I dropped a mention of his interview on Rogan in this entry. After being impressed with him on that interview, I delayed listening to the interview with Bari Weiss on her p0dcast. Here is the paywalled ep on TheFP’s site, but you can find the interview on Honestly.
I don’t c0mpletely agree with him on some things, but this sort of thing that makes me really regret my professional career.
There is only one way of doing things, and, regardless of what money it might save, it’s dictated how you’re supposed to operate. Thou shalt not deviate. If you do, your system’s going to be shut off. Information security is completely procedural on things that don’t work well at all, and you’re supposed to devote a significant amount of your time to adhering to procedure.
Put your solution through the following procedures, generate the following artifacts, and submit again for cybersecurity authorization.
Does the solution work? Well, it passed muster through an extensive waterfall engineering effort. It passed its cybersecurity scans. It cost a ton of money to create. It must be good.
The discussion of the time and materials contracts almost necessarily requires expensive solutions put together by people with expensive “educations.”
Getting back to Palmer, though, it certainly evokes memories of my time getting into IT/government contracting. On the Defense side of things, there seemed, to me, to be a resistance to doing anything at all that was cheap and simple.
I worry about being Captain Queeg with the strawberries.
But when I started, I was coming from an environment where I basically had no budget. I’d scrimp, and find a way to get things done with what I had available. Sure, there might have been many ways to do things “more correctly,” but how long would that have taken, and how much would it have cost?
Luckey’s discussion of designing his company’s products based on what they’ve got available.
There was a lot made of the OceansGate Titan’s use of a PlayStation controller. Watch this if you’re curious.
But the problems there weren’t because they didn’t engineer an expensive control system. The problems were because the hull collapsed. If Titan’s hull hadn’t collapsed, would anyone have said anything about the controller?