Hacker News Reader

Comment by bentt | Hacker News Reader

In a few years, if not sooner, Twitter will be right there with Tesla/SpaceX in terms of resume cachet. Everyone will see their culture has been transformed to one of rigor and performance. The "A" players will surface and they will do more with half the staff (or less even) than they ever did with 7500 people... and it will be noteworthy. Musk will be in the mix heavy for about 6 months. He'll make executive hires that work for him and then will wander back over to SpaceX as they get closer to Starship getting off the ground.

People will be flipping out the whole time and a few Twitter competitors will rise, which will be great. Each Twitter alike will take on its own culture and the bubbles will now be network wide, much like they are with big press outlets like Fox and NYT. But Twitter will be the big daddy that all the journalists are on and if you want to broadcast something it will be the best place.

View on HN

SpaceX and Tesla have no 'resume cachet'. They are widely known in engineering circles as hiring huge numbers of entry level or just barely above entry level engineers, exploiting their interest in technology to work them like rented mules until they burn out, and then discarding them. It's not a negative having worked at one of these places necessarily but unless the next employer is looking for an engineer with soul burned out of them it's not a positive either.

The social media hive mind noise does not reflect serious engineering circles.

John Carmack reflects the latter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQro0rkg2DE

George Hotz reflects the latter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P_Y8CUcqks

Andrej Karpathy reflects the latter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbxladysbTE

I work in embedded/systems software and worked in aerospace, have been in hiring committees in the Bay Area for years. While what you say about how Tesla churns Jr. engineers, SpaceX is not much like that. Also they both carry significant 'resume cachet', and I hired both in projects ran by "ex Tesla" and also ran by "Tesla haters" and making a career in SpaceX and in Tesla do signal that you are pretty serious about your performance as an engineer.

I don't like Musk, I don't like Tesla, I don't like (most of) what SpaceX does. But as a professional I can't agree with your Reddit-AntiWork-MuskIsEvil portrayal of those companies. It's just not true.

> I don't like (most of) what SpaceX does

What do you not like about SpaceX?

> SpaceX and Tesla have no 'resume cachet'.

Among hiring managers at big companies, they absolutely do.

I agree, those people saying that Tesla and SpaceX are not a great experience to have in your resume, are pushing wishful thinking to new boundaries.

At my company, I promise you someone on my team would see the resume and shout "Holy shit this guy/gal worked at SpaceX!"

This. And everyone would stand up and clap.

That doesn't differentiate between fame and infamy.

As a hiring manager I can say that SpaceX has very little cachet, but Telsa has some. At least not in the SW space. Maybe in areas more related to their domains they have more.

Hiring manager at big company: no cachet. One of the people in a team adjacent to mine got a job offer from SpaceX and rejected over perceptions of chaotic management.

That's not what is meant. The folks working at SpaceX work hard. The question is, when they look to slow down and go to another company, does having SpaceX on resume for 2-3 years vs widget maker X make it more or less likely to be hired.

The idea that spacex engineers are lazy / don't work hard etc is fanciful thinking. SpaceX being badly managed? Maybe true. But engineers at spacex? If you look at competitors like an engineer on the SLS project (which has taken 10-20 years to get to one 20B rocket launch) - no question who you'll want to hire if you are in "new space". I think for old space companies - probably still worth hiring SLS type folks just given that they will know how to deal with the paperwork of those jobs.

I would NEVER work for Tesla or SpaceX (work life balance way off). But neither would I claim they are lazy or poor engineers.

Is this a real statement? At least in SV the last few years, ex-tesla and ex-spacex in terms of getting funding for projects was a big win. Some went to apple et al as well for pretty good money.

I know of a few folks from what I would call older line engineering (thinking boeing / SLS type places) actively looking to get onto a musk company (younger folks generally pretty eager to do work).

It's pretty visable when you see NASA administrators doing presentations and then SpaceX folks (who all seem like they are in their 20's to me). Pretty clear you are getting a lot more experience at SpaceX then in the big SLS subcontractor stack for example. I'm adjacent to this space a bit and I think most of the senior folks leaving tesla / spacex (plenty of them) have all landed pretty well despite your claims.

Yeah, and then there are those that make it and stay. I doubt you hear from them. Anyone still at SpaceX/Tesla feel free to pipe in.

This comment is just plain wrong.

Twitter is not 'SpaceX' in every way.

It's 'social' and 'media' which are completely different operating environments.

Twitter is long, long established as another company.

The 'user base' of Twitter is entirely different kind of customer.

He has no 'big government subsidies' to rely on, aka neither Tesla nor Space X would exist without major budgetary support from Big Gov.

I suggest Twitter under Elon may be more profitable. Or different in some other way as well, but I'll give it only 25% chance it becomes like you're suggesting.

No company would exist with major budgetary support from the government.

Energy is subsidised, roads exist, international commerce, the internet, laws, money.

That is an extremely expansive definition of "budgetary support."

The commenter you're replying to was obviously talking about direct government payment for SpaceX services and direct government rebates for Tesla (and other electric car) customers, not infrastructure investments.

Paying for services? How communist of them.

Even if all of that is true, I'd be surprised if Musk manages to make a positive return on his investment.

However good you are, if you pay way too much for something, you're worse than someone who just didn't overpay and made no other changes.

Well, how do you measure return?

People seem to think one of three things about Elon Musk:

A) Musk is a typical rich asshole who only loves money. B) Musk is a typical power hungry asshole who loves power and money is a side effect. C) Musk is a big nerd who thinks he can solve big problems better than other people, and power and money are side effects.

