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Ask HN: Would You Work for Elon?

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Re: Ask HN: Would You Work for Elon?

#91

Post by haggy »

mcphage wrote: post #64
bheadmaster wrote: post #19

Considering that Elon puts a lot of focus on ability and skill over formalities and organizations, and that he believes that small team of highly-skilled highly-motivated people can often (always?) out-perform large teams of moderately-skilled moderately-motivated people, I'd say yes. I find a lot of joy in working on challenging problems without having to deal with bureaucracy bullshit. I have a feeling that Elon li…

> Elon puts a lot of focus on ability and skill over formalities and organizations I'm curious what this means to you, because when I see people from inside Twitter correct him on Twitter, with specific technical statements describing what's going on—and then he fires them—that seems like formalities way outranking ability and skill.

This ^^^ My answer to this question would have been a VERY weak "Yes" before the Twitter disaster. Now that we're seeing the true Elon alongside real engineer feedback, it's a HARD no.

Re: Ask HN: Would You Work for Elon?

#92

Post by staunch »

dmarchand90 wrote: post #8

In 2008, absolutely. Today? I really have the impression he has last touch. I'm also too old to want to deal with his extreme working hours. All that said, yes, I would if the pay was right XD

Yeah, it's a very important point that he has changed, a lot.

Elon Musk's trajectory is a lot like Alexander the Great's. He started off as the somewhat scrappy upstart and has become the somewhat corrupted corporate despot.

His enormous success, which has been truly amazing and largely good for humanity, has led him astray. He's bought into the image of himself as a genius that can do no wrong. He's become arrogant, temperamental, and prone to impulsive behavior.

Alexander became quick to kill his managers that pissed him off. Elon Musk just fires people, thankfully.

Probably a lot of his problems are due to the same kind of "men [that] have always corrupted the character of kings and will never cease to ruin the interests of those who happen to be reigning" as Arrian wrote of Alexander's yes-men courtiers.

My impression is that Musk is going through a severe case of burn out and this is how he's responding. And since he's got so much pressure on him there's no practical way for him to take the break he needs without risking everything.

Re: Ask HN: Would You Work for Elon?

#93

Post by phailhaus »

Nope, it's pretty obvious that he's not capable of handling criticism and thinks he's smarter than everyone else. The Twitter Blue rollout was an absolute disaster that everyone saw coming, and it is hard to believe nobody told him "if you only have to pay to get verified, everyone will make fake accounts." (Update: we now know they did. [3]) Shocking that he didn't think of it himself given his "genius" reputation.

And while he finds criticism from his employees unacceptable [1], he has no reservations against casually disparaging his entire team in public: "Starlink is rebuilding the Internet in space, so maybe I know slightly more than some guy who wrote code for a website" [2] Remember, he's referring to his own website here, and suggesting that he understands Twitter's infrastructure better than its own engineers because he owns Starlink. The narcissism on display is astounding.

There is nothing I would learn under Musk that I wouldn't be able to learn elsewhere without the toxic environment and the burden of having to walk on eggshells around a fragile CEO.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/11/musk-fires-twitt...

[2] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1592564281698299904

[3] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/11/musk-ignored-twi...

Re: Ask HN: Would You Work for Elon?

#94

Post by agentwiggles »

Nah, I'll pass.

Not due to any political or moral stance, or even because I don't particularly like the turn his personality seems to have taken over the last few years. But just because the man seems to expect tireless 80 hour a week workers, and I'm not interested.

I'll take my 36-40 hour weeks for half the pay and smile all the way to the bank.

As for the public firings of Twitter employees - I think it's a bad look for both sides. Elon comes off as an insecure and vindictive douche, and the employees who seem surprised when their public dissing of the company they work for results in firing come off as naive and vaguely stupid.

No win situation really. It should not be a surprise to people that public criticism of your employer can and does get you fired. I won't take a stance on whether that's right or wrong, but it's the game we're all playing.

Re: Ask HN: Would You Work for Elon?

#95

Post by zmxz »

muglug wrote: post #73
zmxz wrote: post #57

Yes. Twitter is unprofitable. People working there come off as lazy and entitled. They openly attack Elon, not contributing anything tangible except "rich man evil, worker good". Previous management wasted investor's money. Culture born in Twitter is awful, it's as if no one is proud of their work and low performers are loud and toxic. I have no problem with Elon's stance, I don't even view him as narcissist like som…

You think Twitter is unprofitable now? Just wait until all the advertising dollars disappear because of Musk’s behaviour.

I don't really care about Twitter as whole, it's a bad company from any aspect. It was unprofitable before Musk and it would go bankrupt. I don't really care what he'll do with it, if he'll delete it in the end or not. Point is: remove Musk, Twitter still dies. Previous management was bad, employees were bad too.

Re: Ask HN: Would You Work for Elon?

