[0] Was Starship’s Stage Zero a Bad Pad? https://practical.engineering/blog/2023/6/16/w47wdfg7h5uojks...
> Unlike NASA that spends years in planning and engineering, SpaceX uses rapid development cycles and full-scale tests to work toward their eventual goals. They push their hardware to the limit to learn as much as possible, and we get to follow along. They’re betting it will pay off to develop fast instead of carefully. But this wasn’t just a test of the hardware. It was also a test of federal regulations and the good graces of the people who live, work, play, and care about the Boca Chica area. And, SpaceX definitely pushed those limits as well with their first orbital test. It’s still yet to be seen what they’ll learn from that.
Instead of engineering trying to buffer and fix weird management decisions, this just exposes them.
Elon strikes me as worse because he likes to think he understands what his engineers know.
Early on in my career I had a name for this. I called it "gamle helter" in Norwegian which roughly translates to "old heroes". An "old hero" is someone who used to be competent in a field, has stopped being competent, doesn't recognize this themselves and is now a nuisance to anyone who actually knows what they are doing, but can't pull rank. One way to become an old hero is typically to end up in management and not practice whatever discipline you think you understand.
To be fair, I highly doubt that Musk was ever a competent software engineer, much less a good engineering manager. He is a PR person. He sells an image that he is a technology person.
Since you linked Wikipedia, I'll quote it.
> Nevertheless, low performers' self-assessment is lower than that of high performers.
> Among laypeople, the Dunning–Kruger effect is often misunderstood as the claim that people with low intelligence are more confident in their knowledge and skills than people with high intelligence.
What I wanted to say is that if the state of the code is bad, it might make them care a bit more when their own state gets synchronized with that. Not necessarily about the code, but surely about the revenue and the looks.
Now, management being what it is, they of course will try to find a scapegoat. But that’s just part of the game and may be better than burning yourself out by trying to fix their nonsense.