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Having a single point of failure is a terrible idea for the health of the company. It is often unavoidable early on in a product, but if the product is success
by aeternum 4y ago
Having a single point of failure is a terrible idea for the health of the company. It is often unavoidable early on in a product, but if the product is successful, there is a strong need to eliminate the single point of failure.
This can be very hard on engineers that were previous the go-to person for a key area. The person and product was successful so the ask to delegate and dilute ownership seems completely illogical. Some ICs don't want to give this up and so they switch from IC to management for the wrong reasons, leading to a manager that isn't really interested in management and is reluctant to delegate and enable the team.
I've seen this occur many times and it's always painful. Starlink is now large enough that it's a huge risk to have a single key person responsible for optics.
- bathtub365 4y agoIt sounds like the author was never given the chance to build organizational redundancy. It was done around and without them in a strangely secretive way.
- q1w2 4y agoIt's important to remember that we're only hearing one side of the story here. It's very clear the author has emotion about what's going on, and there are several emotionally toned segments in his account. That's understandable, but it also likely means that this is a biased account of what transpired. Fundamentally, it sounds like SpaceX is having other engineers shadow him because he's a single point of failure. That part alone is not remarkable.
- flumpcakes 4y agoFrom the sounds of it, they were hiring inexperienced/incompetent yes-people into areas of his expertise. That's not really organisational redundancy in my book. Just more blood for the blood gods. I have been places where there's something very simple that a dozen people don't know how to do or the reason why it is there or that it even existed.