Both are engineering and automation work actually, the only difference I see is the required initial capital to run an experiment in hardware vs software space and the marginal cost of distribution.

The smartest people who are stamping parts all day were the people who Ford promoted for higher positions to make the work more efficient. He wrote that most people were happy with the repeated work, but there were a few who were better as leaders or engineers.

Tesla’s growth curve is actually very similar to what Ford’s was at the start.

They aren't the same types of work. It's not a repeating protocol to create software so you can't optimise that protocol to get faster the way you would an industrial process.

It's managers treating software development like an assembly line that leads to waterfall, management Taylorism and other proven-to-fail concepts. You can optimise for innovation or you can optimise the speed of a repeatable assembly line but one business unit can't do both in the same framework because optimising speed requires reducing process flexibility and innovation requires increasing it.

What’s your opinion of what SpaceX is doing with the SN rockets? It’s clearly not waterfall, as SN11 was finished already when the SN10 exploded. SpaceX needs to do modifications to it though. At the same time Elon is working on the assemly line while innovating by running lots of experiments. What SpaceX is doing is clearly state of the art.

To tell you the truth I think waterfall model was not about getting the best manufacturing, but about the leaders not taking any risks and saving their own jobs.

You can certainly keep innovation on an assembly line, hence why I was very specific with my words about optimising the speed of an assembly line. Lean manufacturing for example prioritises innovating on the manufacturing process instead of using an assembly line and gets comparable speeds.

SpaceX is clearly an innovative company and I'm sure they're not using a Ford-style assembly line because that would make no sense for a quality-over-quantity product like a rocket.

By assembly line I specifically mean a Fordian assembly line where units move between stations manned by specialists in a single step of the process.

> By assembly line I specifically mean a Fordian assembly line where units move between stations manned by specialists in a single step of the process.

That was the result of lots of innovation that Ford did. And then all the car companies stopped innovating on it.

For example Ford started to use electric motors for each machine separately instead of having 1 big motor that tried to power all machines. He sped up the assembly line by 10x at least and measured all operarions carefully.

The assembly line you are talking about is the last process set in stone for 100 years instead of innovating further.

The analogy doesn't apply. If you want to judge software by metrics, judge the code, not developers. The code does the same thing, over and over. Auto workers did/do the same thing, overr and over. Developers don't.