Formula 1 system architecting – Part 2: The religious, centralist worldview of an engineer

Guido de Boer likes to reconsider stuck habits, to ask questions about generally accepted truths. In a conversation with him, we regularly come across the quirks and instincts of technicians. They’re often very creative, but at the same time, they’re trapped in their own somewhat religious, centralist worldview. This manifests itself in their tendency to want to control everything and their desire for a total overview. Engineers want to think about what should happen at any time in the machine. They want to come up with the entire software structure and determine in detail how everything works mechanically.

Nonsense, De Boer says: “That shouldn’t be done at all. It’s about making agreements and thinking. What abstraction am I in? If I’m the boss of this box, who should I make arrangements with? When the wafer stage is my responsibility, I have to come to an agreement with the guy of the wafer handler: cut the agreement in two, archive it and stick to it. It’s not at all important if there are a hundred cables or ten computers inside.”