their mistakes (USA and France).
On a cantonal level there is (among others) a "finance referendum". This may be mandatory or optional depending on the canton. Optional means the project is only actually put to a referendum if an eligible group demands it. An eligible group may be a political party, a certain number of voters, certain interest groups, etc.
For example in the Canton of Zürich there is an optional referendum on decisions of the Cantonal Council on new non-recurrent expenditure of more than 6 million francs or new recurrent annual expenditures of more than 600'000 francs. To actually put such a decision to a referendum requires either 3000 voters (public referendum), 12 municipalities, the city of Zürich or the city of Winterthur (municipal referendum), or 45 Cantonal Council members (cantonal referendum).
On a federal level there is no "finance referendum". It has been proposed, but most political parties are against it since it could hinder the Federal Council in its freedom of action and delay or even block important investments. But there's a mandatory referendum for all constitutional changes and certain other things like joining supranational communities etc. and a optional referendum for all federal laws and certain other things like international treaties etc. The optional referendum requires 50'000 voters (or eight cantons, but this only actually happened once).
"Switzerland's voting system is unique among modern democratic nations in that Switzerland practices direct democracy in parallel with representative democracy. That's why the Swiss system is called semi-direct democracy.[1] Direct democracy allows any citizen to challenge any law approved by the parliament or, at any time, propose a modification of the federal Constitution.
...
Approximately four times a year, voting occurs over various issues; these include both initiatives and referendums, where policies are directly voted on by people, and elections, where the populace votes for officials. "
The German Wikipedia says Swiss engineers were at fault (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hochrheinbrücke#Konstruktionsf...)
I'd be interested to see any breakdown of costs or schedule that show "planning" as being 50% of the the work.
What I think you mean is that the grandparent comment strikes you personally as not recognising the efforts of other engineers around the world, and you wish it did. I think that would be a less incendiary and aggressive way to get your point across, and, in most places, more likely to get a useful response.
Disrespect occurs with or without intent. The original poster's comment can only be construed in one way: the Swiss do things this way, it is better, and therefore everybody else does it wrong. The claim (50% spent on planning) is clearly and demonstrably wrong. As someone who works in the tunneling industry I take personal offense to the implication that we (Americans, British, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, everyone not Swiss) don't "invest the time up-front in planning and thinking" before we "set the machinery in motion" and that we have a work methodology that isn't "oriented towards reaping long term profits with interest".
That is correct, in my experience the Swiss way is the best way, and I have yet to work in another country (and I'm international) where they do it better or with more planning and forethought. The only other mentality which comes close to that is that of Japanese. This is obviously anecdotal, but to me it is perfectly understandable why the Swiss managed to do it within time and budget constraints. Everywhere else I've worked, and what I've seen, it was not as good.
I've put the Swiss saying that planning is 50% of the work to the test, and have had great results with it. Again this is anecdotal, but to me, it confirms that their way of thinking is correct, and I appreciate it.
By the way, the article in German mentions multiple times that certain challenges which were met were expected because they were identified during the planning and preparation stage.
Most people aren't judged by effort. They're judged by results.
Another way of putting it: the proof of the engineering is in the working.
Correct.
> Most people aren't judged by effort. They're judged by results.
Again, correct. And they deliver results, consistently.
The only place where they don't is team sports, but again that has a logical reason behind it, which is that they are very private and individual people, everyone for themselves (not that they don't try, it just doesn't work out). But when it comes to planning, they could very well teach others how it's done, because they excel at it. There is something to learn from every nation, planning and organization is one thing that one can learn from the Swiss.
Simply looking at an isolated example of a project that was on schedule and under budget (for varying definitions of schedule and budget, but that's how it goes in construction - the Seattle SR 99 replacement tunnel project along with the Seawall replacement is currently "on schedule" if you believe the management of those projects) does not provide the data to back up the poster's statement. Without the data we cannot adequately make the determination if the "Swiss system" described by the poster is better than any other system.
