This is a chemist's view from the trenches. A manager who hasn't been brought up in the engineering mindset wouldn't even be able to understand any of the points in that blogpost, which partially explains the trouble that pharmaceutical companies are finding themselves in. You cannot bribe or cheat observable reality.
Sometimes you have to go with a less capable result because the alternative will take too long or cost too much to develop, or (since we're talking aerospace here) weigh too much.
The trick, of course, is to know exactly how good is enough.
This doesn't really make sense given any common meaning of good enough. A well engineered system or product is optimized. If you want to say that good enough means solving the inherent tradeoffs between safety margins and cost with careful design and precise specs, then you're not talking about the same thing as that blog post, nor would that accurately describe the way Boeing appears to design commercial aircraft nowadays.
But you're right, I'm clearly not talking about the same thing as that blog post. What I'm arguing is that there's this appropriation of language where people use "good enough" to mean exactly "not good enough", and I don't think that's helpful.
Basically if you have a safe seat- or monopoly, you must learn to play catch against yourself or else.. boing, and important parts go flying.
Sometimes that competing becomes backstabbing between the divisions.
The “good enough” from an engineering perspective is, “meets the customer’s specifications and is the best we can do given the constraints of time and money.” It’s about the quality of the product.
The “good enough” in this essay relates to the expenditure of emotional effort in getting your work done to a known standard while management are applying pressure for you to reduce the amount of time and money invested. “Good enough” in this instance relates to the effort exerted. At some point you are not going to try any harder because further effort is counterproductive to your career prospects or financial well-being.
This “good enough” is the lab full of technicians who know the product doesn’t even come close to the specifications it is being marketed towards, but they continue to work because they need food on the table. It’s “good enough” as a dictum from management, not as an informed decision from the product team.
Elsewhere, Milkshake has a story about a biological chemist on a project to develop a delivery vehicle for cancer drugs. This fellow found his results unconvincing, continued working on the problem and ended up demonstrating convincingly that in vivo the vehicle did not behave as intended. Now the company had a problem (the FDA demands that relevant results be reported) because management intended to sell the IP to a hapless bidder, and the chemist's action pierced the veil of plausible deniability: https://orgprepdaily.wordpress.com/2017/08/24/breaking-bad-i...
Your post does a dis-service to the 350+ who died.
Nobody agrees that using one external sensor on the 737 MAX that is subject to weather, bird strikes and ground handling damage was nearly good enough.
However the engineers in question at Boeing clearly failed to produce a design that performed to spec in normal operating conditions.
^ Yes, there are scaling factors where it might be cheaper to design a 0.1° accurate sensor and sell it to everyone because it would be more effort having two production lines but that's an optimization.
