Every time Elon Musk makes this kind of announcement, his engineering departments groan.
As I understand, they have folks actively managing Musk trying to prevent him from promising the moon :)
As I understand, they have folks actively managing Musk trying to prevent him from promising the moon :)
The engineers "thank you" comes in many forms. The fulfillment of the job. The privilege to work on cutting edge tech. The satisfaction of their customers. Their salary and so on and so forth.
Irrelevant
> The privilege to work on cutting edge tech
Irrelevant
> The satisfaction of their customers
> Their salary and so on and so forth
Irrelevant, that is/was part of their contract regardless of outcome (otherwise R&D departments wouldn't exist, failure tolerances wouldn't exist, etc).
Musk merely gave directive, he didn't implement or do this R&D on his own. Calling this Musk's success is like saying Einstein design and built the atom bomb thus he is solely responsible for the death of many a Japanese. But society doesn't take that point of view, instead only that he contributed to it, not that he owned it through and through. A good leader leads their subordinates, but they are not the sole factor in their subordinates achieving success. If a leader does not recognize their subordinates, they will soon find they have no subordinates to lead.
The more technical the crowd the more you hear this kind of thing but it really does bear mentioning that if these engineers could be doing it without these figureheads then really, they should do that.
They fact that it's plausible has no bearing on the fact that it is often simply not the case.
Why did Apple nearly fail before Jobs return?
Why are Tesla and SpaceX a direct result of one mans vision?
I'm not saying that no one else is involved in these businesses, I don't think anyone is stupid enough to assert that these are not examples of fantastically great organisations made up of brilliant engineers and probably project managers and lawyers and all of the other parts that make up a great companay but yet the fact remains that the 'figurehead' is there.
Why is that if these 'figureheads' serve no purpose other than to court the media?
This is an oldish thread, but I want to point out that the main reason engineers need figureheads is to attract capital. The second reason is to unify the engineers toward a common goal.
I do believe engineers deserve a lot more credit from society, and also that engineers underestimate the contributions of non-engineers. I feel that the subtly snide way you worded your statement ("really, they should do that") is needlessly derisive to both groups.
I hadn't intended to insult anyone and in terms of derision, I am certainly in no position to be doling it out.
Going back to the comment in question though, it is kind of the crux of the matter as I read it.
There are some posts further up that are very sarcastic about the contributions of these 'figureheads' and my statement to those people stands for itself: if these 'figureheads' are not necessary then do it without them.
I go on to provide very popular examples of where this simply isn't how things work.
Note that I have never even so much as intimated that it couldn't work like that just that it doesn't often seem to.
I will admit that there is perhaps some of my own insecurity slipping in here. As someone with a technical background who now works in a less technical capacity I think I may have taken some of these comments personally and allowed for them to pile onto an already toppling pile of impostor syndrome type thinking.
The fact remains though that to build something you need engineers, you also need architects, you also need someone to bankroll the project. Asserting that one or more of these players are more important that others does seem illogical to me and it would probably take a lot to change that outlook on my part.
I like him, he has done well but his PR has done even better.
It's the visionary's job to convince them that we people only think the impossible things are impossible.
That's basically how I do my internal dialogue. I shoot down an idea of mine because it's too brittle, vague, and difficult. But I still want to build that something. So, I keep thinking and end up saying to myself, "Well, maybe I could do something that's like an ugly partial implementation, just leaving out the hardest things: it won't be what I want but I can write something that resembles it." And then I write the first prototype and end up having something here to play with. However, I still keep wanting more and maybe I get an insight that allows me, having first played with the first build, to make a better approach with a new set of tradeoffs but such that will get me closer to what I want. Gradually I approach what I want, possibly never quite reaching that point, but still getting closer and closer.
While I don't disagree with you, context matters greatly here. This is the same logic of every middle managing pawn or upper management narcissist who self-styles him or herself the "visionary" you describe. Someone like Musk has the technical aptitude and experience to accurately assess what is technologically possible or impossible and estimate how much it will cost and how long it will take. He has also surrounded himself with highly talented technical people who, from what I can tell, he listens to.
Unless someone has previously envisioned and brought to fruition some visionary product or service, we should remember that the most likely explanation for their insistence that the seemingly impossible is possible is some combination of their ignorance, incompetence, and narcissistic delusion.
And the latter is what you'd presume by default of a manager. It might not be true of Musk in particular, but in absence of explicit evidence to the contrary, it's likely, which is why this kind of overeager optimism can be downright scary-sounding coming from a high-level corporate executive.
I have a feeling that, like you said, Musk listens to these people. Maybe he actually knows their potential better than they know it themselves; knows what they can pull off when driven, that they wouldn't think (or especially claim) themselves capable of otherwise. Maybe, in other words, he's like the protagonist of some military ensemble drama series. (Jack O'Neill in Stargate SG-1, say.)
And given how successful he is, maybe he is that guy! Someone's gotta be. But that guy is really rare. Most corporations, sadly, don't have that guy anywhere in them. And without that guy, you've just got unrealistic promises, followed by flops, followed by finger-pointing.
“Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?”
Robert Browning, from Men and Women and Other Poems
... he does it not because it is easy, but because it is hard!
For his engineers.
Not so much for him.