Today we're going to discuss overbuilding verse overengineering. When something's built like a tank, most people say it's overengineered. That is completely not true. It's overbuilt. Overengineering, that's something completely different. However, these terms get used interchangeably quite a bit. People like to say things are overbuilt or overengineered to imply that it's very high quality or someone took the time and really put some thought and effort into making a good product. I grew up in the Midwest and you have to shovel a lot of snow there. And I had a friend who had gone through the third shovel that season trying to shovel snow. Everyone he had broke and he was tired of it. He was a fabricator. So, he was going to fix his problem. No more crappy shovels. He's better than that. He's going to make his own. So, he went to work. He found uh some extra plate steel. Make a real good blade on the shovel. And we can't have any of those crappy handles. So, we're going to use some schedule 40 pipe. We're going to make a man's shovel here. So, anyhow, he got this shovel made and unfortunately I don't have it here. This was a long time ago, but he showed it to me and I'm like, great. I don't think you're ever going to break that. And I said, let me know how that works out for you. So, we got a good snow about maybe a week later. So, he'd been sitting there. He'd been itching to use it. So, I talked to him the next day and I asked him how the shovel was. Didn't bend, didn't break. In fact, it was even in pristine condition. And one of the reasons it's probably in pristine condition is about 30 seconds into shoveling his driveway, he realized that it's really hard to work with a 30 lb shovel. So, that is an excellent example of overbuilding. And as a fabricator, fabricators know how to build. So, they are great at overbuilding. Now, I am an engineer. So, let's take maybe a more engineered approach to making the perfect shovel. So, we don't want any of this heavy steel plate. This that's just ridiculous. What was he thinking? We're going to do this much better. We're going to make something that people can really use and it's going to be refined. So, instead of that really heavy handle, let's go with uh go with some titanium. I've got some really nice titanium. This stuff's really light. Uh this one's a little short. Uh, but I can get a bigger piece. It It probably be like a 100 bucks, but we're making a good shovel here. And I want to have a real performance blade on this thing. I I don't want some, you know, low tech metal that that's like Iron Age crap. So, let's go with uh let's see what I have here. I think we can make the blade of this thing out of carbon fiber. Now, we'll get some thicker stuff, but carbon fire is super stiff. Six times stronger than steel. We're going to make the mother of all shovels. Now, the edge of this is not going to hold up when we start hitting rocks. It'll start, you know, getting some dents and it'll start chunking it out. So, we're going to do this, right? We're not going to skimp. I want this shovel to be something you can give to your grandkids. So, I was thinking we can get some carbide and we can adhere some carbide to the edge of this. So, we're going to have a nice carbon fiber blade with some silicon carbide edges, and this thing's going to show through anything. It's going to be lightweight. It's going to be strong. It's going to be stiff. We're here rocks with this thing. We're going to bust the rocks. This is going to be the best shovel ever. But but but but don't stop yet. We want to be able to monitor how efficiently we are doing this. And we need to be able to automatically upload this data into an Excel spreadsheet. So, what I recommend is we're going to add a Bluetooth connection to the shovel. And this is going to be awesome. So, not only is it Bluetooth, but we're going to have it integrate with the Rayban Meta Glasses. So, I'm going to be able to monitor in real time how quickly I am shoveling. And you're going to find out that I am shoveling like three times faster than the heavy thing did and probably one and a half times faster than just a normal crappy shovel. Oh, and I almost forgot. It's going to have a remote and it's going to have LED colors. So, when I get close to a gas line, it turns yellow. I get close to electric, it turns red. And I get close to a water line, it's going to turn blue. This thing's going to be amazing. So, I think I definitely won the shovel wars here. And this shovel is going to be available in 2 to 3 years. And they should be available for about 2,986 or $87. And I'm sure you're all going to be lining up to buy one. For those of you that aren't going to line up and buy one of those shovels, possibly this shovel, which you can get for about $10, which is neither overbuilt or overengineered and really not very good quality, this might be a better option. It will get used by 80% of people about once a year and it'll last long enough. So, let's say you're in the trades. You need something a bit better. So, let's look at this. We have a nice fiberglass handle. We have a high-carbon steel blade. And we have a stronger attachment point. This is probably a $25 shovel. And it's probably overkill for most people. However, this is well engineered. This is well built and it's simple. Most of the time, that is what we're going for. Most people think that a product is going to fail because it used poor materials or had poor manufacturing methods or it was just rushed into the market too fast. However, some products just fail because it was a bad idea. One example is Google glasses. They came out, they functioned. They were actually pretty revolutionary. The quality wasn't bad and everyone who wore them got called a glass which this alone needs to make me rethay integrating these Ray-B band meta glasses with the shovel. and also why I've never worn these in public. Another example is 3D TVs. The technology was great. Sounded like a good idea. Every TV manufacturer jumped on board and dumped millions or billions of dollars into this technology. However, no one wanted it. No one wanted to sit around wearing glasses all day long, you know, like we just talked about to watch TV. And some people got dizzy from it. And there was just technical aspects that weren't ready. So sometimes it's not the product, it's the idea. And then we have the California highspeed rail which is neither overbuilt nor overengineered. And it's actually the physical manifestation of vaporware. And if we want to talk about the mother of all inventions, we