We Built Systems Too Complex to Survive Layoffs, SpaceX Wouldn’t

The last couple of years have been weird for software engineering. Layoffs everywhere. Teams getting smaller. Expectations somehow getting bigger. And in the middle of all that, we kept doing the same thing: Adding more stuff. More tools. More layers. More abstractions. More complexity. That’s why I keep coming back to SpaceX. Not because of rockets. Because of how they think. This Isn’t About Rockets When people talk about SpaceX, they talk about launches, engines, Mars. But the interesting part is not what they build. It’s how they build it. There’s a simple idea behind a lot of their decisions: If you can remove a part, remove it. Not optimize it. Not rewrite it. Not scale it. Remove it. Less parts means: Less things that can fail Less cost Faster iteration It sounds obvious. But it’s not how we build software. We Went in the Opposite Direction Somewhere along the way, software engineering became obsessed with adding layers. We convinced ourselves that: More abstraction = better des