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SpaceX alums are branching out and shaping the startup economy

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Re: SpaceX alums are branching out and shaping the startup economy

#231

Post by tekkk »

xedeon wrote: post #226
tekkk wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I understood SpaceX was founded by some brilliant engineers and Elon just became the poster boy with no actual engineering credentials. Undoubtedly he is business-savvy but it seems not that surprising managers who take credit for the engineers' work might thrive there.

Patently false. 1. https://twitter.com/lrocket/status/1512919230689148929 2. https://twitter.com/lrocket/status/1099411086711746560 3. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Mueller

Tom seems brilliant but I wouldn't refute my argument based on a single datapoint. I've seen non-technical managers being able to hold conversations and make insightful comments having been around engineers for so long. A little bit like ChatGPT, now that I think of it. And they definitely can serve as a counter-balance to over-engineering.

But would they be able to code a single HTML page on their own? I doubt it. They definitely know how to spec one down to the last detail, but alas there's a distinction here. And I would also argue Tom might be a little biased in his opinion. I don't particularly have anything against Elon but I'm not surprised certain type of people with personality faults gravitate towards him.

Re: SpaceX alums are branching out and shaping the startup economy

#232

Post by jeffreyrogers »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #199

- it's frankly impossible to pick investment winners - so a more sensible approach might be to provide smaller investments to more people. Governments basically do this by providing schooling and health care to children till age of 18 or so. I mean the RoI on teaching Elon to read was fairly high. I wonder if his primary school teacher could get a lien on future earnings? - if MMT is right, then the problem is not li…

> it's frankly impossible to pick investment winners

There's an entire industry of highly compensated people built around the idea that you can pick investment winners.

> so a more sensible approach might be to provide smaller investments to more people.

Banks have commercial lending departments that fill this function. Doesn't help with startup capital, but I doubt that is the limiting factor preventing most people from starting a successful business.

Re: SpaceX alums are branching out and shaping the startup economy

#233

Post by sandworm101 »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #96

Anecdotal, but: Startup I worked at hired a bunch of SpaceX and other musk company employees as middle management, during the hyper growth phase and every single one of them was simply awful. Some were just abusive managers, many were just not that effective. The worst one was a manager that would swoop down with heroics, take credit for other people's work, not support reports on ideas you had, played the blame game…

Well, they were former SpaceX people. Perhaps the good eggs are kept and these were SpaceX castoffs? But that is probably giving SpaceX too much credit. I get the sense that they simply have an insane turnover rate that sucks a little good work from everyone before kicking them to the curb. I would expect people grown in such an environment to be at least a little poisioned.

Re: SpaceX alums are branching out and shaping the startup economy

#234

Post by sandworm101 »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #108
throwawaymaths wrote: post #96

Anecdotal, but: Startup I worked at hired a bunch of SpaceX and other musk company employees as middle management, during the hyper growth phase and every single one of them was simply awful. Some were just abusive managers, many were just not that effective. The worst one was a manager that would swoop down with heroics, take credit for other people's work, not support reports on ideas you had, played the blame game…

> Some were just abusive managers, many were just not that effective. The worst one was a manager that would swoop down with heroics, take credit for other people's work, not support reports on ideas you had, played the blame game, etc. Also anecdotal, but this is identical to my experience with a handful of ex-employees of some Elon companies. They were basically office politics machines, optimized to promote themse…

>> One claimed to have worked closely with Elon, but after seeing him lie about so many other things I don’t trust anything he told us.

Lol. Sounds like he indeed worked very closely with Mr. Musk.

Re: SpaceX alums are branching out and shaping the startup economy

#235

Post by b33j0r »

SilverBirch wrote: post #153
hikawaii wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then that means that office politics optimizers were able to make Boeing, Lockheed, and NASA look like jokers at something they'd been doing for decades. If I thought this about SpaceX management and ex employees was representative of the culture as a whole,I would throw out all the modern books on managing tech organizations and go all Taylor immediately.

This is a common fallacy. Modern businesses are enormous and succeed or fail for all sorts of reasons. Trying to figure out who is actually responsible for the success of a company is difficult. Just because a company is successful, doesn't mean every employee of the company is great. It's essential to understand what the dynamics of an industry is in order to understand why a company is successful. In the case of Sp…

A real-life reusable rocket that lands back on the pad was an exciting project to be a part of, no matter if you were doing it in a virtual sweatshop.

I could see being part of that ultimate goal as being a motivation to work for the aliens from the Simpsons (don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos!)

But given the progressive nature of the projects and “for all of humanity” vision that was presented, I have always been disappointed to hear these things about the operation. I’m glad I didn’t sign up, and it was tempting.

