Lots of insights on lean engineering in this interview to Elon Musk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw
3. Whatever requirement or constraint you have, it must come with a name, not a department. Because you can't ask the departments, you have to ask a person
[...] otherwise you could have a requirement that basically an intern 2 years ago randomly came up with off the cuff... and they're not even at the company any more... but it came from the, let's say, Air Flow Department!
4 Only the third step is to simplify or optimize [he seems to be off-by-1].
Possibly the most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize the thing that should not exist. Everyone has been trained in school that you gotta answer the question -
convergent logic. So you can't tell a professor "your question is dumb" - you'll get a bad grade!
So everyone basically - without knowing it - they got a mental straight-jacket on: they'll work on optimizing the thing that should simply not exist!
4b. Accelerate cycle time: you're moving too slowly. Go faster!
But don't go faster until you worked on the other three things first!
If you're digging in your grave, don't dig it faster. Stop digging your grave!
So... but... it's... you can always make me ...$?#@... faster!
[he literally said that last sentence too fast for it to be discernible! 😂]
5. And then the final step is Automate.
Now, I have personally made the mistake of going backwards on all 5 steps [...] Yes, multiple times, on Model 3.
That is: I automated, accelerated, simplified, and then deleted. [but did he forget to question the requirements after deleting the part?]
This starts at 22:00 into the interview, and it's worth listening to even with the incessant beeping of the construction cranes in the background.
@tsturm @codewiz We thought they were hard because the space agencies and the defense contractors they were providing welfare to had an interest in making it look hard so that people wouldn’t realize how slowly they were moving and how they were mostly flushing even their relatively meager budgets down the toilet.
@freakazoid @tsturm I have to admit: I had never heard of DC-X before.
@codewiz When they inspect the giant grid fin is one of my favorite parts.
Workers in hard hats dragging a giant fin across the yard with that huge booster looming in the background, loud banging noised emitting from somewhere inside of the rocket, the boss giving an unfiltered interview right in front with his dog jumping around the place.
Compare that to any other rocket company. The difference is shocking.
@tsturm Yes! Talk is cheap, rockets are hard (or so we thought, until Elon made them so mundane).