Sometimes the question is wrong

So I came across this interview of Elon Musk which I handily link here:

It is an interview, where, among other questions, Elon explain in simple words how Conway’s Law can be defeated in organizations.

He summarized the law to:

The product errors reflect the organizational errors.

The problem of organizations is the boundary between teams: they create implicit constraints. People design around these implicit constraints and slow themself down, or, worse, they miss some optimization opportunities. Or even entire solutions.

Sometimes the question is wrong

Elon suggests that to avoid that we need to always question constraints: sometimes the constraints are wrong or inexistent.

The constraints that you are given are guaranteed to [be] some degree wrong. […] Because the counterpoint would be that they are perfect. […] One of the biggest traps of smart engineers is optimizing a thing that shouldn’t exist

He even quoted Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy: the Deep Thought computer outputted “42”, but the hardest problem was finding the right question. Sometimes finding the right question is harder than finding the answer, and once you frame the question, the answer comes easy.

And sometimes, the question is wrong.