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We're not innovating, we're just forgetting slower

(www.elektormagazine.com)
139 points obscurette | 2 comments | 04 Jul 25 14:13 UTC | HN request time: 0.479s | source
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raincole ◴[04 Jul 25 16:04 UTC] No.44465682[source]▶
> They can deploy applications to Kubernetes clusters but couldn’t design a simple op-amp circuit

And the ones who can design a op-amp circuit can't manufacture the laminate their circuit is going to be printed on. And the ones who know how to manufacture the laminate probably doesn't know how to refine or synthesize the material from the minerals. And probably none of them knows how to grow and fertilize the crop to feed themselves.

No one knows everything. Collaboration has been how we manage complexity since we were biologically a different species than H. sapiens.

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cherryteastain ◴[04 Jul 25 17:02 UTC] No.44466133[source]▶
> THE GREATEST IMPROVEMENTS in the productive powers of labour, and the greater part of the skill, dexterity, and judgment, with which it is anywhere directed, or applied, seem to have been the effects of the division of labour.

> To take an example, therefore, from a very trifling manufacture, but one in which the division of labour has been very often taken notice of, the trade of a pin-maker...a workman not educated to this business...could scarce, perhaps..make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make twenty. I have seen a small manufactory...where ten men only were employed...Those ten persons, therefore, could make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day.

- An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith, 1776

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alganet ◴[04 Jul 25 17:24 UTC] No.44466331[source]▶
When you divide and specialize manufacture, you get efficiency.

When you divide and specialize design, you get design by commitee.

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marcosdumay ◴[04 Jul 25 17:30 UTC] No.44466379[source]▶
You clearly don't.

If you design a desk lamp, it wasn't designed by a committee just because a person designed the screws, another designed the plate stamping machine, another designed the bulb socket and etc.

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Buttons840 ◴[04 Jul 25 17:41 UTC] No.44466444[source]▶
> When you divide and specialize design, you get design by commitee.

In your counter-example, the design was not divided, and thus it is not a counter-example at all.

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1. spongebobstoes ◴[04 Jul 25 18:05 UTC] No.44466640[source]▶
The division of design doesn't stop because some of the pieces can be bought at a store.

The lamp design clearly was divided -- the final designer did not design the screws, lightbulb, wiring, and perhaps many other components. Someone had to design those components that were then combined creatively into a lamp.

Dividing design into components that can be effectively reused is tricky, but it remains essential.

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2. alganet ◴[04 Jul 25 18:25 UTC] No.44466790[source]▶
Real examples often work better.

Last week I was learning about Itanium. It was a processor designed specifically for HP. Its goal was to replace both x86 and PowerPC.

HP would design the new systems to run on Itanium, and Intel would design the chip.

There was an attempt at specializing design here, with both companies running on design constraints from another. They formed a design comittee.

This was like the screw company making screws _specifically_ for one kind of desk lamp. It's division and specialization of design.

A natural specialization (one company gets very good at designing some stuff) is not divided, or orchestrated by a central authority.

In manufacture, it's the other way around. If you already have a good design, the more divisions alongside a main central figure, the better. You can get tighter tolerances, timing benefits, etc.

My argument is that these aspects are not transferrable from one concept to another. Design is different from manufacturing, and it gets worse if we try to apply the optimizations we often do with manufacturing to it.