>>1973025The competency crisis is real. You see it a lot of places where we used to be able to do things. For example, the A-12 (precursor to the SR-71) was built in 28 months by 25 engineers and <50 technicians, with just slide rules. And they also needed to invent novel material-science things like how to work titanium. So the total labor cost was probably under $25m in 2023 dollars.
For context, the 787 cost $32,000,000,000. If they used 100x as many engineers and technicians, that means they spent 23% of the project budget on labor (no idea if this is a good assumption, but still, 2 orders of magnitude difference is crazy.)
The good news is that some people are re-learning the lost art of building things quickly. Notably, SpaceX. As time goes on, I imagine (hope) the legacy companies will try to adopt some of the behaviors of successful companies, as they always do. That's why these companies all adopted the lessons of Jack Welch to begin with-- he had success at GE and was lauded as a success. Now that his philosophies have run several companies into the ground, boards should start asking 'why can't we be as fast/effective as SpaceX, or Skunkworks from the 60's, etc?'
