But how could any space-program ME be so inane? How was he smart enough to find the shop every morning if he couldn’t reason any better than that? Would you trust a guy like that to engineer a spacecraft?
I dunno. My guess it was some low-level flunkie who was given a list of system components and told to go find out what the weight of each one was.
People get tunnel vision. When they’re working in one section of the project that requires one type of thinking even the smart ones can have a hard time adjusting to dealing with a different section where that type of thinking just doesn’t apply. I’ve lost track of how many GOOD project managers I’ve fielded the “how many tests does QA get done in a day” question from, they are quantitative people used to dealing with definable work units and “things just get done” world of QA makes no sense to them. That’s why test cases were invented, they’re a convenient fiction no QA department actually pays attention to but that gives project managers a handle for their gantt charts.