Hacker News Reader

Comment by asgr | Hacker News Reader

Results speak for themselves. If Musks style is inferior, why are his companies doing so incredibly well?

The article discusses Twitter specifically. By practically all measures, Twitter (now X) is doing worse than before Musk acquired it. Indeed, Musk's creditors have downgraded the value of the investment multiple times. Financially, the acquisition has been a bust. It's been pure self-destruction.

Another thing about Twitter/X that most people don't realize is how little it has changed. Superficially it's changed, including a new domain name, but the actual code and operation seem to be more or less the same as before. And in fact some of the new features that shipped after the acquisition were already in the works before the acquisition. Years ago I wrote a Twitter-specific web browser extension, and aside from the change in domain name, the extension continues to work almost perfectly. In a way, it's shocking how little has changed.

There's a sibling comment that says the following: "i’ve been the arsehole who demands high standards and then lambasts folks when they don’t achieve it."

Then goes on to say that this is a bad way to get anything done

That seems obvious

I think what Musk does isn't this. I think Musk has high standards, then gets rid of people who don't meet them. Then tries to find and hire people who do meet them

If you can actually find people who do live up to incredibly high standards then you will very likely have a successful company

Frankly, the answer to this seems mundane to me. I served in the Army and put up with hardship and abuse on a level no engineer would ever consider acceptable, and so did everyone else in my organization. Why? Because we deeply believed that what we were doing was worth it for the larger good of country, something bigger than us. It's the same reason athletes in sports that pay shit or nothing at all will do it, or parents will sacrifice, suffer incredible hardship, and sometimes die for their children.

When I moved to my current house, my neighbor had been an engineer for Tesla, but he burned out and decided to renovate his current house, which had an unused barn, into a destination bnb. I talked to him a lot about his experience and why he did it in the first place. He and other Tesla engineers were true believers. They were leading a green revolution that was going to save the world. SpaceX is in a similar situation. Achieving viable large-scale space travel is a literal moonshot that nerds dream about.

It's no mystery either why his antics have failed at Twitter. Nobody at Twitter believes that 140-character microblogging will save the world. They don't get to go to work feeling like firefighters or astronauts. They'll work for pay and comfort, not for mission.

This is HR speak and from my experience, "technical" people talking about these topics tend to be overcompensating for lack of competency, or interest, in their domain. Its objectively easier to talk about this stuff all day vs coding or being knee deep in the guts of systems. My last job was big on this and many engineers with high "EQ" were rapidly promoted into middle management roles. Lets just say, the promotions were short lived because a "reduction in force" followed. This isn't an excuse to be a jerk, but the industry has over indexed on HR/psychology talk and real hardcore technologists don't give a shit. Fortunately many of these firms are super upfront about these things, like on their career page, or if you feel inclined, look at their leaders/manages on linkedin - they put this stuff on blast all over their profiles. A little research goes a long way.

I wrote a piece on this exact point and how much you should actually worry about EQ:

Technical and cognitive skills are clearly "threshold factors" that cannot be ignored— they get you in the game and let you keep playing it. While they might not be sufficient, they sure are a necessary condition for success in most domains.

In order to stand out on your EQ skills you have to be first competitive on your technical/cognitive skills. It will be tough to compete just on your social skillset.

EQ is probably not a differentiator at lower levels and early stages of your career. Technical chops, cognitive skills and execution will probably help you stand out more. It's only when you move on to the managerial and executive ranks that EI/EQ starts becoming a differentiator, what Goleman calls a "discriminating competency".

Even at higher levels, EQ is not a given. Where it can probably make the most impact is in avoiding pitfalls once you get there, what researchers call “leadership derailment", rather than being an active mechanism in reaching there.

More here: "Misled and Oversold on Emotional Intelligence" https://www.leadingsapiens.com/ei-vs-iq-misperceptions/

Just because a person lacks social skills does not mean social skills magically become unimportant. For all technologists like to brag about their world being black-and-white and that technical chops are the be-all and end-all, this is only true in very specific roles. For everything else, you have to deal with actual human beings, and in this case "this is the way I am, get over it" is generally a very poor strategy.

Despite & not because of?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com