Being as optimistic as I can without being an idiot: it’s abundantly clear that they are still farting around with welding techniques, but in a complex project of this scale, somebody is always running behind schedule, and if it’s something new, then lots of people are (I worked on support software for the 787, and even among our cohort, my division was the only one that was only slightly behind schedule) and sometimes it’s enough for those people to be sort of scaffolding for everyone else.
If Conway’s Law has any flex in it, you bend the mandate of each group to shift some of their responsibilities to teams that are getting better results and eventually something ships. I suspect this is how they get anything done. It might even be their organizing principle, a sort of self organizing system.
The same might be true for SpaceX, I couldn’t say. What we do know is that they just accepted delivery of welding robots, and I don’t know if that was Plan A all along or they’ve given up on training people to consistently make a clean bead that’s 53 ft long.
If Conway’s Law has any flex in it, you bend the mandate of each group to shift some of their responsibilities to teams that are getting better results and eventually something ships. I suspect this is how they get anything done. It might even be their organizing principle, a sort of self organizing system.
The same might be true for SpaceX, I couldn’t say. What we do know is that they just accepted delivery of welding robots, and I don’t know if that was Plan A all along or they’ve given up on training people to consistently make a clean bead that’s 53 ft long.