Is anyone tracking former Telsa employees?
SpaceX alums are branching out and shaping the startup economy
241–250 of 283 posts
Re: SpaceX alums are branching out and shaping the startup economy
#242Earlier 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.
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.
Got any source for further reading? Everything I can find says that Musk founded it and was heavily involved in the engineering.
Re: SpaceX alums are branching out and shaping the startup economy
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hot take: The people you mentioned are hired to bring big-name cred to the organization. None of them stuck around (correct me if I'm wrong, I've only done a cursory glance just now), they all left. Eg, they're the "top tier engineering" part of the companies, and other employees (and I've dealt with these employees at Tesla in a past life, so I can attest to their terrible attitude) are the "mediocre build quality".
Astronaut Garrett Reisman worked for 7 years there and is on record stating that is all the stress he could handle.[1]: Jim Keller has a history of joining a company to start a project and then leaving once it is complete. He did this multiple times in his career and was with Tesla until they completed the self driving computer. He has also left behind a team of stellar well known people. I am not too sure about Andr…
I overlapped there with Garrett, and while our work rarely overlapped, he was certainly around and "in the trenches". My point is that, from my point of view, he was a real person rather than a figurehead.
To some extent I could say the same for Elon, who was certainly around a lot. He was more of a general visiting the trenches, though. Also a real person, but of a different caste.
I was one of those lower level engineers building stuff. I stuck around for 3 years, and left when I was happy rather than burnt out. It was my first job after school, and I wanted to try some other companies before settling down.
Re: SpaceX alums are branching out and shaping the startup economy
#244This market should be called the "space space".
Re: SpaceX alums are branching out and shaping the startup economy
#245Earlier 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 work in a industry with around 1000 engineers in that field in my location. There must be like 10 big companies where I can work in the area. Basically everyone knows each other and when you interview someone, it's easy to get the person's reputation. I just got a new guy in January (didn't do the interview myself, I was away), I know his ex boss very well and of course I phoned him to know how he's like. He depict…
This is exactly why I hate term “A-player”. There’s so much of the team and work culture that impacts someone’s capabilities.
Re: SpaceX alums are branching out and shaping the startup economy
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or maybe SpaceX did that despite being held back by those people. NASA's management is rather infamous too so it's not like they're competing against much there. Every time NASA's managers gained too much influence over the engineers people actually died.
Engineers are pragamtic as profession. Managers are glorified sales, their primary product is selling their team and move the goal post forward. As as a software engineer, I'd rather buy my next car from an engineer who designed it rather than anyone else in the chain. Not because we speak similar languages but because I know that engineer will happily list ever bit of that makes them feel uncomfortable. Engineers ma…
> Construction is the one step that cannot be easily cheated
This is a great quote, btw.
Re: SpaceX alums are branching out and shaping the startup economy
#247Earlier 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.
In a sense, this is the organisational fallacy, of our time. The baby version of this was 15 years ago, when Jobs was Musk and being an asshole was the main/only feature visionary executives emulated. Maybe the lesson is that we're bad at lessons.
What was the ACTUAL lesson with these two? I can guess your intent, but could you specify? Also I think the grand father version instead of the baby version. Apple is massive...
Re: SpaceX alums are branching out and shaping the startup economy
#248Earlier 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.
You must have bad luck. Many middle managers are previous ICs who are still trying to pay the bills -- they're not automatically bad people. Consider also that bad companies hire bad people -- so maybe you could consider that as well.
My experiences with management have been pretty positive. But I am biased: if my situation sucks -- I leave. Perhaps you stayed longer than you should have...
Re: SpaceX alums are branching out and shaping the startup economy
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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. I mean, only one of these stayed more than five years; one only stayed _two_ years. And, frankly, if you're in a leadership position in a company, you say nice things when you leave after two…
No, both Garrett Reisman and Andrej Karpathy worked for Elon for more than 5 years.
Re: SpaceX alums are branching out and shaping the startup economy
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 int…
All right sir. You seem to hold a strong opinion about the subject, i do not. I find it funny rebuting me by using term mental gymnastics but i find this debate fruitless to pursue. A speculating outsider on interwebz. Okay. Sure.