Comment by jmcmahon443 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmcmahon443 | Hacker News Reader

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It's tough to say for sure, it depends heavily on the project and the company and people building it.

My estimate though is that proper use of BIM (not just design & engineering, but also accounting and time management... 5D) would save anywhere between 40-70% on their projects.

So, why isn't it happening? Because the construction industry is always the last industry to adopt new technologies. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" is the mentality. Also, if you're 40-65 years old and been building forever, it's not so fun to listen to 25-30 year olds tell you what's what. But that's what needs to happen.

The older guys in firms don't listen (the ones that do save a bunch of money...), and so the young talented people leave for better industries like software engineering, where they are actually respected and valued.

We are started to see SOME private companies, like Suffolk, really adopting new stuff. The big guys like Turner and AECOM are trying to adopt, but like I said earlier, their technology infrastructure is a JOKE! Try writing BIM automation scripts when your network admin won't even let you have root access. What a sad, sad joke it is.

Am i understanding this right: i can build a building in half the price if i use BIM ?

Because if that's true, who cares about old companies - start a new company ,raise money(there's plenty for good opportunities ), train some people, and start offering everybody 30%-40% discount on their building. You'd kill the market and make ton of money , right ?

Then try to get a bid approved as a newcomer. With all of the language in the bids, you'll never get a contract unless you've done a lot of these over cost, underperforming jobs and greased enough hands along the way. If you ever want to get a good dose of anger, read some government requests for bids. They're totally geared towards existing large companies.

I thought GP was speaking about the construction industry in general, not just government work?

This is very true. Which is why I think this sort of BIM automation needs to spawn from a large AEC company, or from a startup partnered with a large company.

We are basically talking about applying AI cost functions to the AEC industry (optimize design, time, cost).

As always, it depends.

If you're building a cookie-cutter high rise residential building, it's kind of well known and easy. The price has already been reduced to about where it is going to be. Typical floors mean typical documentation.

However, as soon as you start talking about complex building structures and services, BIM easily pays itself off. Think automated finite element analysis. The key is to plan far ahead of time, and design far ahead of time. There is no automation today, it is all done by hand. But I believe someday, BIM automation will dominant the market.

A few architects out there use procedurally generated shapes for architecture. A few engineers out there use AutoCAD plugins to streamline engineering services. BIM automation is already on the way...

I should add - BIM automation is HUGE market opportunity right now.

For example, if the architect can design the building, then the engineering optimization is automated (plumbing is well-understood...), and the accounting, BOMs, and fabrication documentation are all automated. This idea removes the time-consuming and pointless conversations between architects, engineers, and the construction team.

This is the potential of BIM that I see.

...their technology infrastructure is a JOKE! Try writing BIM automation scripts when your network admin won't even let you have root access.

You aren't suggesting that such root access would be any less of a joke? Maybe it's just me, but deploying scripts should be authorized for one or more separate roles, none of which are "root" or managed by the network guy.

Network admins in big companies seem to exist to make everyone else's work harder or impossible to get done. Security doesn't need to mean limiting those "idiot users" to set of operations pre-approved by sysadmins to not be able to damage anything (which also means not being able to do anything).

It's a similar problem to why people keep using Excel instead of expensive database products - because the latter are too constrained and inflexible and not really up to handling the actual work that needs to be done.

I am not a security expert, nor is my perspective all-encompassing. But from what I could see, architects didn't have good enough computers, engineers didn't have basic resources needed for automation (let's talk about the future here), and a whole lot of time was being wasted in meetings and politics.

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