I believe he's type C (Hopeful Nerd). So for that type of person, his positive return is solving the problem. He thinks he can fix social media. He thinks social media is a big problem. He thinks humans need to fix social media or they are fucked, just like if they don't get off oil they are fucked, and just like if they can't leave Earth they are fucked. Fundamentally, he does think humans are worth saving.

I would bet that the vast majority of people that choose to work with Elon believe he is type C (Hopeful Nerd) and believe in humanity as well. That's why they put up with all of his flaws and toxicity - because they believe in the cause and know it's a broken eggs == omelet situation.

Why does he have to be one of those things? None of them are mutually exclusive. You can be a big nerd with lots of money and a narcissistic power-hungry attitude. Just because you’re obsessed with money doesn’t mean you also don’t crave power (the two routinely go hand in hand as money is a form of power).

He seems to embody all three “types” fairly well.

Well it's less that HE is mutually exclusive, it's more that the polarized social media world tends to see through these extreme lenses. And probably some days he's more one than the other.

I see you only listed three options but where's the fourth: D) Musk is the saviour of humanity and everything he does is perfect and in no way, shape or form subject to criticism.

Yeah extremists gonna extreme

Why does Musk tweet lame conspiracy theories he is obviously smart enough to know are false?

> Even if all of that is true, I'd be surprised if Musk manages to make a positive return on his investment.

+1. It's hard to see how the ROI works out here. The price was 50% overvalued if not more, and Twitter has had severe problems with monetization.

On the other hand, Musk actually uses Twitter at scale unlike the previous management of the company. That might give him more insight into the possibilities than his predecessors.

I think it's about more than money for Musk. It's about influence and nudging the world closer to how it "ought to be". This is why wealthy people buy newspapers that will never make money. It's about power and influence.

And I agree with OP - all this will be forgotten when Twitter is considered an elite place to work in a few years. Love him or hate him, but the guy attracts really talented people that want to work with really talented people.

Great point. Bezos didn't buy WaPo to make money. But I think Bezos is far less idealistic than Musk. Personally, I don't like Bezos one bit, and not just because his rockets are shaped like dildos (though that does not help).

In a way, I agree. Twitter's moving into an era where they have way fewer people but also huge pressure to release a bunch of changes on nightmarishly short schedules. I guarantee there's some senior tech lead who's just been handed a "make $8/month blue checkmarks happen, you have two weeks" assignment.

In an environment like that, "rock stars" who can knock out projects in short order are going to see their careers skyrocket. But the trick is, they're going to pull this off by taking every shortcut they can. Code reviews are out, refactoring is out, performance and scalability concerns are out, etc. They will successfully launch the thing and then flee to the next glorious launch opportunity.

This will work very, very well for a while. The thing about taking on a lot of debt is that it allows you to accomplish big things in short order. But the debt will be hidden, and over a year or two, they will start to find that suddenly getting projects done is becoming nearly impossible, even compared to the pre-Musk days. And things will slowly fall apart.

It might be that all of the technical debt they're about to take on will have been worth it. Debt's a tool, and maybe making big changes to adjust their company's heading is worth it. And maybe to Musk, it's VERY worth it, because technical debt doesn't show up on financial ledgers, and he probably wants the company to look as solvent as possible.

But I wouldn't want to be a software engineer there in a year.

Good analysis IMHO. Hmmm. Maybe the plan is to flip the company before the chickens come home to roost?

This makes no sense. Tesla, SpaceX, like video game companies, are able to punch above their hiring weight because the domain is "sexy" (engineers get excited about electric cars, space exploration, and video games)

Social media just isn't these days, from an engineering perspective. The fun parts (scaling distributed infrastructure) are already old hat and it's mostly a business rules complexity problem. Most of what all these people are doing relates to complicated and boring business details. It's a corporate job. It won't pay, for engineers, in excitement, so it has to pay in money.

So I'm not sure where all these people that are so excited to work their asses off for something that will be boring for them will come from (exciting for the businesspeople, as there are very hard business problems, but not for the engineers, as there are no hard tech problems in this domain anymore).

The only option will be to do what FAANG and hedge funds have always done, and either really overpay to force top talent to care about these boring problems, or just settle for average talent with average productivity and average outcomes.

> The "A" players will surface and they will do more with half the staff (or less even) than they ever did with 7500 people

It's still not obvious to me what they did with 7500 people that couldn't have been done with 10% of that

Content moderation?

Twitter already has more "resume cachet" than Tesla/SpaceX.

Feel like there are more and more people here who know nothing about the industry.

Bahaha. Rigor and performance?? Teslas kill people. SpaceX is cool, but pays fuck all because it’s cool.

I once watched the YouTube video of musk talking about battery prices and buying raw materials on the London exchange, and I thought, wow this guy is so insightful, no wonder his companies do well. It’s not till later that I found out that everything he says is someone else’s idea that he takes credit for.

This is true of every CEO and corporate leader. They coordinate profound talent around them. That alone is a talent, and a very valuable one.

Right. Being an effective CEO is not about having original ideas. It's about selecting the best ideas, and creating a team to realize them.

> It’s not till later that I found out that everything he says is someone else’s idea that he takes credit for.

There are a zillion ideas out there. The idea (!) is to be able to pick the right ones.

For example:

1. never give up

2. don't beat a dead horse

Which idea is correct?

Tesla’s AIs save people too. And looking at the balance it’s quite good.

This reads like sarcasm

Imagine being this far down into a cult of personality and people reading it and thinking to themselves "yeah _this_ comment is fine"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com