[tonyarkles]

> I admire some outcomes from engineers that break things like big rockets.

I work in unmanned aerospace. It started with 55lb quadcopters and got… significantly bigger from there.

I’ve thought a ton about what you’re saying over the last 5-6 years. I have broken things. My coworkers and underlings have broken things. We’ve also spent a bunch of time doing design review, code review, FEA review, big upfront design, and all those expensive slow things.

Here’s, for me, the dividing line: did we learn something new and novel? Or did we destroy kilobux worth of hardware to learn something we could have learned from a textbook, or doing a bit of math, or getting a coworker to spend a few hours reviewing our work before flying it?

And I 100% agree with your last statement: you can “move fast and break things for science” professionally. But… if something breaks when you weren’t expecting it to, the outcome of the post-mortem really should be surprising new knowledge and not “this made it to prod without review and was a stupid mistake”