2: ...Debating Musk's Intelligence
3: ...Debating Musk's Mental Health
4: ...About Tesla
5: ...About The Boring Company
6: ...About X/Twitter
7: ...About Musk's Mars Plan
8: ...Comparing Musk To Other Famous Figures
9: Other Comments
10: Updates
1: Comments From People With Personal Experience
BlueSilverWave writes:
I remember the days when SpaceX was really ramping up university recruitment. They were the table at the career fair everyone wanted to give their resume to. Naturally, SpaceX sent a spectacular a-hole who yelled at and belittled most of the students applying. It got so bad they actually apologized about it when they held a talk at the next career fair. Turned quite a few folks off, it was a real embarrassment. Took a couple of years to wash that one out.Paul T writes:
I sometimes think about the people that knew the type of behavior going on and still stood in line and applied. I think a large part of why all those ex Musk employees and etc. still excuse various behaviors and defend him so fervently is that there is approximately no one who goes to work at one of his companies just to work a job. No one would put up with that crap for a 9-5, and now that it's so well known, no one would apply for it. It's all starry-eyed (mostly recent college grad) true believers. And the turnover rates speak pretty well for themselves […]
Some more thoughts after sleeping on this review. It's very strange... so being an automotive engineer for several of those "staid, evil" Big3 companies, one gets a very direct view of Tesla and how they have been over the years.
Something that probably ought to get talked about more: for large companies, we are among the first few hundred to buy the newest hotness from our competitors. I saw a Model X Founders' Edition fully disassembled on tables, with the welds drilled out and sectioned so we could see every single part. I've done side-by-sides with Teslas and various other vehicles, where we literally will put our part and the competitor part next to each other in a giant warehouse (all of them for a series of vehicles) and do side-by-sides. When you do that, abstract questions of genius kind of fade to the background, and you get to actual real world questions like "is this part good? Is it better than mine? What is it trying to do? How does it try to do them? What does this say about the engineer's constraints? What does this say about the company organization behind it? Where are the organizational seams? Where are the hard points that could not be changed? How do those reflect on my company, my program, what we're trying to do and the things we have to work around?"
This isn't just idle navel-gazing. Akins' Law about system interfaces is quite relevant here. Where you draw organizational and system boundaries and the restrictions you put on certain hard points can drive significant differences in a component on a table.
But out of all of that, my biggest take-away was that Teslas..... just aren't very good? Their structures up to the Model 3 are quite inefficient and don't have great rigidity. The dimensional variation is shocking (far beyond even SBU, IYKYK). The hang-on parts are generally relatively poorly performing on their own. They can't touch our structural or powertrain durability tests. Rate and handling is bad, ergonomics fails to meets package targets, NVH and sound quality are poor, and we pay JD Power far too much to find out just how bad the quality numbers are (hilariously bad). I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that most other OEMs can't make a Tesla, because our systems and processes prevent us from releasing something that half-baked.
It really makes you question the customer sometimes, because if we put out a touchscreen that failed like that, we'd rightly be ridiculed. CEOs have lost their jobs over far less.
I think Musk's genius is in two very closely related areas: getting investors to give him an unlimited checkbook, and in getting customers to believe they're doing something new, novel, and important, in a way that lets him walk past screwing up things that legacy players get right as an inevitability. The technical side? Most engineers I've met can probably accomplish it.
P.S. the interface is so slow and laggy, holy cow
>> “Since these companies already have hundreds of engineers, each specializing in whatever component they’re making, why does it matter whether or not the boss is also a good engineer?Traditional_Leg_6938 writes:
Part of the answer must come from that story above about him taking over people’s jobs. His strategy is to demand people do seemingly impossible things, then fire them if they fail. To pull that off, you need to really understand the exact limits of impossibility.”
I agree with this, and would add that it's not specific to his strategy of micromanaging folks and taking over their audaciously-scoped tasks if they can't complete them. For any tech company, a technical CEO has superpowers compared to a non-technical one (but are predisposed to a fairly standard set of weaknesses too).
Even beyond just the CEO role, in the tech industry there is a very widely discussed challenge of "technical vs. non-technical managers". The engineers doing Individual Contributor (IC) work can grow to resent non-technical managers if they don't have a sense for how hard a given ask will be to implement, and a common anti-pattern is for the non-technical product, marketing, sales, and scheduling decisions to be made without a deep understanding of the actual feasibility as it bottoms out in the technical implementation. At worst this can lead to myopic leadership ("MBA management" etc.).
