I think he has some instinctive proficiency at the intersection of product design and PR. I wouldn't consider him an engineer.
That is to say, Elon is not an engineer.
I've no doubt Musk can talk convincingly about engines or whatever, and maybe even about physics, but I don't think he could function as a professional engineer. I'm just not getting the impression that he has much depth.
[1] discounting Carmack who is brilliant but is a different kind of engineer
Even when Carmack was Zuckerberg's "subordinate" he was independently wealthy and could do whatever the fuck he wanted, and has been for a long time. You didn't see him going around, even then, talking up Zuckerberg's engineering chops. Despite the fact that we know Zuck did in fact write a lot of the early code for FB.
Carmack is also not a "different kind of engineer". Guy is primarily famous for his software, but he had a rocket company of his own, ran Meta's VR labs which involved quite a bit of hardware, etc.
I trust John Carmack in his wheelhouse, but without knowing him better I wouldn’t trust him to fix my car or recommend a beer, just because he’s prolifically qualified at building and shipping software.
I would even argue his recent work on VR for Facebook makes me question if he’s still “got it”, considering how wildly that seems to have flopped.
I’m excited to see what he does with his new AI startup, but let’s not canonize the man.
Carmack is absolutely qualified to talk about aerospace engineering. He also knows quite a bit about cars, FWIW.
Where is the list of legendary engineers who've worked with him who say the opposite? Seriously, even one example would be interesting to me. I'm not aware of any.
I dunno how many rooms with people like Elon you've been in, but people heap praise on people like that; it's free for them to do, and makes the Elon-type feel good about themselves, which materially impacts how much money those praisers have access to.
Once you get into the rank and file engineers, where the folks have a lot less to lose by speaking their mind, the praise has been much harder to come by, and you have incidents like at Twitter, where engineers called out Musk's apparent inability to comprehend Twitter's architecture, resulting in at least one heated exchange during a Twitter spaces chat.
I trust the celebrity engineers less than I trust the nameless engineers, at least when it comes to matters of PR.
Also, not for nothing, but if you haven't seen any negative comments about Elon from "celeb" engineers, you should probably look up the stuff Woz has said about Elon, it's not all positive, at all.
That's a fair statement, it could even be true. But the fact remains, what is confidently asserted by many lacks evidence to substantiate it.
> Once you get into the rank and file engineers, where the folks have a lot less to lose by speaking their mind, the praise has been much harder to come by, and you have incidents like at Twitter, where engineers called out Musk's apparent inability to comprehend Twitter's architecture, resulting in at least one heated exchange during a Twitter spaces chat.
I think it is useful here to refer to exactly what it is that you mean. I am aware of a few such instances, but the instances I am aware of are Musk being mostly right and the engineers in question being mostly wrong. Perhaps you are aware of different incidents.
> Also, not for nothing, but if you haven't seen any negative comments about Elon from "celeb" engineers, you should probably look up the stuff Woz has said about Elon, it's not all positive, at all.
Woz hasn't actually worked with Elon. Anyway in a cursory search, I can't find the quotes you seem to be referring to. I'm not disputing their existence, but a link would be helpful to make this concrete.
I don't believe this [0], and am going to step away from this convo now.
The baseline is the median HN commenter. And Carmack's opinion carries infinitely more weight than that. I would argue it carries substantially more weight than the 99th percentile HN commenter.
The point is: All of the people who have worked directly with him and are also famous for their engineering talent in various domains respect him. I'm literally not aware of a single example in the opposite category. And I'll take the opinion of widely respected engineers who've worked with the guy over the commentariat on an internet forum any day.
But he had a way with words, seemed to have a passion for technology, and probably lied about having worked at Hewlett-Packard. "I figured, this guy's gotta be cheap, man. He really doesn't have much skills at all," Alcorn remembers. "So I figured I'd hire him." A Diet Of Air And Water Jobs was hired as Atari employee #40, as a technician fixing up and tweaking circuit board designs. One of his first roles was finishing the technical design of Touch Me, a simple arcade memory game similar to Ralph Baer's later Simon toy.
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/steve-jobs-atari-empl...