Question: Have you ever figured something out by making mistakes?

Nathan Quinlan answered on 7 Feb 2015:

Every day! In another answer, I told a story about buying two gadgets (pressure sensors, to be exact) for a particular job. Neither of them worked properly and we finally made a simple one of our own that was good enough. The mistake there, and the lesson learned, was that we put too much trust in fancy and expensive gadgets.

Making mistakes is human. An engineer’s job is to weed them out before they do harm. We’re always checking each other’s work and trying different methods, so that mistakes will be found. In good engineering teams, there’s no shame in making a mistake as long as you’re honest about it, so that it can be fixed.

Here’s a video of Boeing engineers destroying an airliner to check for mistakes in their calculations about the strength of the wings.