Sharing this quick interview with my fellow Ortho Engineers. There is great wisdom in here from Elon, and many Engineers (like myself) have wondered what went wrong when we reach the final design. I wish I had these 5 on my wall when I was a young Engineer at S+N.
1/ The Biggest Mistake
The most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize the thing that should not exist. Why would you do that? Well, everyone's been trained in high school in college, that you got to answer the questions convergent logic. So you can tell the professor your questions, they will get a bad grade, you have to answer the question so everyone's basically without knowing it. They got like mental straitjacket on we're gonna optimizing the thing that you should simply not exist.
2/ Question the Requirements
Make your requirements less dumb. It does not matter who gave them to you. It's particularly dangerous if a smart person gave you the requirements, because you might not question them enough. No matter who you are, everyone's wrong some of the time then try very hard to delete the part or process. This is actually very important. If you're not occasionally adding things back in, you're not deleting...
