Comment by true_tuna | Hacker News Reader

Comment by true_tuna | Hacker News Reader

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Tl;dr I hope they upgraded the the DB backing their battery manufacturing process.

I had a buddy who worked at Tesla. The first step of the battery manufacture process involves a robot taking a little cell out of the box, discharging it, charging it back up and testing to see if it shows the right voltage. Super easy quality control test. But all that needs to be written to a database. The database was hosted on a vm using a shared raid array of spinning disks. Their battery manufacturer process was literally gated by a slow ass disk drive. My buddy pointed this out. Asked that they just throw an SSD in there (we’re working on it). Followed up, asked if he could just do it himself (no). Followed up a third time asking for the authority to fix the problem (no). Finally quit in disgust because they refused to solve a simple problem so how are they going to solve hard ones?

Was it limiting the testing in some way? In can't really imagine it was.

Changing working things in a critical phase of the core business without reason does not seem like a good idea.

I agree the setup seems bad and should be addressed, but if there are better things to do maybe do those first.

They had to slow down the robots so they didn’t outpace the database. Slapping an SSD in a database increases write speed by 4X. They probably could have increased battery production by 15% for a total of $99. Slow database meant slow robot meant slow battery pack production meant slow car production. Replacing a working thing might be bad, but when your expert says your thing can be drastically improved with a trivial upgrade, you should do it. Especially if it’s in the critical path of production. You can’t know everything, but you can employ experts. But they can’t help you if they’re not empowered.

Was this a bottleneck to the end product? If at some point in the process there's a different bottleneck, I'd expect it to be reasonably construed as dangerous. That being said it sounds like an ownership problem. Red tape made from past fires (not the pink slip kind ) can easily become the real problem in a complex operation like this.

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