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Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

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Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#561

Post by gammatrigono »

Fnoord wrote: post #480
gammatrigono wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theranos never had a real product or sales and was a fraud from the beginning of institutional investment. Comparing them to Tesla is pointless and has been done to death.

My point certainly wasn't to compare Tesla to Theranos. I didn't mention the two in one sentence. My point is that for every good example of a success story (about startups in this case), there's a good story of a failure. And the failures are much more than the successes. If you want to discount the failures because they don't fit your narrative, then you should equally oppose the successes when they don't fit your…

Everyone knows what you're implying when you bring up Theranos in a thread about Tesla.

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#562

Post by glenneroo »

abledon wrote: post #235
misiti3780 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Elon is a big Windows fan and pushed hard to run the whole shop on Microsoft tech wow - this is surprising to me and wasnt mentioned in the biography - any ideas why ?

Yeah it was (Ashley Vance book), he chose Windows over Linux when developing PayPal back In the day because the tooling in Windows was far more advanced (visual studio IDE) due to the parallel games industry driving development on that platform

Some of the known hardships of working in the games industry seems to pervade present-day Tesla and SpaceX, particularly working over-time to get things done "in time". The upshot of SpaceX (and maybe other Musk ventures) is that devs are at least building things slightly more tangible than just pure entertainment.

Musk has even admitted as much that he prefers game developers. Maybe he see's the parallel for working overtime and uses this "perk" to his advantage? From an article from 2015[0]:

> "We actually hire a lot of our best software engineers out of the gaming industry," said SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, when Fast Company posed this question during the May 29 Dragon V2 unveiling. "In gaming there's a lot of smart engineering talent doing really complex things. [Compared to] a lot of the algorithms involved in massive multiplayer online games…a docking sequence [between spacecraft] is actually relatively straightforward. So I'd encourage people in the gaming industry to think about creating the next generation of spacecraft and rockets."

[0]: https://www.businessinsider.com/why-is-spacex-at-a-video-gam...

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#563

Post by evofx »

strlen wrote: post #289
UK-Al05 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn't actually that many sap/oracle like packages in .net Even dynamics isn't .net

There seems to be a misconception that enterprises (specifically ones where software is not considered a product) means Java and .NET with frameworks. Reality is that is this just the tip of an iceberg: a bank, a hotel chain, etc... might use Java or .NET for web applications yet great deal runs on proprietary software. Much of that software either runs on machines that are still sold and marketed as mainframes or if…

This reply really exemplifies clear thinking. It is likely you will fit the role of a solution architect, rising above the menial arguments that frequently occur between developers.

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#564

Post by jakobegger »

coatmatter wrote: post #397
coldtea wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If that's the standard, then almost everything becomes safety critical. Almost everything in a cars front panel and dashboard can be. I've read somewhere that people have been killed even because of something as quaint as the wrong placement of car ashtray.

One time I pulled up at the red light behind a Tesla while I was on a bicycle. Straight through the rear window I could see the driver and front passenger being distracted by the massive flat touch screen. The traffic light turned green, and had I been beside the Tesla, I would have beaten it across the intersection despite all that electric motor tech in the car. Anyway this little illustrated anecdote of mine aside…

I've missed the light turning green while just looking out the window (our car has no screen). As long as people are only distracted while waiting at a light I wouldn't worry too much.

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#565

Post by Fnoord »

gammatrigono wrote: post #561
Fnoord wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point certainly wasn't to compare Tesla to Theranos. I didn't mention the two in one sentence. My point is that for every good example of a success story (about startups in this case), there's a good story of a failure. And the failures are much more than the successes. If you want to discount the failures because they don't fit your narrative, then you should equally oppose the successes when they don't fit your…

Everyone knows what you're implying when you bring up Theranos in a thread about Tesla.

Lets pretend that's true. Then why mention it?

