We don't have time machines and so can't re-run the experiment. I've read biographies of Rickover and not all people who lived through this time are complementary.

It's certainly true the strategic arms processes and nuclear submarine engineering benefited in a long term view.

I just find myself asking if the US army recruiting tag line Be The Best You Can Be was really met, or if Rickover achieved what might be more akin to crystallography "local optimum" where there are better peaks out there, but this one is mine. (To borrow another army concept)

Viewed from Australia the current state of US submarine construction is woeful. We're on the brink of being ripped off having prepaid for access to Virginia class subs soon, and AUKUS subs in future. We expect to be told we cannot have Virginia class subs ever, we cannot have longterm crewing or command ever, but we can host them retained in US HANDS and we can continue to pay for them.

Not that Rickover made that happen, but whatever his lessons are, the US submarine building industry doesn't seem to have learned then, or be able to apply them.

His best lesson, in my opinion: https://whatisnuclear.com/rickover.html

His writing style is very good, and he succinctly summarizes the phenomenon where a technology that is substantially complete to the point that it has known issues is looked down upon while a technology that is purely "on paper" (the "paper reactor" as he calls it) is treated as a good alternative, since the paper technology isn't far enough along for the problems to even be known. That's not even a good TL;DR, so you should just read Rickover's essay.

It's like the current situation with "vibe coding". An LLM can build you something which demonstrates a principle in some kind of hand-wavy fashion, but the gap between the thing produced by the LLM and a sustainable product is just huge. And, as with the gap between Rickover's paper reactor and his practical reactor, it's often extraordinary difficult to explain to a non-specialist why that is so -- because the difference is all in the detail.

That's a good analogy!

A lot of the bubbles in our field have been like that.

missing from the account is just how much rickover was hated internally by the navy, until he wasn't. IIRC his office was in converted women's room in the pentagon.

Um.

I don't know how many people on HN have served and heard of Rickover? But I'm pretty sure most people on HN could not function in a Rickover style management context. It gets things done, but it's not terribly polite about going about getting them done.

To the article's credit, it does touch on this aspect of his management style. But engineers today are from the Millennial or GenZ generations. A lot of that just would not fly. I chuckle thinking about the shock and surprise on the average HN'ers face when one morning they come in and find out they're fired because a hypothetical "Rickover" did a code review last night and found a long existing bug they didn't fix yet.

And keep in mind, this hypothetical "Rickover" would review your code, and that of all your reports, every night. He doesn't like the architecture you chose? You're gone. He finds issues in the code of one of your subordinates? That subordinate is gone and you are too.

It's harsh. I'm not sure today's Americans are ready for that?

yeah but this hypothetical rickover wouldn't also be the same person constantly telling them to put off fixing the bug to build out a feature that the nontechnical product manager thinks customers want.