Some were just abusive managers, many were just not that effective. The worst one was a manager that would swoop down with heroics, take credit for other people's work, not support reports on ideas you had, played the blame game, etc.
And when the cars are torn down we see top tier engineering execution and innovation while at the same time we see mediocre build quality. I just don't understand how such organizations can be both filled with terrible people and rock stars at the same time and survive for as long as the Elon companies have done so.
I mean, only one of these stayed more than five years; one only stayed _two_ years. And, frankly, if you're in a leadership position in a company, you say nice things when you leave after two years. It is What is Done. I don't think you can really read much into these sorts of statements either way; they're pretty much following a formula.
I just got a new guy in January (didn't do the interview myself, I was away), I know his ex boss very well and of course I phoned him to know how he's like. He depicted me a kind of bad picture of him.
After 3 months I agree that he's not the sharpest knife in the drawer. But unlike my friend, I'm not asking for perfect code, I'm asking for throughput and bold moves in the wilderness. With that consideration, the guy is actually ok compared to others!
I've come to learn to not rely a lot on outside advice on people, and I prefer to judge it myself in situ. The team, the company, the project or simply personal life can greatly affect someone's performances, and it is not because someone is great at company A that he will be great at company B.
As a younger self, when I heard a C-ranked executive talk about X who's a "fantastic engineer", I assumed that I'd have to work hard to reach their level, without realizing that they may actually not have a clue.
Now, when I hear a C-ranked executive talk about X who's a "fantastic engineer", I realize it's just name-dropping.
But, barring any information, my default assumption is now that it's name-dropping.
OpenAI was co-founded by Altman and Musk together at the same time, with a huge amount of Musk's money, without which it would've never gotten off the ground in the first place. Also please give a citation for this "public knowledge". I'd counter that it's instead pretty public knowledge that OpenAI basically stole Elon's money on a promise of making an AI company that wouldn't lock things behind proprietary walls, but now has turned out to be the complete opposite. Sam Altman pulled a fast one on Musk and then pushed him out of the company.
[1]:https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/24/23654701/openai-elon-musk...
> it also mentions he didn't provide anything like the amount of funding that was initially expected
Elon provided $100M, were they expecting more than that? That's quite a lot of money for an early company.
> Also, OpenAI was never a partnership between just Musk and Altman, there were half a dozen other people involved including Thiel and Reid Hoffman, there is no way that Altman unilaterally pushed Musk out. It looks a lot more like Musk wanted to be in charge, and doesn't like that OpenAI ended up succeeding without him.
It doesn't surprise me that Elon wanted to be in control, given that they started to go against the joint vision established by Sam and Elon from the get go. You mention it was "half a dozen other people", but it was Elon and Sam that were the public leaders for the vision of the company.
I was going to comment on how this article is a Musk PR move. It's quite clear why the first thing he guts in a company is PR. He has simp's that will do it for free and because there is no official PR channel, a literal reality distortion field is created because only fanbois get access to the man, the myth, the legend.
Elon Fucking Musk!
Or it means they had little enough good to say about him that they had to google it.
Which means rested, attentive employees who are not going to be "rock stars", they're going to do the job correctly and then go home because that's what's required.
Jim Keller has a history of joining a company to start a project and then leaving once it is complete. He did this multiple times in his career and was with Tesla until they completed the self driving computer. He has also left behind a team of stellar well known people.
I am not too sure about Andrej Karpathy. I dont know if we have enough of a history to know when he chooses to join and leave companies.
There must be a lot of lower level engineers who have to be developing all these amazing subsystems in the car and other products.
Wonder what the turn over is for the really skilled people. Maybe the truly burnt out people or just stragglers are the ones you are encountering.
To some extent I could say the same for Elon, who was certainly around a lot. He was more of a general visiting the trenches, though. Also a real person, but of a different caste.
I was one of those lower level engineers building stuff. I stuck around for 3 years, and left when I was happy rather than burnt out. It was my first job after school, and I wanted to try some other companies before settling down.
To stay in his circle of influence or because Elon is indeed a genius even though he doesn’t come across that way.