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#566

Post by coatmatter »

jakobegger wrote: post #564
coatmatter wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One time I pulled up at the red light behind a Tesla while I was on a bicycle. Straight through the rear window I could see the driver and front passenger being distracted by the massive flat touch screen. The traffic light turned green, and had I been beside the Tesla, I would have beaten it across the intersection despite all that electric motor tech in the car. Anyway this little illustrated anecdote of mine aside…

I've missed the light turning green while just looking out the window (our car has no screen). As long as people are only distracted while waiting at a light I wouldn't worry too much.

Except they're not only distracted while looking at their screen when stopped. The distraction continues after they start rolling again - one thing directly leads to another here.

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#567

Post by kpil »

bluefeather wrote: post #543
agitator wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who worked on RTOS systems and now works on autonomy. These things frighten me everyday. What frightens me even more, is the people who work on autonomy without a real grasp on determinism. It's unfortunate that the people who have the most high tech backgrounds (phds in computer vision AI, etc) applicable to autonomy, have never implemented safety critical autonomous systems outside of a research project…

SpaceX's Linux-based engine controllers at least have a decent amount of redundancy. They're all triple-redundant, and each of the three components consists of two cpu cores running in lockstep that are validated against each other as well.

Signalling and train control systems typically have two independent implementations - full stack: hardware, os, software, different development teams.

I guess you'd need three separate implementations to achive some redundancy when you can't just slam the emergency brakes if the systems disagree.

(... For some reason, I find it higly demotivating that another team is doing the exact same thing. Maybe I just want to be a snowflake...)

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#568

Post by jaimex2 »

user5994461 wrote: post #403
api wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The majority of the professional world runs on Windows. There are many advantages: (1) Stable platform that's backward compatible over long periods of time. (2) Very good rapid application development tooling, e.g. Visual Studio which is probably still the best IDE overall. (3) A huge trained developer base making it easy to recruit. Same goes for IT personnel. (4) A huge pool of software, custom dev firms, etc. (5)…

If it's more than 10 years ago, Visual Studio was the only IDE for C++ and the C++ was the most common language.

Why do you think that is?

I've always wondered why there's such a small list of decent IDEs for C anything.

I usually just stick to vim and a handful of plugins.

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#569

Post by bradleyjg »

mrep wrote: post #559
bradleyjg wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think other companies are doing 40. In fact, I don’t know anyone making six figures that does 40. (I’m not saying no such jobs exist, just that no one I know works in one of them. If other high end software jobs are paying the same for 45-50 that Tesla is paying for 60, that’s on the low side hourly, but the low side of the high end. 75% (45/60) of 150k is still $112.5k plus presumably good benefits and some…

> I don’t think other companies are doing 40. Maybe I am just lucky but I have worked for 2 of the major big tech companies and came out of college making 100k+ while primarily working 40 hour weeks at both. > 75% (45/60) of 150k Tesla new grad software engineer total comp is 150k? Damn, in that case they are pretty close with big tech (amazon is 145k and G/FB is 165k from what I have heard). I assumed it was lower s…

Sorry if I was being unclear. I have no inside knowledge and just wanted to throw some numbers out there so we didn't continue to talk past each other. If Tesla is paying $120k to fresh CS grads and expecting them to work 60 hour weeks, I'm still not sure I'd say they were "paying peanuts" but it's at least getting there.

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#570

Post by user5994461 »

jaimex2 wrote: post #568
user5994461 wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's more than 10 years ago, Visual Studio was the only IDE for C++ and the C++ was the most common language.

Why do you think that is? I've always wondered why there's such a small list of decent IDEs for C anything. I usually just stick to vim and a handful of plugins.

There are no good development tools for C++ because it's an impossibly hard language to parse and process.

For instance, try writing an auto completion tool for C++ and Java. The first one take orders of magnitude more work for a mediocre result.

Using vim is symptom of the problem. The available tooling is so bad or non existent that it's comparable to a text editor.

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