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2026-01-07
2026-01-07 06:41:??
[!quote] The Shadow of the Torturer, Chapter 17: "The Challenge" No intellect is needed to see those figures who wait beyond the void of death--- every child is aware of them, blazing with glories dark or bright, wrapped in authority older than the universe. They are the stuff of our earliest dreams, as of our dying visions. Rightly we feel our lives guided by them, and rightly too we feel how little we matter to them, the builders of the unimaginable, the fighters of wars beyond the totality of existence.
The difficulty lies in learning that we ourselves encompass forces equally great. We say, "I will," and "I will not," and imagine ourselves (though we obey the orders of some prosaic person every day) our own masters, when the truth is that our masters are sleeping. One wakes within us and we are ridden like beasts, though the rider is but some hitherto unguessed part of ourselves.
2026-01-07 10:03:??
At Ace, "residential" always meant single-family/duplex construction, but I think now we were the outliers.
2026-01-07 10:05:??
I have---for some time now--- been trying to figure out the purpose of the non-system breakdowns.
Perhaps there is another dichotomy in that an estimator may use the area classifications of the design or according to their own understanding of each term. For lack of a better example, whether a "101 - KITCHEN", without provisions for cooking, would be broken down under "Kitchen".
2026-01-07 10:42:??
When I got to work today Art admonished a fellow estimator for not uploading all of a project's drawings, even those they did not intend to take off, to Trimble Connect. Art suggested that the estimator should upload all the drawings, but only add them to LiveCount as needed.
I take issue with the suggestion on principle since doing so would not benefit the estimator or their senior (if they aren't added, the estimator can do nothing with them), but would require not-insignificant effort. Effort that would ultimately benefit no one:---
Trimble Connect's ham-fisted approach to version control means that the fewer times it must be used, the better.
I'm currently dealing with the headache of an estimate where such caution was not applied.
The probability that any construction will be performed according the drawings that we take off (or even their immediate successors) I suspect is slim to zero. That Ops would have the patience to add the revisions, fighting with Trimble Connect as they would be, I suspect is even less.
On my current project, after trying in vain to play by Trimble's rules, I started by deleting all the drawings I could (those without takeoff associated with them) then reuploaded the revised set. I'm confident that this would be the dominant strategy.
It's curious to me that the possibility of scope revisions doesn't seem to be at the front of every estimator's mind when doing takeoff or considering process changes, like it was for my mentors and peers at Ace.
2026-01-07 12:13:??
#occupational #topic/estimating #topic/organization
Just now Jorge admonished another peer for using insulated wire for pool bonding, his rational was flawed beyond saving (something about the difference between bonding and grounding), but stemmed from a frustratingly common misunderstanding that our Accubid assemblies are intended to be an accurate list of the material to be installed.
They are not. If they were intended to be accurate, there would need to be several times as many. They are a compromise between accuracy and estimator effort. It should be assumed that for common scope, at least one assembly should be acceptable as-is.
Pool bonding is required for at least a quarter of our jobs. We have no bonding assemblies with bare wire. Therefore it must be assumed that it was determined that it would be acceptable to represent bare wire bonding with insulated wire items, because otherwise it would be necessary to have double the assemblies, or to expect estimators to substitute each size of wire everywhere bare was necessary.
See realism-vs-instrumentalism.
2026-01-07 16:03:??
#occupational #topic/estimating #topic/organization
There is a palpable animosity for pdi-estimating#Bid Estimating in pdi-estimating#Construction Estimating (ConEst), stemming---I believe---from an lack of buy-in on Bid's part. Their lack is easily explained by their estimating-culture#Incentives: Since throughput is systematically prioritized over accuracy, ConEst has a strictly antagonistic role because it slows down the bid process.