In hardware, it's not enough to design the object itself. Objects need to be made. At large scale, they need to be manufactured. When you manufacture novel obje

In hardware, it's not enough to design the object itself. Objects need to be made. At large scale, they need to be manufactured. When you manufacture novel objects, you must also design all of the object-specific tooling that goes into producing your thing, like molds and fixtures, which are just as important in producing your object as the design of the object. It could not be made at scale without designing those fixtures and molds. For complex objects, creating effective molds or fixtures is a high-skill job whose difficulty is equivalent to that of the object designer. After working on developer infrastructure at a big company for a few years now, what I've realized is that most companies don't spend very much time at all designing the 'molds' and 'fixtures' their software teams need in order to manufacture a worthwhile object that they know will work. They pay lip service to the importance of testing and solid dev tooling, but they're reluctant to invest in it. (I don't blame individuals here — they're behaving rationally given market pressure — but it's a sad state.)