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Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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.

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Then that means that office politics optimizers were able to make Boeing, Lockheed, and NASA look like jokers at something they'd been doing for decades.

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.

Or maybe it's just the ones who left?

Or fired.

This is a common fallacy. Modern businesses are enormous and succeed or fail for all sorts of reasons. Trying to figure out who is actually responsible for the success of a company is difficult. Just because a company is successful, doesn't mean every employee of the company is great. It's essential to understand what the dynamics of an industry is in order to understand why a company is successful. In the case of SpaceX there's no doubt there are some people there who are great engineers. But that's probably not why they beat Boeing.

A real-life reusable rocket that lands back on the pad was an exciting project to be a part of, no matter if you were doing it in a virtual sweatshop.

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.

They've only "cornered" access to LEO because they vastly outperform the competition in almost every conceivable category. That should get you a short term monopoly.

Yep. Yep. and Yeah… I didn’t quite succeed at making that sound like I was still a fan. I’d still work on these things given an opportunity. For sure.

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”

Business success often only requires that you be less bad than your competition.

Or maybe SpaceX did that despite being held back by those people. NASA's management is rather infamous too so it's not like they're competing against much there. Every time NASA's managers gained too much influence over the engineers people actually died.

Engineers are pragamtic as profession. Managers are glorified sales, their primary product is selling their team and move the goal post forward.

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?

> Construction is the one step that cannot be easily cheated

This is a great quote, btw.

In a sense, this is the organisational fallacy, of our time.

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.

What was the ACTUAL lesson with these two? I can guess your intent, but could you specify? Also I think the grand father version instead of the baby version. Apple is massive...

* Build something people want and will pay for.

* 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.

Where do you work?

Sadly I've ranted enough on this account that it needs to remain anonymous.

Thanks for this, well distilled. I used to be anxious about how the handful of folks I knew running breakout companies all leaned heavily towards asshole. Was it a necessary but not sufficient trait to achieve great performance?

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.

"More revenue solves all known problems" -- Eric Schmidt

"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.

From what I understood SpaceX was founded by some brilliant engineers and Elon just became the poster boy with no actual engineering credentials. Undoubtedly he is business-savvy but it seems not that surprising managers who take credit for the engineers' work might thrive there.

Patently false.

1. https://twitter.com/lrocket/status/1512919230689148929

2.https://twitter.com/lrocket/status/1099411086711746560

3. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Mueller

Tom seems brilliant but I wouldn't refute my argument based on a single datapoint. I've seen non-technical managers being able to hold conversations and make insightful comments having been around engineers for so long. A little bit like ChatGPT, now that I think of it. And they definitely can serve as a counter-balance to over-engineering.

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.

> Tom seems brilliant but I wouldn't refute my argument based on a single datapoint.

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.

All right sir. You seem to hold a strong opinion about the subject, i do not. I find it funny rebuting me by using term mental gymnastics but i find this debate fruitless to pursue. A speculating outsider on interwebz. Okay. Sure.

Got any source for further reading? Everything I can find says that Musk founded it and was heavily involved in the engineering.

I based this on the intuition witnessing his incompetence managing Twitter. For a great engineer, he certainly lacks awareness that I attribute to either ignorance or being more accustomed to handling things in abstract - not in practice.

>> 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.

Lol. Sounds like he indeed worked very closely with Mr. Musk.

Selection bias on who decided to leave / got removed from the organization vs who opted to / could stay inside it?

> Some were just abusive managers

> 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.

Still anecdotal but most of the managers I've worked with were very much decent people. Not all of them extremely efficient, but definitely decent.

Same for me. I worked with managers who mostly tried to do a decent job, some failed some succeeded, some were incapable others were good even when working at 50% of their capacity.

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.

Curious, but what kind of companies were these?

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.

(I'm not going to count my time in academia)

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).

>During my 20 years I had maybe 3 people out of the 100

Pretty much seems to reflect the general populace. The figure seems to be actually better than the general populace.

You must have bad luck. Many middle managers are previous ICs who are still trying to pay the bills -- they're not automatically bad people. Consider also that bad companies hire bad people -- so maybe you could consider that as well.

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...

And yet their rockets really work!

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