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Comment by ucaetano | Hacker News Reader

"The fact that Tesla can simultaneously demonstrate brilliance and incompetence in the same vehicle is not surprising, considering it is a high-tech software company trying to master complex manufacturing processes that took established automakers more than 100 years to perfect."

High-tech software company?

Tesla is an automaker, not a software company. Sure, Elon comes from the software/tech/payments industry, but putting Zuckerberg in charge of Exxon wouldn't change the fact that Exxon is an energy/oil company.

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I work in one of the big 3's. we do crazy things too, its just that gizmodo isnt interesting in any of it :D I tend to walk in at 9 or 10 am and walk out of 7 or 8 pm. Our culture isn't any different than tech industries (maybe a little exaggeration there) I find it a little intriguing when people label(mislabel) a particular industry.

edit - one of the big 3 automakers

> I tend to walk in at 9 or 10 am and walk out of 7 or 8 pm.

Sounds like a shitty place to work.

How so?

It's fine if you work 4-day weeks. (36 to 44 hours)

With a 5-day week, you're working 45 to 55 hours. That wears on you. It could be OK if the pay is unusually good.

I'm a big advocate for work life balance, but since when did 40 hours/week became the single universal limit for everybody? Humans are not that standardized.

40 hours isn’t the standard. France does 35 and gets better productivity per hour because of it

It's a bit awkwardly worded, but I get their point (I think) - take your example and swap it, for instance: if you were to exchange all the employees at Facebook for employees at Exxon, the company structurally and culturally would still be an energy/oil company even if the product they were making was software. Likewise, Tesla runs, structurally and culturally, like a software company, even though they are building cars.

You definitely don't want to "Move fast and break things" at an oil company. They have very defined procedures for everything. Now days safety is paramount. You can't just change procedures even if its better because they can't afford a blowout or leak or accident. At Exxon you have a manual for everything and deviating from it is frowned upon.

To carry the analogy from above, Exxon moved fast and broke the Prince William Sound. Safety is important obviously but innovation has real costs and software companies seem to learn a lot more and innovate more when they break things vs energy companies-- at least that is the meme.

Also, energy companies move slow and still break things like the environment.

IIRC The alcoholic master handed over navigation to a very inexperienced 3rd mate and left the bridge for him to navigate out the channel by himself. That's an individual screw-up that can happen in any organization's culture. I wouldn't say the whole organization (Exxon) moved fast and broke things.

The boat had a collision avoidance radar which had been non-functional for over a year because Exxon wouldn't spend the money to maintain it.

It collided with an underwater reef.

There was an above-water radar reflector in place specifically so shipboard radar could warn of an impending collision with the reef.

...and an inexperienced 3rd mate was alone on the bridge.

I'd prefer my car not to be broken, even at the cost of innovation. This is a product that protects my family going down a highway at 70mph, not an electronic device used to play candy crush.

I think this is it. Same reason traditional car companies are notoriously bad at software. Different mindset, different culture, different skills, different history and institutional knowledge.

Automotive companies don't usually write large amounts of their own software for infotainment, vehicle controls, machine learning, factory systems engineering and the actual embedded programming for the electronics. Yes Tesla is a software company. They hire a huge amount of software engineers.

Is Apple not a software company because they make phones and give away all their software for those phones for free like Tesla does?

At least they didn't say Tesla was a rocket company.

Another point of view is that Tesla isn't either of those things but rather an energy company.

They're mainly a car maker, energy storage is just about a tenth of their revenue.

for now...

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