Life’s too short to willingly work for toxic and totally unpredictable narcissists
Already did it once, no way in hell I'd do it again.
Ask HN: Would You Work for Elon?
61–70 of 258 posts
Re: Ask HN: Would You Work for Elon?
#62Everything involves tradeoffs. When Elon is thinking clearly and with vision, which appears inversely proportional to his celebrity, he seems like a great leader. He is a godawful manager, however, and I am uninterested in living for Elon.
Project a future where his operational style is normalized, and if you can't see the dystopian hellscape that results, then most likely you think you'd be one of the elites in that world so you're ignoring it, or you don't care so are part of that particular problem.
Uh, "No".
Re: Ask HN: Would You Work for Elon?
#63No. I have worked for a micromanaging, toxic narcissist who thinks he knows better than anyone (he doesn’t, demonstrably) and shifts focus after the next shiny thing too frequently, and engineers walk in eggshells because one wrong comment can get you fired. It’s not a great place to be - and yearly turnover rate of close to 30% means most people in the org agree it’s not great
Re: Ask HN: Would You Work for Elon?
#64Considering that Elon puts a lot of focus on ability and skill over formalities and organizations, and that he believes that small team of highly-skilled highly-motivated people can often (always?) out-perform large teams of moderately-skilled moderately-motivated people, I'd say yes. I find a lot of joy in working on challenging problems without having to deal with bureaucracy bullshit. I have a feeling that Elon li…
> Elon puts a lot of focus on ability and skill over formalities and organizations
I'm curious what this means to you, because when I see people from inside Twitter correct him on Twitter, with specific technical statements describing what's going on—and then he fires them—that seems like formalities way outranking ability and skill.
Re: Ask HN: Would You Work for Elon?
#65[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Would You Work for Elon?
#66Yes. Twitter is unprofitable. People working there come off as lazy and entitled. They openly attack Elon, not contributing anything tangible except "rich man evil, worker good". Previous management wasted investor's money. Culture born in Twitter is awful, it's as if no one is proud of their work and low performers are loud and toxic. I have no problem with Elon's stance, I don't even view him as narcissist like som…
> Elon's not someone who'll fire a person who is good at what they do.
Insulting 3500 people at once, nice.
Re: Ask HN: Would You Work for Elon?
#67Ok regardless of his recently showcased lack of technical abilities and preference for 996:
Isn’t it pretty clear that he’s super unstable and spiraling quickly? He was forced to buy Twitter because his history of stock market manipulation blew a 420 joke out of proportion, and now he’s worrying about bankruptcy and rolling out features that crash and burn within 24h. Not to mention the many, many reports of the toxic culture at Twitter rn. I mean… as a software engineer one of the things I value most is working for a company that isn’t going to implode and make my stock compensation worthless
Re: Ask HN: Would You Work for Elon?
#68Yes. And I would have worked for Gates or Jobs if I had have the chance as well. Despite of controversy, those are/were brilliant minds that I would love to learn from more closely - but not sure for how long though
Re: Ask HN: Would You Work for Elon?
#69Who is Elon?
Re: Ask HN: Would You Work for Elon?
#70His management style is not the worst thing about the guy. If all the legends about him were true (superhuman BS detector, genius level IQ, laser sharp focus) I'd be happy to be part of the team. Unfortunately, I think his main talent is the uncanny ability to overhype himself. He is lucky that a side effect of this ability helped him hire and motivate really good engineers. Thay might not be sufficient in the long r…
Yeah I'm very down for a hard working mission driven environment. I have never once needed to be coddled. But I'm not down to work for a shameless self promoter who fires all who disagree. I wouldn't work for Elon for the same reason I wouldn't work for Trump or Hugo Chavez.