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No. This is not what engineering is about. Engineering is about making reasonable design trade-offs. Simply throwing dollars at a wall without doing an ROI estimate is called overengineering, and overengineering is bad engineering. For reliability, where that trade-off sits depends on the application. Aerospace, medical, consumer electronics, and disposable toys will sit in different places. If I lose a mission to Mars saving $100 on part which had a 5% chance of failure within a year, that's very poor engineering. If I include that same part in a $3 toy, bringing the price to $103, that's equally poor engineering. Whether I trust or trust-and-verify depends on how much the "verify" part costs, how strong my trust is, and what the costs of failure are. Normally, the ROI calculation is easy; capitalist markets work well for this. I can ballpark expected costs. When working with a customer like the government, the boundaries might be a little bit distorted, since the customer is process-oriented. The government might have a hard salary cap which makes it impossible to bring in qualified engineers, and I might take 3 years with a team of 5 people at $100k to do what one person at $300k could do in 6 months. At the same time, I might have hard requirements on process, such as origin-tracing every part. The danger is when that becomes in-cultured and spills over to other places. If I'm working for the government, I'll follow government processes, and I understand why those are there. But I won't confuse those processes with good engineering. Once people do, they become poor engineers. If I've shipped a toy which unwittingly has thousands of fake parts which I thought you made, we'll both have been cheated, and I'll expect you to solve that with me cooperatively. If you hack into my product and brick it, even if you were legally in the right (and you're not), you've lost a customer. That's bad business too. |