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Ask HN: Would You Work for Elon?

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Re: Ask HN: Would You Work for Elon?

#161

Post by AbraKdabra »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #111
FredPret wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The rockets and the cars are real. -Tunnels are BS -Hyperloop is dumb BS -TeslaBot demos are embarassingly bad -Neuralink seems to be BS -Solar Tiles are BS -The PowerWall is semi-legit but overpriced -The roadster/semi/cybertruck are suspiciously late -A lot of the Mars plans are weak/delusional

Yeah, and Gmail started as an April Fools prank, remember? You call it BS, I call it "no one is innovating as much as this fucking guy", go figure.

EDIT: The guy is sending rockets to freaking space and has a fleet of satellites that provide intenet, are you not entertained??

Re: Ask HN: Would You Work for Elon?

#162

Post by emptyparadise »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #81

Not only should we not work for these people, we should actively take their power from them by organizing and supporting each other as much as possible. It's crazy to me that our profession fights unionization despite repeated, predictable and consistent anti-worker, antisocial, narcissistic, ego driven companies that grind us up and spit us out Giving someone unvested RSUs with no voting rights, in third class stock…

remaining twitter engineers unionizing would be the funniest thing in the world

Re: Ask HN: Would You Work for Elon?

#165

Post by it »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #82
elif wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you take the side of every cringing junior engineer as gospel, Elon's technical explanations can only be believed to be deceit.

sasha solomon is legendarily competent. I've never even worked with her but she's one of the handful of engineers I know by reputation because everyone I work with who has worked with her is awestruck by how good at her job she is. "cringing junior engineer" indeed.

Maybe so, but I still don't see the gaslighting.

Re: Ask HN: Would You Work for Elon?

#166

Post by bheadmaster »

nashashmi wrote: post #143
bheadmaster wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm curious what this means to you In short, it means that doing things better (e.g. making a piece of software faster) for the sake of things being done better is praised, not tolerated, as is the case in the many "let's just ship it, we'll fix it later" software companies. > when I see people from inside Twitter correct him on Twitter, with specific technical statements describing what's going on—and then he fire…

When the guy says stupid stuff, it would be "RUDE" to not correct him. But in his opinion, he thinks it is "rude" to correct him. He is on a power trip. I second everything you said about fostering a competitive no bs environment. Reminds me of Jeff Bezos. But Musk's behavior is toxic. Treating people outside the firm (like customers getting into accidents with self drive and losing their life, or journalists critiqu…

I'm talking specifically about publicly tweeting a passive-aggressive rebuttal whose only purpose is to imply "this guy has no idea what he's talking about", not about correcting people in general. Try doing that when your boss says something "stupid" and see how that goes for you.

Re: Ask HN: Would You Work for Elon?

#167

Post by bheadmaster »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #153
bheadmaster wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no reliable information about the current modus operandi under Musk, nor about modus operandi of any of his companies. I just have a vague feeling derived from the random information about his companies and employees I've read over the years. It's very possible that it's just smoke and mirrors, but if I were given an offer, I'd at least try it for a while. If it's true, I gain a lot - if it's false, I gain a u…

Frankly, if I were evaluating a job candidate and I saw that they joined Twitter after Elon, I’d see it as huge red flag.

Frankly, if someone judges people for working somewhere, regardless of the circumstances, I would see that as a huge red flag.

Re: Ask HN: Would You Work for Elon?

#168

Post by FredPret »

Retric wrote: post #134
FredPret wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, and then he proceeded to turn that fledgling entity into a massive industry-launching company. This is enough to be considered a business genius. Even if Tesla fails, which seems unlikely given their pile of cash and very popular cars, he has already succeeded in his stated goal of getting the switch to electric cars started.

The EV transition is all about improvements in battery technology which Tesla had nothing to do with. A big chunk of Tesla’s early revenue was selling drivetrains to over EV companies. The transition was real and Tesla successfully road the wave, props to a successfully executed business strategy but technology wise it really didn’t change much. People talk about the EV1, but the Toyota RAV4 EV was produced from 1997…

Technology is one aspect of progress. Deploying it, convincing people to adopt it, making it a viable business are all just as important, if not more.

Just as an aside, it's not possible to make more than zero cars without developing a hell of a lot of technology; especially if you mass produce them. Even if every aspect of the car is completely old hat, which Teslas aren't.

Re: Ask HN: Would You Work for Elon?

#169

Post by inawarminister »

drcongo wrote: post #160
stephc_int13 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla seems to be a moderately successful but enormously overvalued car company. Why? Because Elon himself is seen as a super-genius and a savior of humanity by a lot of people, including smart dudes like Geohot or Lex Fridman. Also, Telsa valuation is tied to L5 (full autonomy), and the TelsaBot and the impressive giga factories and the AI hype, and the Solar panels etc. But most of that will flop...

I'm really not sure we can class anyone who thinks Musk is a genius as being "smart dudes".

Geohot innovated removing iPhone sim lock (remember AT&T exclusivity>) at age 17, jailbroken PS3, and built an Autopilot-quality hardware by himself. He's now livecoding a ML library on Twitch.

Lex Friedman is Lex Friedman.

So no, those guys are smart dudes.

Re: Ask HN: Would You Work for Elon?

#170

Post by Dracophoenix »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #81

Not only should we not work for these people, we should actively take their power from them by organizing and supporting each other as much as possible. It's crazy to me that our profession fights unionization despite repeated, predictable and consistent anti-worker, antisocial, narcissistic, ego driven companies that grind us up and spit us out Giving someone unvested RSUs with no voting rights, in third class stock…

> It's crazy to me that our profession fights unionization despite repeated, predictable and consistent anti-worker, antisocial, narcissistic, ego driven companies that grind us up and spit us out

Unionization is no different from giving someone else control over your paycheck. Just as there are narcissistic bosses there are mafia-like unions and, in both cases, you're not going to know until it's too late. The benefit of the tech industry is that there's always a market for it and there are low barriers to entry. Programmers can vote with their feet. This isn't the 1950s. There are millions of choices for tech workers today that aren't street-sweeping or working for Big Blue.

> Giving someone unvested RSUs with no voting rights, in third class stock isn't meaningful.

Vested RSUs turn people into millionaires overnight. If that isn't meaningful to you, there are plenty of actors in Los Angeles that would trade their union cards for your stock.

> The capital class couldn't care less about you the person writing code or managing a team or building pipelines or maintaining dbs. Am I the only one that remembers Office Space?

The lesson I got from Office Space was that working as a spreadsheet-filling accountant was boring and soul crushing. Little to do with tech per se. In fact, what liberated the protagonists from their drudgery was one of the character's knowledge of finance and programming. Tech, in addition to managerial incompetence and a building fire, saved them.

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