The right tool, for the right job.

If you watch an expert arborist (tree man) at work, you’ll notice that they’ve removed every single safety guard from their chainsaws.

Every now and then, there’s a nasty accident, but most of them respect their tools, and just make a lot of money (which you’ll understand, if you’ve ever hired one).

Same goes for pretty much any vocation.

That said, manufacturers have learned that there’s a lot of money to be made, selling professional tools, to insecure fools with money.

There’s a big ego hit, in LARPing a highly-experienced engineer, when you’re not one, yourself.

> If you watch an expert arborist (tree man) at work, you’ll notice that they’ve removed every single safety guard from their chainsaws.

You can say that about everything that has some form of guardrails. It goes faster without them. That doesn't necessarily mean it's the right decision to remove them. People tend to change their minds after they have an accident, which to me is an indication that they can't seem to properly assess the risk and the outcome beforehand.

This is a really bad take. Professional arborists don’t “rip every guard off their saws”, there aren’t even that many guards to begin with, and the ones that exist (chain brake, hand guard, throttle lock) don’t slow anyone down. They’re there so you don’t bleed out in a tree.

The “LARPing” angle makes even less sense. What’s the software equivalent, saying that keeping engineers out of direct prod access is just an ego hit? That’s not LARPing, that’s risk management. Same way arborists keep the guards on because downtime from losing a hand costs more than any pretend efficiency.

Bad tools don’t make you a pro, and pretending guardrails are just for “fools with money” is an incredibly bad take. It’s like those YouTube get rich folks that never mention how much of the success is luck.

> Every now and then, there’s a nasty accident...

That may just be they aren't very good at risk assessment. Nasty accidents with a chainsaw are in a different league of damage for the person involved compared to, eg, accidentally deleting a database or upsetting a manager. A software engineer is all but guaranteed to walk away from deleting a DB with their limbs intact. Even if their manager gets really angry a dev is almost certainly going to survive the encounter.

>If you watch an expert arborist (tree man) at work, you’ll notice that they’ve removed every single safety guard from their chainsaws.

What are you actually talking about here? Tree surgeons may remove some of them some of the time, but all of them would either kill them, get them fired, or both.

Here is an old quote to put into perspective:

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/06/06/old-bold/

It isn't experts who remove it. It is professionals whothink they know. I've been trained on chainsaws by USFS experts - they used the safety gear and demonstraighted that used correctly things work just as fast. In fact they were often faster than the professionals who thought they were faster - because the planning and communication steps (6 steps) often saved more time than was gained by jumping in)

safety gear doesn't cost much time to put on. Checking the safety gear also finds not safety things wrong with it.

In my experience it's the other way around. It's typically the bottom of the barrel contractors who sabotage their own (and others) safety for a quick buck.

The same way a senior engineer is more likely to use version control, backups and automated testing rather than YOLOing vibe coded applications to prod.

The old saying "they've forgotten more about X than you'll ever know" is very true. A professional quite often has forgotten what it was like to be a beginnner, making them both very knowledgeable about a topic but also very likely to give dangerous advice to a beginner.

Although I've never worked as an arborist, I supervise the installation of high voltage equipment for a living. I work with all kinds of contractors. Our equipment weighs tens of tonnes.

If I would see somebody removing the guardrails from their tools, I would send them off site immediately. There will be no nasty accidents.

Although, loggers have specialized vehicles (harvesters and whatnot) that look more like construction vehicles with giant saws and grabbers on the front.

I think there’s something interesting in the pick of arborist (somebody specialized in coming in and dealing with troublesome trees) vs some kind of logger (specialized in the at-scale harvesting of trees). I bet there’s more room for modified consumer gear in the previous case, because the whole job is to figure out weird situations (like taking down or cleaning up a too-big tree in somebody’s back yard with poor access and lots of things you don’t want to hit) that might preclude the use of the ideal equipment.

But, it isn’t obvious to me which is more like software engineering. Ideally, the software company is a cultivated environment optimized for productivity, more like a logging forest. Part of the engineer’s job is to help cultivate the nice orderly rows of correct-sized trees so that they can just rip through them at scale, right? Maybe the arborist is more like some high-end consultant that you hire when things go wrong.

