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Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

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Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#221

Post by nathancahill »

snowwrestler wrote: post #161
dswalter wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cars weigh thousands of pounds and routinely drive upwards of 60 miles per hour. The success of the first iPhone or Facebook app didn't depend on using it to navigate through life-and-death situations not only for the users but also for everyone around them. There are places for 'move fast and break things'. But cars move fast already, and they can really break things.

The iPhone has to reliably connect for emergency calls and provide accurate location. That can be life or death. In fact, "Apple isn't ready to engineer phones at a life-or-death standard" was a fairly common critique of the iPhone in the early days. In response, Apple ran a little PR campaign around their radio engineering efforts--they had a web page that showed all the cool-looking rooms for testing radios, which…

That PR tour was in response to "AntennaGate" when Apple failed to engineer a phone to a life-or-death standard (well, if you were "holding it wrong").

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#222

Post by lifeisstillgood »

jackhack wrote: post #169
arcticfox wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Agree completely. Hard real time is possible with Linux, we use it for sub millisecond control of Traffic Lights. Out of curiosity, why do traffic light controls need to be that precise?

resume-driven development?

everything is revenue driven development

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#223

Post by matthewaveryusa »

So basically the code base and politics of any large (successful) company. I wouldn't want to work with this dude. It's one thing to talk shit with your coworkers and another to do it online. I'm sure everyone is trying their best and all I'm reading are rantings from an ivory tower troll that did nothing to try and change things. I'm no fan of Tesla and I've shorted them so I guess thanks?

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#224

Post by gerardnll »

ryandrake wrote: post #194
bmiller2 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work at SpaceX on avionics software, in a role very similar to OP, and my experience was similar in some respects. The tech and products were complex. The turnover rate was high and training new hires was a lengthy process. The new projects coming down the pipeline never ceased (this was during a period where FH/F9-1.1/Dragon/Crew was all under design/development and constant iteration). It was fun for a yo…

I heard the same thing about the burnout and turnover. Do companies really think they are saving money by paying peanuts, grinding people down to burnout, and then constantly having to rehire/retrain new people as the old ones leave? Meanwhile the code is a mess because nobody has been there longer than a year and there is no architecture or design continuity. Just frantic patches over other frantic patches by burnt…

Capitalism. Need for money and results. I don't think that anybody wants to burnout anybody, it's just the pressure of the whole system I guess. Money pushes to do things fast. Shareholders and clients to keep happy.

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#225

Post by dfox »

mikeash wrote: post #177
coldtea wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tesla’s infotainment and IT infrastructure is unrelated to their safety Because drivers can't get distracted and crash because of a failure in the infotainment and IT infrastructure?

If that's the standard, then almost everything becomes safety critical. Drivers can easily get distracted by malfunctioning smartphones or apps. (Or, for that matter, properly functioning smartphones or apps.) Yet the prior discussion was based on the idea that things like iPhones and Facebook aren't safety critical the way this is.

It is my understanding that two major reasons for various ugly UI and unintuitive UX in automotive infotainment systems are patents and safety certifications.

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#226

Post by debt »

ryandrake wrote: post #194
bmiller2 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work at SpaceX on avionics software, in a role very similar to OP, and my experience was similar in some respects. The tech and products were complex. The turnover rate was high and training new hires was a lengthy process. The new projects coming down the pipeline never ceased (this was during a period where FH/F9-1.1/Dragon/Crew was all under design/development and constant iteration). It was fun for a yo…

I heard the same thing about the burnout and turnover. Do companies really think they are saving money by paying peanuts, grinding people down to burnout, and then constantly having to rehire/retrain new people as the old ones leave? Meanwhile the code is a mess because nobody has been there longer than a year and there is no architecture or design continuity. Just frantic patches over other frantic patches by burnt…

“Do companies really think they are saving money“

Well they landed a rocket on a barge in the ocean so something about that model must be working right

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#227

Post by deadmetheny »

eecc wrote: post #86
phkahler wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Apparently Tesla's autopilot also runs Linux, which seems like a huge accident waiting to happen (pun intended). Not to worry, the tight control loops the require determinism all run on Arduino boards.

Not sure if you’re trolling or not. Well played

I have some good news for you - we have invented these things called "jokes", in which people make statements about things that are obviously untrue as a means to elicit a humourous response in the reader. Now you too can go forth with this knowledge and be prepared for a world in which people aren't saying obviously untrue things solely as an attempt to trick the uneducated and gullible into believing falsehoods! Good luck!

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#228

Post by haberman »

Is there any corroboration of this? Like that this is even someone who worked at Tesla? I'm certainly not discounting that it could be real, but with so many people shorting Tesla, any uncorroborated information should be looked at with a high degree of skepticism.

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#229

Post by asaph »

misiti3780 wrote: post #163
ddevault wrote: post #11

I used to work at SpaceX on the team that did a piece of software called "WarpDrive". It was a massive monolithic ASP.NET application, with large swaths done with ASP.NET WebForms and a slow frontier of ASP.NET MVC gradually growing when I was working there. This application was responsible for practically everything that ran the factory: inventory, supply chain management, cost analysis, etc. Elon is a big Windows f…

>Elon is a big Windows fan and pushed hard to run the whole shop on Microsoft tech wow - this is surprising to me and wasnt mentioned in the biography - any ideas why ?

This is discussed at length in the first chapter of Founders at Work. The chapter is written by Max Levchin (co-founder of PayPal) and discusses his bitter feud with Elon Musk over Musk's desire to convert systems over to Windows. Interestingly Musk is never mentioned by name.

https://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Early/...

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#230

Post by calcifer »

blauditore wrote: post #75

Is there any way to confirm this is actually legit? I mean, theoretically one could just make such things up, no?

If it was made up, don't you think it would be trivially easy to discredit by literally anyone in one of those teams? Not to mention Tesla itself?
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