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Comment by AlphaWeaver | Hacker News Reader

> His departure is the latest in a long string of high-profile executives to leave Tesla in the past year, most recently Steve McManus, a vice president in charge of engineering for car interiors and exteriors at Tesla, who joined Apple. Two other former Tesla executives, Michael Schwekutsch, and chief engineer Doug Field, have also left to join Apple.

Not to understate the significance of Tesla losing Straubel, but TechCrunch's claim that Tesla is losing lots of "high-profile executives" seems like a little bit of a stretch. Steve McManus was a vice president in charge of "car interiors." It seems strange to place him on the same level of significance of their CTO.

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Since January 2018:

Jason Mendez, director of manufacturing engineering

Will McColl, manager of equipment engineering

Jon McNeill, president of global sales and services

Eric Branderiz, chief accounting officer

Susan Repo, corporate treasurer and vice president of finance

Jim Keller, head of Autopilot hardware engineering

Georg Ell, director of Western Europe operations

Matthew Schwall, director of field performance engineering

Ganesh Srivats, vice president overseeing retail, delivery

Sarah O'Brien, vice president of communications

Gabrielle Toledano, chief people officer

Dave Morton, chief accounting officer

Liam O'Connor, vice president of global supply management

Antoin Abou-Haydar, senior director of production and quality

Justin McAnear, vice president of worldwide finance and operations

Phil Rothenberg, vice president in the legal department

Jeff Jones, head of global security

Dan Kim, senior director of global sales

Aaron Chew, director of investor relations

Todd Maron, general counsel

Charles Mwangi, senior director of engineering

Cindy Nicola, vice president of global recruiting

Dane Butswinkas, general counsel

Deepak Ahuja, CFO

Praveen Arichandran, director of growth

Karl Wagner, senior director of global security

Dave Arnold, senior director of global communications

Felicia Mayo, vice president of human resources and head of diversity

Peter Hochholdinger, vice president of production

Steve MacManus, vice president of interior & exterior engineering

Statistics would be more valuable than a list of titles. How many people have titles such as “president” or “Vice President”? How does this compare to churn at other companies, statistically?

yeah if you look at banking, people with titles like Vice president or Director leave all the time in relatively large numbers and it means nothing. C-suite is another story.

Tesla isn't a bank though. People have those titles in Finance because they have ownership over a particular product division, of which there are many. Consumer loans, corporate paper, fixed income, export-import financing, commodities trading, etc.

Also statistical comparisons on open positions for these absent positions. Have there been management consolidation? What impact has there been to the functioning of the company?

30 people leaving Tesla with job titles as low as "manager" over the course of a year and a half is almost meaningless without seeing how this stacks up against other tech companies of a similar size.

There's a potential fallicy here. Tesla should be compared to other car companies and not software companies. Because Tesla is building cars.

really though how many car companies have OTA updates

They all will. Volkswagen is doing it for its electric cars. But that level of connectivity is not necessarily a good thing:

https://www.thedrive.com/tech/29120/top-ota-expert-shows-how...

i wouldnt count on it bosh has a choke hold on any innovation in the auto software space , at this point its no secret that auto software is in the state it is because of bosch choke hold on the whole market .

Volkswagen must have missed that particular memo:

https://www.automotivelinux.org/announcements/2019/04/08/vol...

https://europe.autonews.com/automakers/vw-exec-kick-starts-b...

https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/2020-volkswagen-id-3-elec...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8cHHNPRg-c

i think we might both be right tesla is a software company and others are catching up to the reality of cyber security in a connected world. they are adopting FOSS to their clossed source systems which isnt the same as building a stack around FOSS from the ground up which is a very software company thing to do.

> i think we might both be right

No, you claimed other car companies won't have over-the-air software updates which is false. You claimed Bosch controls automative software which is also false. Bosch also makes use of a lot of open source software:

https://oss.bosch-cm.com/

yes i amended my claim after reading the article about auto-Linux(i didn't know about it thanks by the way), but i checked out the Bosch oss and its not what i would call useful maybe i need to look into it a bit more, From what i have seen so far the license disclosure is out of date for few vendors ie, not yet updated since jan'18 , package disclosure show there may be some vulnerable outdated packages on the platform today, its almost like a attack vector brochure. So there may still be cars out there which have these software platforms and they wouldnt be able to update them unless bosch updates it and you patch it through copyrighted update tool which bosch owns , in a service center licensed by Bosch, and your telling me bosch doesnt have a strangle hold of the auto software market, if anything this oss disclosure reaffirms it .the fact that some manager thought this oss discloure sure seems like a good idea is exactly the kinda thing a non tech manager guy would do in a car company.

Here are examples of the software for some upcoming cars. Prove that Bosch "controls" the software for these cars:

- Mercedes EQC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JTew1D5Tk8

- Audi e-tron GT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvNw15W_EK8

- Honda e: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEKq8jmckz0

- Volkswagen ID.3: https://www.engadget.com/2019/07/14/vw-id-3-interior-reveale...

If you can't prove it then simply admit you don't know what you're talking about.

This is no normal company though right? They are going to have a million robotaxis on the road in a year,Solar tiles,semis, news models,FSD and the stock is going to the moon.

Yet everyone is leaving?

Mostly managerial positions. Meh.

still they made thier deliveries on time , so how important were they really ??

BMW's CEO stepped down 2 weeks ago. Ford has had 4 CEOs in the last four years... not a sound from the media.

The janitor at Tesla quits and its a top story about a company in turmoil.

Even more: the BMW CEO quit basically for being completely unable to deliver on the EV roadmap and squandering the huge advantage BMW had in the field.

I don't think BMW ever had any kind of advantage in this field, never mind huge.

The i3 was reasonably good for its time, then they disbanded the team and lost their way

The i3 is a car designed to be a pure electric car (not counting the optional range extender, which did cost precious space). It came to market in 2013. So BMW clearly was only second to Tesla in bringing a pure electric car to the market. The i3 did a few doubious trade-offs but overall is a nice electric car.

In that sense, BMW was way ahead of most other car companies. If they had continued to bring out other models based on their tech, they would have a sizable offering of electric cars. But unfortunately, they mostly stopped development and had the i3 dev team leaving.

Actually BMW's CEO stepping down was very widely reported. The reason it's not news in the same way as the Tesla news is because it was very public and obvious why he was stepping down - he had basically failed. The reason Tesla's news is more interesting, is because its unexplained. Which means its probably a leading indicator of some news to come. Either dozens of Tesla execs have all suddenly had their own 'A christmas carole' moment and decided to spend more time with their families, or there's something more at play.

BMW does not lose half a billion in a quarter and sells it as a huge success.

> Ford has had 4 CEOs in the last four years...

I count two.

Jim Hackett: May 22, 2017 to present (CEO) Mark Fields: July 1, 2014 to May 22, 2017 (CEO)

> Ford has had 4 CEOs in the last four years... not a sound from the media.

You must not read a lot of news

I'd say a big draw of Tesla is their well executed styling, both inside and out. I'm not sure if his purview was design, QC, supply chain, or all of the above for interiors, but thats akin to say, the VP in charge of displays leaving apple. Big portion of the product.

But I'm not in the hardware biz so /shrug

There is only one executive left from their proxy filing one year ago: Elon Musk.

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