Is it? I'm looking around my house right now and virtually everything is shoddy craftsmanship from people who were either being underpaid or just didn't give a shit. The cabinetry isn't level with the floor, the doors don't quite fit the door frame, there are paint stains on the outside of the 4th-floor windows, some of my GFCI outlets were installed with the wires connected upside down and my electricity is blowing fuses all the time, LED bulbs that are supposed to last years last weeks instead, my roof had exposed nails that eventually rotted through and created leaks.

Am I just supposed to build everything I own myself from scratch? I have a full-time job. I was also coming off three spine surgeries in the span of 16 months when I moved in and wasn't exactly in shape to build my own house.

Maybe you’d appreciate the global supply chain that’s been built out so workers can manufacture goods for a tenth of the price it would be domestically, so other people halfway around the world can complain about shoddy craftsmanship.

You have the option to purchase beautifully created hand crafted doors but then you’d probably complain about the prices being unreasonable. That’s always been the trade off hasn’t it.

Dude. My next door neighbor had his furnace installed upside down. The only reason the builder was able to sell that place at all is because the code inspector was 84 and, as far as we can tell, wasn't willing to walk up four flights of stairs to get to the furnace. Thankfully, the city agreed to pay to get it fixed. I had a nail through my plex piping behind a third-floor washer/dryer hookup. When it rusted out 8 months after moving in and my house flooded, the plumber he'd been seeing this all over the place. As far as the roofer who fixed my roof could tell, the contractor just stopped work before getting to the edges of the roof, failing to cover the edging nails.

This isn't a matter of commodity parts. As far as we can tell, the builder (who has been late on upwards of 80% of HOA payments, by the way) is simply a grifter who pissed off all the contractors working for him to the point they either did shit work on purpose, or just refused to finish and he brought in some random unqualified handyman to get as much as he could past overworked, too old, don't give a shit city inspectors.

And yeah, each individual homeowner could be smarter and know what to look for to find these signs when buying a house. Yet very few of us do. I don't have that kind of expertise on everything I might ever have to purchase, and again, was taking 30 mg of oxycodone a day for two years while still trying to work.

I'd be glad to believe this is some isolated incident, except ever since moving here, every contractor I've ever had out to fix anything has told me they keeping seeing this kind of fly-by-night, has no clue what they're doing builder popping up and hiring lowest bid subs and then running out of money to actually pay them, constantly seeing work stop and people walking off the job, to the point that the only people willing to do urban work are largely unqualified, low grade tradesmen. It's endemic to the industry right now, seemingly a result of so much free money floating out there that anyone with a hundred grand in capital and no experience doing anything remotely related is now qualified to buy a bunch of land and become a homebuilder.

I wouldn't complain at all that a well built home is unreasonably priced. The problem is, whether I'm willing or not, I don't have the means to buy a two million dollar home.

"Crap" is largely a function of consumer preference. Even with a Consumer Reports subscription, people will ignore red flags and buy a car that's fun or cheap.

A good craftsman should be able to tell you how well a house is constructed before purchase. Not that I'm saying that would have been easy to fit into your schedule.

Not necessarily, when everything is standardized and mass market it become nearly impossible to find options that don’t follow the “norms”. New housing developers have little incentive to do anything beyond look like their competitors, which as also bland and standard and not designed for actual living. People don’t have any other options due to the housing shortages.

It would seem that your home fell within the 90% of homes that are supposedly crap.

There is no such thing as building something yourself. When you make something, you use tools, materials and methods made by other people.

The most important part of building something that isn't crap is being able to recognize the crap in what you are considering for use. Then deciding if you can contain the crap, or find a less crappy alternative.

Well you can actually build something yourself. Sure, someone else built e.g. the code editor you‘re using, but if you come up with an algorithm yourself, you did, by definition, build it yourself.

If you create an algorithm, it is likely based on previous algorithms you learned, and millenia of mathametics.

To implement it in a computer, you likely rely on an operating system to run on, layers of userspace libraries, layers of firmware, many independent hardware components. An electrical supply.

There is such a thing as building by yourself. Otherwise you do end up with 90% crap, and there exist people which are annoyed by that.

Eg build systems without autotools, cmake or even more horrible bloatware (meson, bazel, conan, scons, nix, ...).

That's why e.g people ship header-only libs. That's why suckless exists. XML configs, YAML configs, SOAP, Java, ... oh my.

I think the point was, simply pointing out flaws is an activity that requires very little effort. A more laudable activity is to provide a better way or work toward making an improvement.

It worked for Ongo Gablogian!