#96

Post by dale_glass »

FredPret wrote: post #72
stephc_int13 wrote: post #18

His management style is not the worst thing about the guy. If all the legends about him were true (superhuman BS detector, genius level IQ, laser sharp focus) I'd be happy to be part of the team. Unfortunately, I think his main talent is the uncanny ability to overhype himself. He is lucky that a side effect of this ability helped him hire and motivate really good engineers. Thay might not be sufficient in the long r…

I don’t get what people mean by this. I have mixed feelings about the guy, but vaporware? Are the rockets not real? Are the cars and solar panels and tunnels and Paypal not real? Of course he didn’t single-handedly do this. Of course other engineers were invaluable in the process. But he forced Tesla and SpaceX into existence when everyone thought it was guaranteed to fail. We saw people trying with electric cars and…

> I don’t get what people mean by this. I have mixed feelings about the guy, but vaporware? Are the rockets not real? Are the cars and solar panels and tunnels and Paypal not real?

Rockets are real.

Cars are real, but aren't particularly good given the reports, so he'll likely run into trouble with the competition soon.

Solar panels seem to be doing very so-so, the reports I've heard is that their solar roof stuff is very troublesome.

The tunnels suck. He dug extremely narrow deathtraps that for some reason are driven through in a car, and that will kill people as soon as there's an accident.

Re: Ask HN: Would You Work for Elon?

#97

Post by baremetal »

Jeremy1026 wrote: post #3

I'd do a ~6 month stint at Twitter in a couple of months. Once he burns everything to the ground and realizes he needs bodies and has to pay for them. I'd go there, work as little as possible while pulling a paycheck, then go back to my regular type of job.

> I'd go there, work as little as possible while pulling a paycheck, then go back to my regular type of job.

Ethics, self-respect, integrity.

Re: Ask HN: Would You Work for Elon?

#98

Post by eric4smith »

groby_b wrote: post #80
eric4smith wrote: post #50

Yes. A big part of being a business owner is that you fall on the spectrum of being an asshole. A little bit or a lot. It takes being an asshole to do large things. And people end up hating you for it. The bigger things you do, the bigger of an asshole you end up being. Quick, name me the leader of a large company who is not an asshole… And if they are not publicly one, privately they are. The traits of a leader requ…

Having worked with people who built (and build) extremely large things - not true in my experience. While the corporate landscape is conducive to sociopaths, it certainly doesn't require them. So, yes, go find another job is the right answer - because we all deserve to be treated with respect.

You just don’t know them enough as yet.

Re: Ask HN: Would You Work for Elon?

#99

Post by xdavidliu »

mcphage wrote: post #64
bheadmaster wrote: post #19

Considering that Elon puts a lot of focus on ability and skill over formalities and organizations, and that he believes that small team of highly-skilled highly-motivated people can often (always?) out-perform large teams of moderately-skilled moderately-motivated people, I'd say yes. I find a lot of joy in working on challenging problems without having to deal with bureaucracy bullshit. I have a feeling that Elon li…

> Elon puts a lot of focus on ability and skill over formalities and organizations I'm curious what this means to you, because when I see people from inside Twitter correct him on Twitter, with specific technical statements describing what's going on—and then he fires them—that seems like formalities way outranking ability and skill.

that reminds me of something interesting I got from reading the Walter Isaacson bio on Steve Jobs. WI generally portrays Jobs as petulant, narcissistic, and mercurial, but one area which Jobs was willing to back down was when it came to conflicts about product quality: in several instances in the book, an Apple employee gets into an argument with Jobs about what design choices are better for the user, and when the employee gave a clearly irrefutable argument, Jobs actually backed down and acknowledged that the employee's argument was superior, and I took this as evidence that, as egotistical and self-centered as Jobs was known to be, he really did put product quality and UX first.

On a related note, I heard in a podcast recently that Walter Isaacson has been following Musk around for a bio.

Re: Ask HN: Would You Work for Elon?

#100

Post by zmxz »

mcphage wrote: post #85
zmxz wrote: post #57

Yes. Twitter is unprofitable. People working there come off as lazy and entitled. They openly attack Elon, not contributing anything tangible except "rich man evil, worker good". Previous management wasted investor's money. Culture born in Twitter is awful, it's as if no one is proud of their work and low performers are loud and toxic. I have no problem with Elon's stance, I don't even view him as narcissist like som…

> Elon's not someone who'll fire a person who is good at what they do. And if he measures that by "number of lines of code written", do believe that is an accurate measure of how good a programmer is at what they do?

I find it unbelievable how apparently smart people are disconnected from context.

If you genuinely believe he did that to measure performance then I've nothing to tell you.

I understood that as an exercise to prove that Twitter employs engineers who don't write a line of code for months and it turned out to be true. It was an easy way to weed out lazy, entitled or otherwise useless employees who are just a waste of money. Which is how Twitter managed to get into such a bad financial position - wasting money for unnecessary expenses.

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