There is a saying in the poker community: don't be results oriented.
Understand what I mean when I say "like poker": the poker mindset is a very analytical, statistically oriented approach. The best players never make a bet/call/fold without some form of logical basis for their plays. They have an internal model that tells them "this play will succeed 50% of the time and I stand to win 3x my risked value and so it is profitable". Similarly in engineering, no decision should be made without an internal model where risk can be evaluated - "this structure will fail 5% of the time and kill somebody but it costs $10,000,000 to get more out of it and so it is not profitable".
Engineering - especially tunneling - is a gamble. You cannot design away every risk. All we can do is show up with our belts and suspenders on and hope our pants don't fall down when we're running out of the hole.
Everything else you described about risk is not unique to poker. In engineering, particularly major projects with real safety concerns, it's risk analysis. This component has a 4% chance of failing in this way, so add redundancy to mitigate it. Put in 10 sensors instead of 4, and require a consensus algorithm to reduce the risks from sensor failure or misreporting.
In engineering we do gamble, on a lot of things. But it's not a pure gamble, we aren't just throwing dice. We plan, prepare, rehearse, and execute.
And a bit of a nitpick, but we are just throwing dice. The entire idea of a safety factor is an abstraction to get away from statistics which is why it has been almost completely replaced in structural engineering with LRFD which is based on statistical analyses of component/system failures.
I'm a civil engineer, and I do structural design work for a living.
If you're not trolling and you do mean what you've been saying, you're being very disingenuous and in the process proving to be true and perfectly valid all comments regarding the virtues of the swiss system in contrast with the typical engineering work around the world, the one you so vocally identify yourself with.
Engineering is not poker. It never was. Only bad engineering is like poker, and it shows in their work. You're confusing basic aspects of reliability analysis (the "this structure will fail 5% of the time" comment) with being poker. European structural design standards dictate that the lower failure probability of an engineering work, for its entire design working life, is around 0,05%. This is not poker.
As you've mentioned, the design process is centered on risk analysis and balances the economic impact of safeguarding against risk scenarios, but this is entirely immaterial for the discussion. The discussion is about planning, and the lack thereof. All projects are planned to an extent, but the point is that planning is often insufficient in the sense that important variables are left unknown until breaking ground for any number of reasons, one of which is this mentality that its unacceptable to spend much on risk assessment ("why spend money on non-destructive tests to infer the geotechnical profile and properties of each stratum in the preliminary design stage if we're boring a hole in there and eventually we'll reach that point ourselves?").
Unknowingly or not, you've supported this observation throughout all this discussion by arguing in favor of the virtues of handling a civil engineer project like "poker", and tolerating and accepting the occurrence of surprises associated with unacceptably high risk probabilities that go way up to 5%. This is precisely the problem everyone is pointing out and you've tried to deny but ended up supporting. This is the sole responsible for the typical cost overruns in civil engineering projects, and you inadvertently demonstrated why sadly this still rings true up to this day.
And for that kind of thinking alone, I upvote this comment of yours. Kudos and respect to you.
As others I found you somewhat incendiary but I am still surprised by the massive downvoting you seem to have experienced :-/
But never any plan, never any specification, never anything except maybe a lonely Powerpoint presentation promising castles in the sky. Process? No process, that takes too long. And if there anything resembling a process, it's never formally documented, never enforced, and as soon as the next crisis breaks out, purposely disregarded. "Capability maturity model? Yeah, no, we obviously have no time for that..."
It's been both frustrating and fascinating watching it all these years: always panic, always guerilla style work mode, always no plan whatsoever, always pandemonium, always chaos. Completely the opposite of the Swiss or the Japanese. Different companies, different people, but with the English always the same modus operandi. And then they say that stereotypes are bad and not true at all. I guess at least I appreciate that they are consistent in being chaotic and disorganized (;-))