Look at outcomes. The whole thing was _actually_ about cornering access to LEO, the whole time. And it largely worked.

Re: SpaceX alums are branching out and shaping the startup economy

#236

Post by dennis_jeeves1 »

datadeft wrote: post #150
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some were just abusive managers, many were just not that effective. The worst one was a manager that would swoop down with heroics, take credit for other people's work, not support reports on ideas you had, played the blame game, etc. Also anecdotal, but this is identical to my experience with a handful of ex-employees of some Elon companies. They were basically office politics machines, optimized to promote themse…

> Some were just abusive managers > They were basically office politics machines, optimized to promote themselves at the expense of everyone else > Obviously this isn’t unique Most middle management is like that. You must be extremely lucky to work people who are not like these. During my 20 years I had maybe 3 people out of the 100 I have worked with who were decent and looked out for the people who they managed.

>During my 20 years I had maybe 3 people out of the 100

Pretty much seems to reflect the general populace. The figure seems to be actually better than the general populace.

Re: SpaceX alums are branching out and shaping the startup economy

#237

Post by michaelt »

nebula8804 wrote: post #205
SilverBirch wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've learned to be super careful about what senior people say about other senior people. Because it actually reflects well on you to say nice things about already respected people, it's a free PR boost. It makes them sound generous and also knowledgeable. But, I've seen this happen a lot in big companies, someone will say "Well X is a fantastic engineer" or "X does great work" and my first thought is "Well that's int…

I don't know man. What breaks that argument is that multiple people make the same positive claims about Elon: That he can handle unimaginable amounts of stress that would break others, that he seems to have a breath of deep knowledge in various different engineering disciplines and that he is committed to his vision. Your theory would make more sense if everyone was making up random praise about him but the interview…

> the interviews with the three people I mentioned were conducted years apart and weirdly all mention these same praises

Or it means they had little enough good to say about him that they had to google it.

Re: SpaceX alums are branching out and shaping the startup economy

#238

Post by throwawaymaths »

robomartin wrote: post #162
throwawaymaths wrote: post #96

Anecdotal, but: Startup I worked at hired a bunch of SpaceX and other musk company employees as middle management, during the hyper growth phase and every single one of them was simply awful. Some were just abusive managers, many were just not that effective. The worst one was a manager that would swoop down with heroics, take credit for other people's work, not support reports on ideas you had, played the blame game…

Well, at a place like SpaceX you have many layers of people. First, you have people like Elon and the managers who learned from him. Elon is famous for ripping people to shreds in meetings. Yelling and screaming at them. Telling them just how stupid they are in front of the entire room. Layers of managers emulate this and treat people like shit in meetings. Not everyone, of course. You then have thousands of young fr…

> Somehow the entire thing works

This is basically cargo culting/ type I error. I've worked for companies that were explicitly NOT this way, they were just fine.

Hell even my immediate boss at aforementioned company was not that way but he was tanked by my skip boss (the musk co. Guy) and immediately my productivity tanked too.

Re: SpaceX alums are branching out and shaping the startup economy

#239

Post by xedeon »

tekkk wrote: post #231
xedeon wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patently false. 1. https://twitter.com/lrocket/status/1512919230689148929 2. https://twitter.com/lrocket/status/1099411086711746560 3. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Mueller

Tom seems brilliant but I wouldn't refute my argument based on a single datapoint. I've seen non-technical managers being able to hold conversations and make insightful comments having been around engineers for so long. A little bit like ChatGPT, now that I think of it. And they definitely can serve as a counter-balance to over-engineering. But would they be able to code a single HTML page on their own? I doubt it. T…

> Tom seems brilliant but I wouldn't refute my argument based on a single datapoint.

Sure, I agree. However, there are many other examples that you can easily look up. But I do find the by amount of mental gymnastics in your response interesting.

I think it's fair to say that the opinion of those who have worked with Elon closely for many years hold the most weight. Compared to outsiders who just speculate on the internet.

Re: SpaceX alums are branching out and shaping the startup economy

#240

Post by xibalba »

nebula8804 wrote: post #117
throwawaymaths wrote: post #96

Anecdotal, but: Startup I worked at hired a bunch of SpaceX and other musk company employees as middle management, during the hyper growth phase and every single one of them was simply awful. Some were just abusive managers, many were just not that effective. The worst one was a manager that would swoop down with heroics, take credit for other people's work, not support reports on ideas you had, played the blame game…

Man These Elon companies are really the biggest split personality companies I have seen. I have heard stories like what you describe from some people but then you have people like Astronaut Garrett Reisman, Chip Designer Jim Keller, and AI Research Andrej Karpathy all give amazing praise to Elon and his companies. And when the cars are torn down we see top tier engineering execution and innovation while at the same t…

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