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Welcome Chris Lattner

tesla.com

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Re: Welcome Chris Lattner

#151

Post by Cyph0n »

stupidcar wrote: post #145
Cyph0n wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can you boast any such achievement in your own life? That was an unnecessary remark; the commenter never claimed that he/she has achieved more than Musk.

The commenter claims Musk hasn't achieved anything at all, other than give some tech demos. I'm perfectly entitled to ask what they've achieved themselves that puts them in a position to so casually demean what, by most people's standards, are quite considerable feats.

What OP has or has not achieved is irrelevant in my opinion. I think it's better form to just refute the criticism and leave OP out of it. But it's up to you of course.

Re: Welcome Chris Lattner

#152

Post by RivieraKid »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #80
celticninja wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Elon Musk is what Steve Jobs wanted to be. Steve Jobs thought he was changing the world with the iPhone, and while it was new it wasn't world changing. What Elon Musk does is world changing.

Probably not a popular opinion, but I think Musk is overrated. The guy has a huge ego, just like Jobs had, and while he's putting it into a nice package, he's not the guy to come up with anything; electric cars, spacecraft etc. Yes, he might change the world if/once he gets to Mars, but most of his stuff is a marketing tech demo. Bell Labs changed the world. Tesla did not.

Of course he doesn't come up personally with, say, rocket engine innovations. But what he does is orders of magnitude more valuable - motivating people, making good high-level decisions (because he's smart and knowledgable in multiple areas such as engineering, design, marketing), getting the right people work for him and being very hard-working.

Being a good CEO is just way more valuable than being a good individual contributor, because it multiplies the output and growth of the whole company.

And ego doesn't really matter that much in the big picture.

Re: Welcome Chris Lattner

#153

Post by devsquid »

webjprgm wrote: post #128
devsquid wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ARC is a whole debate, but the one thing it is not is simple and I would argue its more error prone than a traditional GC. I've used it for most of my career and I have seen what sloppy/unaware coding can do to it. Lattner is a well known expert on compilers. Having used Swift since its inception, I would call into question the reliability of the Swift LLVM compiler. In its current state (3.0.2) its absolutely terrib…

I'm not sure I would say Swift is the kind of robust that is needed for safety critical software, but it is a nice step forward for application code. It mostly forces you to deal with things safely while still allowing Objective-C dynamic behaviors when you need to get around the restrictions (often to interact with other Obj-C code). So, yes I can see why one would call Lattner at the forefront of making more reliab…

Sure Lattner and Musk are interesting people, but I find the level of hero worship in the tech industry to be sickening.

Having used compilers for a few new languages (Rust, Go, Dart, Kotlin, Swift). Swift is the only one I've had any issues with as well as Swift seems to be the only language to have adopted the "move fast and break things" philosophy of Silicon Valley. I dunno, I just don't see the argument.

Re: Welcome Chris Lattner

#154

Post by jonstewart »

adamnemecek wrote: post #36
gtrubetskoy wrote: post #23

There's got to be more to this story. You don't spend years developing a language (Swift) as culmination of previous work (LLVM) and then abandon it for a job in a relatively new and different discipline. It doesn't make much sense to me.

He has a track record of being able to scale engineering organizations in open source and corporate environments.

Exactly. If you can lead and develop a complex, technically challenging open source project that competes head-to-head with, say, one of the top 10 most venerated open source projects, achieve parity with it (some would say surpass it), without too much drama, _at Apple_, then, well, it's probably less about the raw technical talents and more about technical taste, managerial talent, and character.

Re: Welcome Chris Lattner

#155

Post by RivieraKid »

mtgx wrote: post #139
mrkd wrote: post #32

Elon Musk is the new Steve Jobs. He is an inspirational leader and talented people want to work with him. It appears it will be harder and harder to attract and keep talent at Apple with out a leader like Steve Jobs.

This is why I think Apple missed its chance to buy Tesla and make Elon Musk its CEO at the same time. I can't even imagine what Musk would do with Apple's $200 billion in cash. I think he would've been much more daring with that money than even Steve Jobs would've been. But I think Apple missed its shot, and the merger of Tesla and Solar City probably sealed that for good. Now Musk is probably already seeing a 10-20x…

That's a really good point, what would Musk do with $200 billions.

It's questionable if he would be the profit-maximizing CEO choice for Apple though.

Perhaps he wouldn't even want the job (if we ignore the cash), because the smartphone and computer industry is maturing, i.e. tougher competition, decreasing rate of innovation, maintenance mode ahead.

Re: Welcome Chris Lattner

#156

Post by Steko »

mrkd wrote: post #32

Elon Musk is the new Steve Jobs. He is an inspirational leader and talented people want to work with him. It appears it will be harder and harder to attract and keep talent at Apple with out a leader like Steve Jobs.

> He is an inspirational leader and talented people want to work with him.

This is a convenient narrative when Tesla makes a high profile hire but they've also lost a lot of talented engineers and I don't remember the convention wisdom being that it was because of Elon's shortcomings.

Re: Welcome Chris Lattner

#157

Post by RivieraKid »

_1 wrote: post #31
Etzos wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you explain why you think there will be a cultural conflict? Do Tesla engineers typically act in ways counter to being nice and humble?

It's more like the person above than the people below.

Those two personality types can work fine actually, I think. Two egoistic-ish people working together is much more likely to be problematic.

Re: Welcome Chris Lattner

#159

Post by sudeepj »

Being a Rust-lang fan, I would have loved to see him join the rust-lang group (which I am not a part of). I thought there might be a chance of this after I saw the post of him leaving Apple.

Re: Welcome Chris Lattner

#160

Post by pkaye »

mrkd wrote: post #32

Elon Musk is the new Steve Jobs. He is an inspirational leader and talented people want to work with him. It appears it will be harder and harder to attract and keep talent at Apple with out a leader like Steve Jobs.

How does Telsa compensation compare to Apple?
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