There’s a guy in my tiktok feed who seems like a fairly serious person (late middle aged white dude presents on the internet as an aerospace engineer of some sort with decent credentials, sounds like all of that is true) who has made like five videos ripping on the idea of using agile methodologies in aerospace. He points out (and this rings extremely true to me) that there are huge differences between software engineering where the cost of errors is pretty small and relatively easy to fix and building space craft where errors are catastrophically expensive and take a long time to correct.
I’ll be honest a lot of what’s gone wrong with Elon’s non software companies (bad build quality on the cars for instance) could be explained by trying to shoehorn agile into physical engineering where it absolutely doesn’t make sense.
I’ll post the next video from that guy I see so you guys can take apart his credentials. I don’t care enough to check.
This dude was absolutely predicting that this launch was going to be a disaster for the company in some unforseen way before it actually happened… but that’s a prediction obvious enough and likely enough to engage with me that he gets zero actual credibility from it. I just really liked his explanation for why it would go wrong.
there is nothing in the agile methodology that lends itself to being more error prone. if anything, it’s less - stuff can slip past deliverable deadlines without issue more easily than a strict waterfall method. elon’s just a bad manager.
It’s how they iterate one step at a time I think. Basically he’s strongly advocating against faster moving iteration heavy models for designing rockets. Basically an old guy is advocating for the old school way of doing things.
Thing is a lot of people discount old stuff because it’s ‘outdated’ without taking into consideration why the old stuff used to be the best practice. If the project you’re working has parameters like an old school project there’s a good chance the way they used to do it was actually better for that project.
An example where I’m a LOT more comfortable debating this would be Just in Time Supply Chain which I’m a passionate hater of outside of the specific spaces where it was originated. MBA programs in my opinion do a great job of pushing ideas out way past where they stop making sense, so I’m pretty likely to buy an argument that someone has taken something trendy and applied it to something it’s a horrible fit for. I’ve seen it more or less continuously in one form or fashion my entire career lol.
The core problem is idiots like Elon not understanding at a first principles level why something like Agile is good and simply demanding that it be implemented because it’s a buzzword.
Full disclosure I have zero experience with agile methodologies lol. But I’ll fight anyone about JIT any time I don’t care. My opening line in that debate is “Are you in the apparel industry or an industry with extremely similar inventory characteristics?” And god help them if they answer no. The only right answer is “I am in apparel” lol. If they say no they get wrecked, and saying yes my industry is like apparel is a trap because no it isn’t.
Definitely, even SpaceX’s internal goal was for it to get far enough away from the launch pad that an explosion wouldn’t also destroy all the ground equipment.
Preach. My company got wrecked starting 2 years ago because all of our critical components were set up as JIT and then suppliers started just kind of shrugging and telling us “these parts are 104 week lead time now, sorry” making us scramble around throwing money at brokers and buying up stock to last us until these new lead times.
Can you guess what the first fucking thing our new MBA VP of Operations suggested we do to lower inventory values when he started with us last year?
Yeah it’s really stupid without the apparel industry specific conditions. Apparel goes out of style quickly which means the optimal strategy is to react insanely fast to changes in what’s selling and keeping inventory levels as low as they can get without selling out of your hot items somehow. Yeah there’s a reason that the apparel business is simultaneously very hard and very high margin. And that’s where JIT belongs, in that specific place. The closer you get to that specific situation (and lets be clear nothing like the apparel style situation happens anywhere else) the better JIT becomes. But it’s an extreme approach for extreme situations. It’s not for any normal company. Normal companies want to buy as much inventory as they can justify in exchange for a better deal on materials. The Goal was a good book about organizational design, but it’s big takeaway was to focus on your bottlenecks not to minimize inventory.
If you make fucking cars keep six months of parts on hand you dumb bastard. Warehouse space isn’t that expensive and until recently the money to finance that inventory was basically better than free. You probably made money on your inventory during the super high inflation era lol.
I swear the number of hot loads I’ve seen that had zero reason to be hot is wild. It’s like people don’t realize how much money you save shipping cheap/good instead of fast/good. Just the the trucking alone gets stupid. It’s how you end up paying 1700 bucks for a shipment that normally costs 1300. And that % doesn’t change all that much as you get longer, in fact if you fuck up and create a situation where you need to air freight something instead of using a semi you could be lighting five figures on fire.
All to show a smaller amount of inventory on your balance sheet and have less warehouse space. The inventory will eventually get turned into product you sell, the wasted freight spend is gone. I don’t get it and I never will.
It costs almost nothing to break software because fixing it is usually just a matter of rolling back a release. Physical things have longer lead times and escalating costs so going slower and validating things before actually building something makes more sense. It doesn’t mean Elon isn’t a bad manager…
there are a couple of irreversible processes in software, e.g. losing data, but they can be engineered around. that’s not the case for most other engineering.
imho, there’s nothing in agile that implies it cannot handle a very large project, but there’s nothing in agile that implies that it can either. good teams have a way of adapting whatever the current process is to what the teams need. like, there just isn’t a single right answer. it all depends on skills of those doing the work. many companies are much too agile, and don’t spend enough time planning and testing.
Musk hasn’t just weakened the company — he’s done so in a way that is personally and professionally embarrassing, betraying both a lack of understanding of Twitter and a total lack of business acumen.
“anyone who needs to pay people for exposure hasn’t succeeded with quality content” is patently untrue. exposure is weird - further complicated by constantly shifting recommendation algorithms - but there is a basic inflection point to exposure where it starts to grow naturally. before that point growth is extremely difficult. there are tons of examples of big content creators that created great content for years with very little views before catching a break or a trend and then caught fire.
theoretically, if you can boost your exposure and skip that torturous and arduous process of reaching the inflection point, it’d be money well spent. however, you do need good content once you reach that point to sustain and if your content is crap then paying that money is lighting it on fire.
I hear twitter blue holds a lot of value for porn content creators, which makes sense. outside stuff like that, and grifters, I don’t see why anyone would pay for it.
Good point about discoverability concerns. Elon’s definitely made it harder to do that though, now that he’s made Twitter Blue into a service that has a total stain on it and caused normies to be naturally inclined to scroll by blue checks they don’t follow.
Is “woke” a noun now? I thought “woke” was an adjective (“Woke professors are ruining higher education!”) and “wokeness” is the thing that’s very threatening and taking over everything.
Oh shit, I guess if “woke” goes to Florida to die like Meatball Ron always says, it’s a noun after all. They spent 30 years making “democrat” an adjective, I guess they’ve always had some confusion about these things.
