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Comment by IggleSniggle | Hacker News Reader

> SpaceShipTwo is an inherently risky experimental test craft—with death always waiting on each side of a narrow envelope—and it always will be. Management is willfully ignorant of this.

This comment reminded me of another story from a previous aerospace era (blimp cruise liners aka airships), the summary of which is:

> A British Lord wanted to build the best airship in the world – and so he had two rival design teams battle it out to win the juicy government contract. Competition is supposed to bring the best out of people, but run in the wrong way it can cause people (and the things they make) to fall apart in the most horrifying ways.

https://timharford.com/2019/11/cautionary-tales-ep-4-the-dea...

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Hmm, that certainly colors a rumor I've heard about Apple. That they'll have two or three teams compete on a new product... but they won't tell the teams that they have competition until final demo day.

"Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you keep it a secret!" -- Dr. Strangelove

I know that was effectively true at Nokia in the 2000s, but that was more a sign of corporate dysfunction than a deliberate "battle to the death". (I worked at Nokia in 2010, and the last project I was on turned out to be one that was literally being worked on by four other people across the world, as it turned out.)

I don't think I've ever heard that about Apple, though, at least as standard (even unofficial) operating procedure. There's sometimes competing internal concepts -- the iPhone's operating system probably being the most famous example, with Scott Forstall's team basing theirs on OS X and Tony Fadell's team basing theirs on Pixo OS -- but I don't think they were being kept secret from one another.

I cannot reveal the source or the company but a major household-name automotive company would have several teams working on projects, with one pre-selected as the "real" one and the others not told their work would be discarded. The idea being that this way you can multiply the size of each engineering team and starve the competition of competent engineers. The fact this system exists was not disclosed to the engineers in order to prevent them from quitting. I know this from an engineer who quit after accidentally meeting a member of another team within the company working on the exact same project.

It sounds like a more realistic motivation for that would be to reduce the risk of failure- if the primary team flubbed the project, the secondary team would still be an option. (Such a system would also give you an opportunity to judge how effective either team was.)

Awful thing to do to engineers, but you can understand why management would do it and why they wouldn't want to demoralize the secondary team by telling them.

No, the work of all teams except the pre-selected real one was discarded and never passed on for evaluation. If you wanted to do it for real you would do it up front and ask them all to try different approaches and have rendevous points to compare and evaluate and exchange findings. I suspect that would be much better morale for all teams involved, but would require management to give up on their "chosen" team, and put some real effort into this, which they were not willing to do (and before you ask, yes, the "backup" team suggested this and got rejected, and then got the fuck out)

You’ll need to provide a source for this.

Something similar apparently happened with the Soviet space program of all things:

> Unlike its American competitor in the Space Race, which had NASA as a single coordinating agency, the USSR's program was split among several competing design bureaus led by Sergei Korolev, Kerim Kerimov, Mikhail Yangel, Valentin Glushko, Vladimir Chelomey, Viktor Makeyev, Mikhail Reshetnev, etc.

https://www.groundzerobooksltd.com/pages/books/80639/union-o...

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