Recorded during the Starbase Tour, [Elon Musk explains](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw) the five-step engineering process he tries to apply rigorously at his work: > 1. Make your requirements less dumb. It's especially dangerous if a smart person gives you requirements because you might not question them enough. > 2. Try very hard to delete the part or process. If you are not occasionally adding things back in, like 10% of the time, you are not deleting enough > 3. Simplify or optimize. It's possibly the most common error of a smart engineer to work on stuff that should not exists. Why would people do that? Well, every has been trained in high school or college to answer a logic. You cannot tell your professor your question is dumb. > 4. Accelerate cycle time > 5. Automate > > I've personally made a mistake of going backwards on all five steps. Multiple times. Literally, I automated, accelerated, simplified and deleted it.