The company he was the VP of Engineering for was an indoor vertical farming startup (which is failing), and he moved onto a new venture in the climate space.
Poor management or not viable?
Vertical farming seems key for our future.
This has never made sense to me. Vertical farming is just greenhouses except with artificial light instead of natural sunlight. Presumably the renewable source of energy for that artificial light would be solar panels. So why not just build normal greenhouses?
CA field grown lettuce gets the farmer less than half a dollar per head. Meanwhile: https://www.montereyherald.com/2022/12/16/11-for-a-head-of-l...
Expect price increases and food shortages this year because of rains in CA. We are not allowed to plant for 45-60 days after last rains so field can dry out.
The truth is that we do have a real food shortage situation now. The vertical farms won’t make a dent in making up the gap. Not even close.
Also anecdotal, but this is identical to my experience with a handful of ex-employees of some Elon companies. They were basically office politics machines, optimized to promote themselves at the expense of everyone else.
One claimed to have worked closely with Elon, but after seeing him lie about so many other things I don’t trust anything he told us.
They were weirdly, unnecessarily ruthless in everything they did behind your back. But they were also highly polished and charismatic when addressing you directly.
Obviously this isn’t unique, but it was weird to see how consistent it was from this group of people.
If I thought this about SpaceX management and ex employees was representative of the culture as a whole,I would throw out all the modern books on managing tech organizations and go all Taylor immediately.
I could see being part of that ultimate goal as being a motivation to work for the aliens from the Simpsons (don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos!)
But given the progressive nature of the projects and “for all of humanity” vision that was presented, I have always been disappointed to hear these things about the operation. I’m glad I didn’t sign up, and it was tempting.
Look at outcomes. The whole thing was _actually_ about cornering access to LEO, the whole time. And it largely worked.
I guess around the time some of these crunchtimes have been reported, I was in some other crunchtime too!
My bias: “hey remember when we sat around and played foosball for lunch? We actually got a lot done anyway”
"The only thing that matters is product-market fit" -- Marc Andreesen
Being in a good market with the first product that can satisfy that market solves all sorts of management sins. Look at Twitter, Zenefits, Uber, WeWork, Zynga, Digg, etc. Or for that matter - how do you think Boeing, Lockheed, and NASA started looking like jokers?
Dominance in a market is usually an anti-signal for management quality, because it means you can get away with stuff that you couldn't in more competitive markets.
The baby version of this was 15 years ago, when Jobs was Musk and being an asshole was the main/only feature visionary executives emulated.
Maybe the lesson is that we're bad at lessons.
* Figure out what the product must look like early, and keep your vision consistent for a long time.
* Dive into the details of the product, and try to get quality at the lowest levels.
* Hire great and motivated people.
* Remove roadblocks that prevent people from moving quickly.
Those are the real lessons.
My current job does all of these, and doesn't do the "Treat people like shit," thing that is the core culture of Elon's companies. We move faster than the Elonverse companies, while working on a problem of similar difficulty.
I’ve come to learn that if you do the things on your list well, some people are going to see that as being an asshole.
Clearing roadblocks quickly ( and nearly all roadblocks are made of people-problems after about 50+), insisting on certain aspects of a product vision for years, and engaging in someone else’s details are all strongly correlated with annoying someone.
I also learned that the assholes I knew were just the usual mean, dunning Kruger style people that exist everywhere. Those traits ultimately meant their inner circle perpetually excludes the kind of really great people you’d want to surround yourself with.
As as a software engineer, I'd rather buy my next car from an engineer who designed it rather than anyone else in the chain. Not because we speak similar languages but because I know that engineer will happily list ever bit of that makes them feel uncomfortable.
Engineers main task is to physically make something.
Even in software engineering something is being physically built up to run the software. We decided to call this the cloud because we let sales people define it. It ain't a cloud, you cannot fly a plane through it.
Construction is the one step that cannot be easily cheated. The machinery we build today is massive and complex so while the bureaucracy prevents a single engineer from addressing the issues, they are position to see see it.
