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The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed

(steveblank.com)
285 points ridruejo | 3 comments | 11 Nov 25 14:34 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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stackskipton ◴[11 Nov 25 21:26 UTC] No.45893105[source]▶
As someone who has some familiarity with this process, just like safety regulations are written in blood, Federal Acquisition rules are written in misuse of money, sometimes criminally.

Yes, we have swung too much towards the bureaucrats but I'm not sure throwing out everything is solution to the issue.

Move fast works great when it's B2B software and failures means stock price does not go up. It's not so great when brand new jet acts up and results in crashes.

Oh yea, F-35 was built with move fast, they rolled models off the production line quickly, so Lockheed could get more money, but it looks like whole "We will fix busted models later" might have been more expensive. Time will tell.

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LarsDu88 ◴[12 Nov 25 00:44 UTC] No.45894990[source]▶
Back in the day, Lockheed could move very quickly. The P-38 went from proposal to working prototype between February 1937 and January 1939. But there was a cost. Test pilots died

The top American fighter pilot of WW2, Richard Bong was killed test piloting the Lockheed P80 jet fighter.

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canucker2016 ◴[12 Nov 25 03:36 UTC] No.45896138[source]▶
Kelly Johnson, head of Lockheed's Skunk Works, worked on the P-38 (as well as U-2, Blackbird, and the F-117A).

He had a list of rules for managing the design of aircraft. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Johnson_(engineer)#Kelly....

There's an unwritten 15th rule (from the above-mentioned webpage):

   "Starve before doing business with the damned Navy. They don't know what the hell they want and will drive you up a wall before they break either your heart or a more exposed part of your anatomy."
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1. LarsDu88 ◴[12 Nov 25 07:37 UTC] No.45897332{3}[source]▶
Rule 14 is pretty interesting. Keep the teams small and reward performance with compensation. Don't just reward increasing headcount. Could improve things at so many tech companies today.
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2. iamtheworstdev ◴[12 Nov 25 13:38 UTC] No.45899992[source]▶
Rule 14 is why every government and large cooperation has an insane amount of bloat and middle managers, IMHO. People's power and pay are determined by two things - the number of people working under them, and their budget (which is often determined by the number of people working under them). It is rarely determined by positive outcomes, it seems, in the government world.
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3. thmsths ◴[12 Nov 25 16:38 UTC] No.45902256[source]▶
Because when someone working for a public entity is rewarded with more money, eventually it results in someone else publishing something along the lines of "Our investigative team scoured records and sent a bunch of FOIA request, they found that some public servants make more than <insertLargeAmountOfMoney>", cue outrage, tightly defined salary bands set by the legislator and ultimately the problem you describe.