At the end of the day, a non-technical manager/CEO must be good at synthesizing the team's estimates and opinions, and knowing when to defer to concerns about tactical considerations, vs. take a tactically more difficult path which will advance strategic aims. (Aluminum chassis is a great example of this kind of tactically-painful but strategically visionary decision where a non-technical leader might struggle.) In a normal tech org the CEO has to trust the CTO, and then the CTO works through layers of managers to enact their technical vision, so there are multiple hops where the CEO's vision can be lost in translation. At Tesla Musk is collapsing both CEO-CTO and CTO-manager-IC communication down to him directly talking to ICs, which (while having other obvious organizational issues) allows him to make bold technical bets and stay very aligned on what is actually possible for his ICs to do.
Coming at the same issue from the bottom-up direction, technical ICs often don't have the context of the full strategic vision, and non-technical leaders often struggle to communicate it downwards in ways that are meaningful to the technical implementors. This is another thing Musk is better than almost anyone at; taking a lofty objective and chaining it down to an individual's role. I heard a SpaceX employee giving an answer in an interview like "Our mission is to become an inter-planetary species. To do that we must first colonize Mars. To do that we need to build a heavy lift rocket (Starship). To do that we need to build a more powerful engine. To build our new engine we need this valve assembly to work; my mission is to optimize this valve to X performance requirement".
Having said all that, why not just use technical managers? The answer is that it's usually not the best use of a strong IC's time; managing is very hard, requires strong empathy, is hard to teach, and training is criminally underfunded and under-appreciated. Managing is very different than IC work; it's meetings and interrupt-driven communications and performance management, whereas ICs usually thrive on "Maker Time" where they (optimally) get long blocks of uninterrupted time to get into the flow state and think about one problem. So while a good senior IC starts to get involved in communications and scheduling and other "outwards-facing" non-technical activities, there isn't an obvious universal progression from IC to manager. It used to be quite standard to have "senior IC" as the pinnacle of technical career progression, and the only way to get promoted further was to become a manager; this turns your best ICs (technical leads, mentors, or whole-system generalists) into normally-distributed managers (i.e. some good some bad, with no expectation for them to be better-than-average). Now at least in software it's more common to have a strong IC progression track that's parallel to managers, but you still see some degree of "strong IC -> mediocre manager" career paths.
The reasons you'd favor non-technical managers also apply to why non-technical CEOs are usually better at their jobs; in most organizations, the technical work is one or maybe a handful of roles in the C-suite (you might have a CTO and a Chief Scientist, say), while there are more non-technical roles (Sales, Operations, Marketing, Legal, HR, fundraising, and so on), and the CEO needs to be something of a jack-of-all-trades between all of those; in aggregate, non-technical skills are required more than technical ones. Musk's successful companies are outliers in that they benefit from being heavily technology-focused; they are applying tech company style iterative innovation and experimentation to historically non-software/non-"tech" domains, which I believe increases the importance of the CEO->CTO->IC chain, and is why Musk's strength in that area is disproportionately impactful. Having a Musk-style technical CEO would not be useful in a traditional car company, or a sales-driven enterprise software company like SAP. (...)
I don't think most people know the general state of aerospace industry CEO's and managers. Boeing is currently run by a former hedge fund guy with a degree in accounting. Relative to the industry, Elon Musk's public statements demonstrate enormous engineering acumen for an exec. I've got a master's degree in AE and whenever he's said something in aerodynamics or structures I'm like yep, that's about right. I remember a while back Musk said something about the 787's batteries catching on fire and some MIT prof, world expert on batteries, was quoted saying, "I would have said exactly the same thing."by Various Commenters, Astral Codex Ten | Read more:
I've worked along former SpaceXers and hung out with current ones (mostly in outdoors sports). If you work in the industry, especially in LA, you run into them. I was also interviewed by Brogan at Hyperloop a while back (super nice guy). The SpaceX hiring bar for technical talent is super high and I wouldn't exaggerate to say the average SpaceX engineer is twice as talented and hardworking as the average Boeing guy. Also, pretty arrogant in my experience (versus Googlers I've met tend to be humble even if they went to Stanford). I think this really started from the top of the company and he couldn't have built this pyramid of insane talent if he didn't have an informed, critical understanding of mechanical engineering.
Image: YouTube
[ed. An enigma. If you have the interest and stamina (which I imagine few do), read the original book review referenced at the beginning of this post: Book review: Elon Musk (based on the 2017 book by Ashlee Vance titled "Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future" (Amazon).]
