Comment by canucker2016 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by canucker2016 | Hacker News Reader

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Kelly Johnson, head of Lockheed's Skunk Works, worked on the P-38 (as well as U-2, Blackbird, and the F-117A).

He had a list of rules for managing the design of aircraft. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Johnson_(engineer)#Kelly....

There's an unwritten 15th rule (from the above-mentioned webpage):

   "Starve before doing business with the damned Navy. They don't know what the hell they want and will drive you up a wall before they break either your heart or a more exposed part of your anatomy."

Rule 14 is pretty interesting. Keep the teams small and reward performance with compensation. Don't just reward increasing headcount. Could improve things at so many tech companies today.

Rule 14 is why every government and large cooperation has an insane amount of bloat and middle managers, IMHO. People's power and pay are determined by two things - the number of people working under them, and their budget (which is often determined by the number of people working under them). It is rarely determined by positive outcomes, it seems, in the government world.

Because when someone working for a public entity is rewarded with more money, eventually it results in someone else publishing something along the lines of "Our investigative team scoured records and sent a bunch of FOIA request, they found that some public servants make more than <insertLargeAmountOfMoney>", cue outrage, tightly defined salary bands set by the legislator and ultimately the problem you describe.

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