I wouldn't call myself an expert arborist, but I cut the firewood that provides all my heat in the winter. The safety features (mainly the goofy guard they put on the end of the bar) are good if you're a homeowner cutting some shrubs a couple times a year, but you have to take that off to drop a tree or cut pieces wider than your bar, so they aren't practical for serious work.

Fortunately, a chainsaw isn't a very dangerous tool, since it stops as soon as you release the trigger. The danger in dropping trees is from the tree itself: having one fall the wrong way or crack loose at the base before you expect it. I don't drop anything large when I'm working by myself, for that reason. I've been mildly injured by some surprisingly small trees, when something happened to bounce where I wasn't expecting.

> There’s a big ego hit, in LARPing a highly-experienced engineer, when you’re not one, yourself.

There's a big ego hit in punching up, down, and sideways, and it's far too popular among engineers these days.

I wish that engineers overall were more humble with each other, but it's not going to change quickly. And regrettably it is the human condition. Humility is also unprofitable.

Having grown up in a rural environment and nearly having my own catastrophic accident while using a circular saw with all of its safety features intact and myself being in an alert and mindful state, I can only describe the scenario you've outlined as, "typical idiot-class behavior".

You see this kind of stuff amongst the petty-criminal working class who chain smoke and binge drink and steal tools off the work site and complain about never being able to get ahead. I've had numerous uncles and neighbors who have life-long debilitating injuries because they showed up to work drunk and fell of a ladder or dropped a running chainsaw on their foot. Every single one of them thought they were a bad ass who "knew what they were doing".

My own accident occurred because I was over-using the tool. I did not have the best tool for the job. The tool was generally appropriate, but I also didn't have the best work space set up for it. The work space wasn't uncomfortable, but I didn't give myself room for error. I thought I had all of the safety features in place and was "being extra careful" while I used it at an awkward angle. Then, halfway through the cut, I noticed the off-cut drooping and knew it was going to damage the piece I was cutting if it dropped too far. I reached to support the droop with my off-hand, which given my angle meant I had to cross under my arm pushing the tool. In a moment I still don't completely understand, the path I sent my hand on did not go directly towards my armpit as I knew I would need to do to keep clear of the tool and instead went under the saw directly. I ended up touching the running saw blade sticking out of the bottom of the piece I was cutting.

A half-dozen different things could have been done differently to avoid the mistake, any one of which is not all that dangerous in isolation, but combined created an incredibly narrow error envelope.

What I didn't consider is that "being extra careful" can change in an instant. One little bump in balance, one little fleeting distraction, one little change of thought as you are mid-task and don't immediately stop to re-evaluate and you blow right on out of your after envelope.

Luckily, I only cut the tips of two fingers. I was able to get them stitched up and they have healed almost completely (there is some thick scar tissue right where my fingers hit keys in my keyboard that serves as a daily reminder).

You don't see this behavior amongst the professionals in the trades who successfully build their businesses from the ground up. Professionals over design their safety envelope. And they still occasionally get hurt. Just not as catastrophicly so.

> If you watch an expert arborist (tree man) at work, you’ll notice that they’ve removed every single safety guard from their chainsaws.

I've never seen an expert arborist remove any safety feature from a chainsaw and they'd be off site in a heartbeat if they did.

You're imagining a scenario to support your opinion, no basis in fact.

In Argentina, a well known case (well known within the industry) of fatal radioactive poisoning from an experimental nuclear reactor happened because an extremely experienced and well regarded operator was used to disabling safety measures of the reactor to speed things up. After all, he understood it perfectly and knew what was and wasn't actually safe to do.

Until he made a mistake, got a dose of radiation (he may have splashed himself with water, actually), and he instantly knew he was dead. And he was, within days, if my memory serves.

Experts make the dumbest mistakes because they are sure safety doesn't apply to them, because they know better.

And what do their insurance companies think about this?

And if they cut their hands off as an independent worker, the only person who gets hurt will be themselves.

But I bet if they start a business and have employees they will have rules against removing safeties and fire anyone who gets caught because now they have to worry about insurance premiums, lawsuits, and their business going under.

race car drivers are the exact opposite of what you are describing and they compete in a sport where every gram matters.