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Comment by dotnet00 | Hacker News Reader

He's certainly involved enough in the development process to be able to talk about technical details at length with even some of his previous top employees confirming that he's been heavily involved in development: https://twitter.com/lrocket/status/1512919230689148929 (Tom Mueller is one of the leading experts in the world on rocket engines due to his work on SpaceX's engines), which is a lot more than most of the other big competitors (the only exception is ULA's Tory Bruno since he too has a strong engineering background).

Shotwell is an excellent president and pretty much directly responsible for many of SpaceX's prominent contracts (as well as their survival in the early days), but she handles the 'business' side of things (although, since she has a mechanical engineering background I assume she also keeps up with the technical side), while Elon mainly deals with the technical side.

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I have an MechE background from a bay area school and honestly you don't learn a thing about anything that could really help you with this. You either have an incredible passion for learning on your own or you are more clueless about engineering than a guy welding rollcages into a racecar with his highschool diploma.

She does have experience doing actual technical work and anyway, at her level I expect her knowledge to be more high level.

To take your example, she doesn't need to be able to weld rollcages into racecars, but she may be able to understand that a rollcage can only be expected to be useful in X cases or that a good rollcage should have Y features.

Similar to how Elon most likely isn't telling people to change X flange into a weld by adjusting the pipe by Y mm, but rather asking his engineers what they would adjust to achieve Z and the technical tradeoffs, then stating what he thinks is acceptable and what isn't.

I agree, hence the mechanic engineering degree is basically worthless IMO. Even in your example, any person with a functioning brain would understand your X and Y examples. So what exactly to mechanical engineers learn? As someone that went through it, I can assure you it's almost nothing. It's just a 4 year grinder so they can put a stamp on who can do medium level math and put up with the grind. The learning is up to you after.

Yeah, that's a good point. When I was talking about her background I was mainly trying to emphasize how she differs to the business leaders of other big space companies. Since I think that a big reason for the utter stagnation of the previous rocketry giants has been the systemic dominance of non-technical penny pinchers over engineers with a business lean. But yes, it does come down to the desire to learn rather than what degree they hold.

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