What being the responsible engineer at SpaceX meant

It was very interesting to me because scaled was so scrappy. Very little process. And when I went, it was very much like the engineers like are responsible, which is the actual term they use at SpaceX. But you know, we did I did composite layup drawings by hand on like a piece of paper sometimes for the shop. Like, you know, I had my little spreadsheet with my analysis and some basic FEA finite element analysis, but You know, there wasn't much process. I would do it by myself. I would show it to the lead. He'd be like, Great, take it out to the shop, hand it to him. They would build it. They'd come

Mm.

back and say, Hey, this looks wrong, like here, or this is really hard to do for us. I'd get out a red pen and like do it this way instead. And then like initial it. this was like a stark contrast to Boeing, where it took me weeks to change a number. It was an irrelevant number. when I went to SpaceX, it was notorious in the industry for also being scrappy and being very little process.

Mm.

but in comparison to scaled, it was a huge jump up in that regard because it was a much bigger team. and you have to have more process there. More drawing checks and stuff, but the ethos was the same. It was just at a different scale. And I still, I literally still redlined drawings at SpaceX out on the shop floor.

Hmm.

you don't do that other places. Like it's not allowed. and so that is the that is the responsible engineer. It's like in the end, the buck stops with you. Your shit has to work. and if

Mm.

you can do it that way, like you can go do it. You don't have to go like ask a bunch of permissions. and it only works in an environment with where the bar for the employees is really, really high. Because if you give that much responsibility and lack of process to somebody who's not that high, it fails. Like it falls apart rapidly.

Mm-hmm.

so you know, a lot of people ask and talk about like how do you translate that. culture to other places. And it's like, well, you have to start with a really high bar. That's like a fundamental piece to it, which is very, very hard to do. Like it's it's very, very hard to build a team that's that good. if you can get close, you can do a lot of a lot of the things they did as far as being like that level of responsibility and how it works.