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Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

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Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

#361

Post by dayaz36 »

Wow...I've lost all hope in HN. It's officially become worse than Reddit in terms of astroturfing. I don't know how you can take a story about someone inside Tesla sabotaging their operations and come out against Tesla in this situation, but somehow every single comment in this thread has manged to do that in different ways. "Tesla's fault for letting this happened!" "It's just an excuse for production delays!" "Elon's paranoid!" "Conspiracy theorist!" "Blaming short sellers is what Enron did! Leave the poor short sellers alone!"

I don't trust anything I read on HN anymore. Alright bots, now down vote me into oblivion where all the pro-Tesla comments end up.

Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

#362

Post by Rapzid »

dayaz36 wrote: post #361

Wow...I've lost all hope in HN. It's officially become worse than Reddit in terms of astroturfing. I don't know how you can take a story about someone inside Tesla sabotaging their operations and come out against Tesla in this situation, but somehow every single comment in this thread has manged to do that in different ways. "Tesla's fault for letting this happened!" "It's just an excuse for production delays!" "Elon…

Left and right extremism seems to be taking over the conversation worldwide these days. It's creeping in everywhere. What is most scary is that it is likely going to have to get much worse before it gets better..

Somebody posted this and it about sums it all up: John Cleese vs Extremism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLNhPMQnWu4 .

Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

#363

Post by detaro »

minimaxir wrote: post #4

> This included making direct code changes to the Tesla Manufacturing Operating System under false usernames and exporting large amounts of highly sensitive Tesla data to unknown third parties. How do "false usernames" work in a modern development environment where all commits are tied to a single real-world user?

Maybe "false" as in "not theirs"? Used others' logins? Found a way to circumvent controls?

Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

#364

Post by mlindner »

flyingswift wrote: post #65

I made this same comment on the other discussion. I find it concerning that one person was able to push malicious code to 'production'. To me, this suggests that Tesla, a company building highly sensitive software, does not employ basic branch policies. How is is it that these changes could have made it through a code review process and get deployed? If a company like Microsoft or Google announced that a disgruntled…

This meaning of production is different than what you're thinking of. In factories "production" is the assembly line itself.

Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

#365

Post by mlindner »

twblalock wrote: post #70

I have no problem believing that a disgruntled employee sabotaged part of the production line. But I do have a problem believing that all of the problems since the Model 3 started production were caused by sabotage. I also have no problem believing that the disgruntled employee simply wanted to take revenge by sabotaging his/her employer -- that's not uncommon, and it should not be difficult to prove if it really hap…

> I have no problem believing that a disgruntled employee sabotaged part of the production line. But I do have a problem believing that all of the problems since the Model 3 started production were caused by sabotage.

No such claim was made. So your entire post begs of fear mongering.

Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

#366

Post by danpalmer »

flyingswift wrote: post #65

I made this same comment on the other discussion. I find it concerning that one person was able to push malicious code to 'production'. To me, this suggests that Tesla, a company building highly sensitive software, does not employ basic branch policies. How is is it that these changes could have made it through a code review process and get deployed? If a company like Microsoft or Google announced that a disgruntled…

> To me, this suggests that Tesla, a company building highly sensitive software, does not employ basic branch policies.

Are they building highly sensitive software?

I would suggest that the factory automation systems would be sensitive to downtime more than anything else, and the ability to respond quickly with changes would be very valuable. Merging policies would only slow this down.

I would also suggest that there are many other internal tools, from machine learning infrastructure to small internal webapps, or supply chain management software that really aren't sensitive, and where the whole dev team having the _ability_ (whether that's used often or not) to push to master is advantageous.

Where is it not appropriate? Customer databases, HR tools, the autonomous driving software, perhaps?

Different development teams can work in areas with wildly different sensitivities and priorities, and in many cases it creates a better culture, faster delivery and more ownership to have developers able to push to master. Not always appropriate, but worth striving for when it is.

Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

#367

Post by baby »

omarforgotpwd wrote: post #68

Everyone's reaction to this seems to be "He is crazy / paranoid". He gave very specific examples of things this person did. If you were someone with a large position against Telsa, or a competing manufacturer, or an oil / gas company finally picking things up after a terrible oil price collapse, yeah maybe it makes sense to go mess things up subtly enough that the company slips a little bit closer to bankruptcy? I'm…

This is the crazy thing about the stock market in general, it incentivizes you to cheat and get dirty in a lot of ways when a large amount of your money is in it.

Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

#368

Post by mlindner »

bitL wrote: post #359
flyingswift wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we really saying that Tesla, a company building highly sensitive software, is not employing basic branch policies? How is it that these changes could have made it through a code review process and deployed to 'production'? What I take away from this is that one malicious actor was able to single handedly deploy malicious code and that there were no processes in place to stop this. That is a far more worrying issu…

Do they even use git? Maybe they run some prehistoric CVS to save costs...

No they use their own home-brewed management system. This isn't a code repository...

Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

#369

Post by mmjaa »

neotek wrote: post #320
mmjaa wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem too easily persuaded that Elon Musk is a con man. Have you taken into account the massive empire he has already built - if he were truly as nefarious as you seem to imply, its hardly likely that he would've been able to effectively build rockets that land themselves, cars that drive themselves, alternatives to the oil-addiction we're all suffering under, etc. I mean, put some balance in your argument: What h…

Buying, or investing in, existing companies and then using his marketing skills to convince other investors (and governments) to pour billions of dollars into them is hardly the same thing as "building rockets that land themselves" - you can thank the engineers and visionaries at SpaceX for that. And his cars absolutely do not drive themselves despite his constant reassurances that they'll be able to do so Real Soon…

If life were only about making claims one can fulfil, it'd be entirely boring and hardly worth any effort at all.

This predilection towards 'maximum correctness, always' seems to me to be a thinly veiled attempt at justifying totalitarianism. You don't get to the moon by doing everything you can not to break things - you get to the moon by not minding if things break, if it means you can improve conditions in life. We wouldn't have gotten to the moon, maybe, if the Apollo 1 incident didn't occur - perhaps if it hand't been so serious, it would have hamstrung the program later on in history. But, we learned from the incident, redesigned things, and radically improved the state of the art at the time.

The same is true now, of Elons' efforts - certainly he has made many big leaps in terms of projected goals and plans, but - so? Have you, with as much visor as you profess, not noticed the many, many times that Musk&co. have learned from their big mistakes, fixed things, and radically improved things as a result? How many times do there have to be big booms on the pad to satisfy your lust for self-introspection?

Nobody ever gets anywhere by saying "you know what would be good - if we just did the mundane, boring, safe things ..."

With that kind of mentality, we'd all be running Windows.

"Objective reality" is a fallacy. Objectively, we should've just stayed up in the trees. Subjectively, I'm glad there are individuals out there to push our species above the fray, all the while ignoring the sanctity of the mob.

Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

#370

Post by supergirl »

rplst8 wrote: post #104
supergirl wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not saying he should be promoted now or before. I’m saying company culture is to blame for this or at least should be the first thing to review instead of blaming the employee immediately. what if the next person that doesn’t get promoted suicides?

Nobody is entitled to a promotion. One is promoted based on merit. And the promotee is not the judge of merit. If someone commits suicide because they didn't get a promotion then I'd argue that person is likely to unstable to be working.

everybody has a breaking point. some lower than others. if they don’t review the culture how would they know if it’s just this person or many more close to the breaking point? not getting promotion might be just one contributing factor. overwork could be another. harassment, discrimination others. they picked one that is convenient
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