One of the unique things about top technology cultures, you know, when Apple wanted to do something new, they actually had a rule that it was a separate group and only one person — maybe Steve Jobs, maybe someone else — could talk to that group. The engineers were helping to run that group and set the vision. You didn’t want a lot of senior people, senior bureaucrats, reaching in and having opinions and getting in the way.
The way the way we ran things even early on at pounds here and in other companies I’ve built that have succeeded in the technology world, is the engineers helped run the company, they helped set this strategy, they helped iterate. They knew what was possible.
Within like a very big command and control system that’s very hard. The way the DOD is set up, the engineers is in the basement and he or she is being told what to do, as opposed to, they belong next to the leaders iterating. They’re understood. Their leadership’s part of it. So I think naturally the way to DOD set up or down the system it’s very hard to fix it. You’re going to have to try new things and really disrupt the way it works if you’re going to attract the top talent to make them feel empowered to make them feel like they’re actually helping run the things they’re doing.
That was venture investor Joe Lonsdale at the Reagan National Defense Forum. The days where engineers in DoD and industry could help drive the vision and success of a military program seem to have passed. They are put into a “fishbowl” where outside activities determine the technical requirements, the costs, and the speed at which they can move. Engineers on major systems might have one or two bites at the apple in their careers rather than getting experience from a number of more rapid and ambitious projects where they can prove their abilities.
Usually, questions of talent revert back to STEM education or debates on salary. I think that one of the most important parts of the talent problem is creating an environment where people feel like they can exert influence and make an impact. Then we can have those other debates.
Trying to get a world-class engineer to address problems where all their activities have been lined up in a master schedule by some analyst is like getting a soccer coach to call the plays your all-star quarterback will run. The quarterback would walk onto a different team where they make better use of his skills, leading to more wins. Being a winner matters to the quarterback as much as the revenue and salary that enabled by it.
Another question here is, which engineers are empowered? Should government engineers be given greater ability to prototype components and subsystems which can feed into industry systems? Should programs be more open-ended, allowed industry engineers more freedom to design and deliver a product that hasn’t been predetermined by requirements? I presume there will be a mix of outcomes across a spectrum. But what enables this is portfolio management — requirements and funding have to be more flexible to allow iteration and learning.
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