have the entire AI infrastructure, which that's a topic for another video. So let's look at another real world example where different manufacturers tried to make things stronger, bigger, beefier, more advanced. higher tech. Years ago, I went to a swap meet and they had a two or three year old Kirby vacuum cleaner there and I think I picked it up for like 50 bucks. And if you've ever seen these things, you know they're expensive. They used to sell them door too for like $1,500 or something insane. That Kirby was pretty much the definition of overbuilding something. That thing will last 100 years. Everything about it was wellmade. Everything was heavy. had big solid aluminum case and you would rather just let your upstairs stay dirty than having to lug it up the steps. I got rid of that overbuilt vacuum cleaner that I didn't want to use and my wife sure as hell didn't want to use and replaced it with an overengineered vacuum cleaner. So, what we have here? We have a Dyson. So, let's see here. We've got this thing here that comes off and we got some other lever here. Oh, what's this thing do? Hell, I don't even remember. Oh, yeah. this thing here. This pops off and and that we got a little valve in here. Then when this thing flips, this thing pops open and redirects the flow. And then this thing comes off. Ah, screw it. There we go. And this thing comes apart in like 20 or 30 different pieces. There we go. But hey, look, this can come apart and we can get to clean this out. So, I guess that's kind of handy. So, anyhow, this is an example of one of the most overengineered basic products I think I've ever seen. And they can make this complicated because they make so many of them. And you can distribute that engineering cost across millions of multiple units. However, it's still really complicated. Okay, where'd that piece go? All right, figure out how this piece of crap goes back together. I wanted to get to the bottom of it. Which one of the vacuums is better? Do we need to take out a Mac truck or do we need to fly it to the moon? So, I figured I'd look at what the professional hotel cleaning services are using because obviously they figured it out. What do you think? Are they using the tank or are they using the high-tech wizardry? Well, it turns out they don't want anything to do with either one. They want something simple like a Bissell, something that's light enough to carry around and simple enough that they don't need to go get an engineering degree to use it. What should be your goal when you design something? Should you overbuild it? Should you overengineer it? Well, I think you figured out by now that you really don't want to do either. What you need to do is design or intent. You need to figure out what is your end user. How many of these am I building? How long does it need to last? And you need to build whatever you're designing in the easiest, simple, cheapest way you can that will meet or exceed all the requirements that you expect out of this product. Two places that people run into big problems is designing for the ideal scenario or designing for the 1% outlier. It'd be great to make a product that works for absolutely everyone. However, if you have to design that product so it's too heavy, too expensive, or too complicated for the average user, then you've missed the mark completely. A good example is an Apple iPhone versus an Amazon Firephone. Apple has always been a little reluctant and a little slow to the game to add features. And they do this on purpose. They want to make sure that everything they added is well adopted, is not going to frustrate users, and they found out that their users are loyal enough that they're willing to wait one or two generations to get a feature over having to learn something that they may not really want. Anyways, Amazon took a completely different approach. They threw all kinds of new features in that had scanners and had 3D features and things that no one asked for and they ended up being very complicated and very few of the people bought it found a use for it and it flopped horribly. There are situations where you want to overbuild or maybe you want to overengineer something. If you're only making one of something, say you're making a CNC plasma table or you're making a structure bolded to your house. In these cases, it might be better to just overbuild it. I do that all the time. If I don't know if I need a 4 in or 6 in or an 8 in I-beam, I don't want to spend the engineering or waste hours and hours of my time to figure out which one's going to work. I'm just going to spend the extra money and buy the 8 in I-beam because I know it's sufficient. Cost me a couple hundred extra dollars and I know for sure I did it right. However, this is a situation where I don't care if it's a little too heavy and I'm only making one of them. So, I don't need to worry about cost on multiple down the road. If we want to look at something that's ridiculously engineered, look at the EUV lithography machines that ASML makes. Without these, we couldn't have the microchips that power our world. Is this overengineered? Well, we're going to look back in 20 years and say it's overengineered because anything high-tech can be made simpler at some point, but for right now, engineering the crap out of it is the only way they know how to do it. However, given our examples of vacuums and shovels, that should not be your base case. As I mentioned before, you should be designing for the 99% of people who will be using your products. And if you can't fit the needs of that last 1%, then you let them know. Or you build a special product for them that may be way more expensive or way more complicated. And that's okay. In addition to product intent, you need to look at quantity. If you're only making one or a few, overbuild the thing. If you're going to be making millions and millions of them, lean in the area of overengineering because that cost is spread out across everyone you make. And sometimes that's okay. But don't make something complicated just to make it complicated. If you've ever worked on a German car, I can guarantee you there's simpler ways to do things. And also think about the design life cycle of the product you're trying to make. Are you trying to make something that needs to last for 6 months, a year, 10 years? A good engineer is going to be able to ask the difficult questions upfront in order to direct the design process from the beginning through the end. If you found this useful, check out my other video on why your prototype is not production.
