This isn't alien technology, literally or metaphorically. The breakthrough here isn't in engineering at all — it's in corporate organization. See, most machines are broken because the organizations that make them are broken. As an engineer, I would estimate that at least 30% of the parts of any given... device exist only to correct for the design flaws in the other 70%. Works like this. Suppose I, an engineer, design a set of pipes and injectors to feed fuel to a combustion chamber at a consistent and controllable rate. Except in testing, there's some corner cases it doesn't handle well. Now, if you're an engineer, you understand this is normal. Nobody ever gets a design right the first time, unless it's so trivial that it's probably been done before. Your first design doesn't survive the wind tunnel, your first code doesn't compile right away, and if does, it segfaults. Your rockets blow up. And there's a flow problem with your fuel feed lines. It happens. Doesn't mean you're stupid. Means you didn't have enough information. But you have an even bigger problem. Middle management. Middle management is a special variety of hazmat suit, which is worn by the finance, sales, or market guys who run companies, so they don't have to touch the icky engineers. C-suite guys hate hate hate engineers, because it's a terrifying sensation to be dependent on someone you cannot understand, who doesn't appear to respect you much. (It does not occur to them that it is also extremely frustrating to have your work paid for, and thus controlled, by someone who cannot understand what you do, who doesn't appear to respect you much.) The primary role of middle management is talk to engineers so C-suite guys won't have to, and the primary qualification is to be a member of the right social class, and to hate engineers. This qualification is dressed up in secret handshake buzzwords like "management experience", as used in the sentence "I know you have been an engineer for twenty years and the other engineers all come to you for advice and leadership, but you don't have management experience, so I am going to hire my golfing buddy's 23 year old kid, who just graduated business school." So the fact that the fuel lines lines are not working quite right isn't your problem. That's part of the normal engineering process. Your problem is that your manager hates you and everything you stand for, and doesn't trust you or take your word for anything. He think his job is to keep you in line rather than help or empower you. So when you say "the fuel feed lines need to be redesigned", he says "we already spent six months and seventeen million dollars design the fuel feed system, we can't let you do it again." He thinks you are telling him seventeen million dollars worth of work needs to be thrown away and redone, and he cannot be told otherwise, because he cannot be told anything. So he says "you have two weeks and fifty thousand dollars to fix it". So you add another turbopump. What else can you do in two weeks? Now there's a new part. And if something goes wrong with that, another new part will be added to fix it. Because the company's actual priority isn't what you are responsible for — the design. It's what middle management is responsible for — the schedule and the budget. You have to play the villain so they can play the hero. What middle management doesn't understand, is paid to not understand, is what engineering actually is. Engineering is the process of making mistakes until you run out of mistakes to make. So when you spend six months and seventeen million dollars, and ended up with a design that doesn't quite work right in all cases, you weren't throwing away money, you were burning through mistakes. You've gotten a lot of them out of the way and won't make them again. But you have to get rid of some more before the design is actually right and doesn't require extra parts. The work of engineering isn't making the thing. It's teaching yourself to make the thing. Once you've done that, you can make the thing with minimal effort and time, because you know how to make the thing. C-suite financiers would hate this idea if they understood it. Why? Because it's unpredictable. Financiers like safe investments that make money. Not knowing how long something will take or how much it will cost is terrifying to them. So they train engineers to lie to them, by hiring a middle managers who try to force them to lie, and just interpret every guess as a promise if engineers still refuse to do so. But lying to yourself doesn't make the truth go away. The truth is that engineering projects take as long as they take, and cost as much as they cost. And that no one knows how long or how much they will be, because no one knows how many mistakes are waiting to be made, until they actually make them. The only thing you thing you can do about this is hire really good engineers, who catch more of their mistakes on the white board, leaving fewer to be caught in the wind tunnel, and this makes engineering faster... but it doesn't make engineering more predictable. Gantt charts are nothing but a collection of lies that corporations have taught themselves to tell themselves, lies that middle managers try to make true by enforcing them as promises. The ultimate reason that machines are 30% unnecessary parts is that the corporations that build them are 30% unnecessary people. This is what's different about Elon Musk. It's not that he's a better engineer. It's that he's a better manager. He understands engineers and engineering, and he doesn't hate them because he is one. He understood all along that green-field design is full of unknown-unknowns, and that there is absolutely no number-crunching, pie-chart, MBA magic that can eliminate this risk... it can only be hidden from view. The critical understanding is in the video clip below, where he says that SpaceX only had a 10% chance of success. You cannot say something like that unless you get it. And when you get it, you are free. Free from artificial anxiety about schedules and budgets. Anxiety about schedules and budgets is based on the delusion of control. Managers can't make a project finish "on time". They never could. The only power they have is the power to screw it up. The fate of a project is already written in the unknown unknowns before it ever starts. And the best, the absolute best, an engineering team can ever do, under any circumstances, is to confront those unknowns with clear-eyed honesty, and a willingness to adapt. Well, when you say to yourself, "This project has a 10% chance of succeeding", you've already confronted the pain of those admissions, which means you have already conquered the fear. The fear that makes you try to treat a prediction as a promise. The fear that makes you insert an extra turbopump, when what you really need to do is get busy redesigning the pipes, even though you have no idea how long it will take or much it will cost. Even when your rockets blow up. The SpaceX Raptor engine isn't just, or even primarily, a triumph of engineering smarts. It's a triumph of character. It's about an entire team with virtues MBAs lack: self-awareness, persistence, courage, humility, and, ultimately, hope. Because that's what it takes to pursue the best design, the RIGHT design, not even knowing if it exists to be found, much less whether you'll find it before you run out of money. Great things are not accomplished by middle managers with spreadsheets and Gantt charts. They are accomplished by teams of experts with passion and vision. Who are willing to risk failure so they can succeed. So what's the point in me saying all this? Am I just writing a puff piece on SpaceX and the Raptor engine? No. The point is that this is not special, one-off, magic alien technology. It's the systematic result of a correct understanding of engineering. Which means that EVERY COMPANY CAN BE LIKE THIS. If the people who control the purse strings are willing to learn from this example, and stop managing with spreadsheets and fear.show more

Devon Eriksen

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