My first question for a rocket company isn't the CEO's confidence. It is, would engineer #134 use this product with their families? Would you entrust the lives of our children to what you've built?
This is a great quote, btw.
But would they be able to code a single HTML page on their own? I doubt it. They definitely know how to spec one down to the last detail, but alas there's a distinction here. And I would also argue Tom might be a little biased in his opinion. I don't particularly have anything against Elon but I'm not surprised certain type of people with personality faults gravitate towards him.
Sure, I agree. However, there are many other examples that you can easily look up. But I do find the by amount of mental gymnastics in your response interesting.
I think it's fair to say that the opinion of those who have worked with Elon closely for many years hold the most weight. Compared to outsiders who just speculate on the internet.
Lol. Sounds like he indeed worked very closely with Mr. Musk.
> They were basically office politics machines, optimized to promote themselves at the expense of everyone else
> Obviously this isn’t unique
Most middle management is like that. You must be extremely lucky to work people who are not like these. During my 20 years I had maybe 3 people out of the 100 I have worked with who were decent and looked out for the people who they managed.
I've only had to deal with one bullshit machine and he quickly moved to another location, my guess is he is moving every time his bullshit has grown to difficult to keep up.
I have a similar experience but haven’t worked for any big tech or name brand companies. The vast majority were in the health tech space with a smattering doing things that would be considered ethically sound (ie. Solar energy marketplace).
I have had a couple nightmare supervisors who were obvious sociopaths, and have several who were incompetent, but for the most part only worked for folks with high EQ.
1. One nightmare CEO in an early stage tech startup.
2. A dozen managers at Mozilla, which ranked from "should have remained a dev" to "great managers". One of them was politically-minded, everybody else was truly attempting to make the team and the project work.
3. A few managers in a more recent tech startup, all of them good (albeit over-worked).
My experiences with management have been pretty positive. But I am biased: if my situation sucks -- I leave. Perhaps you stayed longer than you should have...
Pretty much seems to reflect the general populace. The figure seems to be actually better than the general populace.
There must be some double digit percentage of them who are genuinelly sculpted in specific way in that harsh working environment. Or you are saying that stressor doesn't make you better in any way (if you survive it).
Probability looks higher that you will find such people at ex-Space X group then other more relaxed and/or bureaucratically leaden companies, IMO.
They shower them with money because, as always, they don't know who is genuine and who is not, only results will tell but looks like a solid bet anyway, more then showering with money random engineer of ex anything.
So if you personally see a lot of failures, that doesn’t mean the VC model is failing. Although most VC funds lose money (there’s a power law for their returns too!)
Paul Graham wrote a scathing summary of VCs, and one reason for YC is to be more honest and fair (YC still aims for capitalist gains, they just play the game differently). http://paulgraham.com/venturecapital.html He also wrote that it is near impossible to pick investment winners (which is what VCs are “supposed” to do).
All the best with that!
He sucked.
Overnight he implemented all the bullshit meetings they had over there. At said meetings he wouldn't listen what people said, and he'd forget what tasks he'd tell people to focus, so the next meeting he'd scold people for wasting company time doing stuff that was not the task they had been assigned.
Layers of managers emulate this and treat people like shit in meetings. Not everyone, of course. You then have thousands of young freshly-graduated people who are in a range between not having a clue to believing they are hot shit because they come from a top university and work at SpaceX.
In the middle of all of this, you have a —-relatively speaking— small group of older, experienced people who make it all work. They work around folks who can’t create a decent Excel spreadsheet to save their lives and the “I have a Masters degree from MIT” crowd who truly need to be humbled.
Somehow the entire thing works. A reflection of society in some ways? It seems every company and society is, in some form, carried on the shoulders of a select few who actually get it and are capable enough to make it happen.
This is basically cargo culting/ type I error. I've worked for companies that were explicitly NOT this way, they were just fine.
Hell even my immediate boss at aforementioned company was not that way but he was tanked by my skip boss (the musk co. Guy) and immediately my productivity tanked too.
Sounds the type of person that typically gets promoted into those roles.
Misunderstood genius syndrome.
I guess the apple doesn't fall far from the ...