"Wheel" by maugan22 is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

I had an engineer come to me last week and he tells me he wants to start using off-the-shelf wheels. He tells me that they're the newest thing and that it'll speed up production by 40% if we don't have to design and build our own.

I get it. Wheels are round, so why not just use the ones from a vendor?

Sadly, this engineer doesn't appreciate the beauty of excellence in wheel engineering. We don't need 18" wheels, or 17" wheels, we need 17.864" wheels. Precisely 17.864" to get optimal efficiency out of our product. Simply nothing else will do.

If we were to buy from a vendor, we'd still need people to manage this vendor. Someone's entire job would be ensuring these third-party wheels showed up where they needed to be, met basic quality levels, and were up to spec. Finally, we'd need to start a program to retrain everyone working with the wheels on how the new ones work -- not to mention various bits of re-engineering to ensure that existing systems are compatible with the new wheels. That takes headcount and we're not in a position to hire given the wider macroeconomic climate.

Now, suppose we did hire up the team necessary to implement a new wheel strategy. What happens if we have a critical failure during assembly? Will the vendor's support team be here to help us? I don't think we could afford to outsource such critical infrastructure to someone else.

Besides, if we simply bought our wheels then what would I tell our 40-person team of Senior Wheel Engineers? I wouldn't even have the headcount to call myself a VP!

Oh wait, I'm being told this is about building Python Wheels and that making cars was my old team...