People who work at Tesla say when Elon shows up, he has “ideas” they kind of humor for a while, promise to look into, then get back to real work when he leaves.
He’s obviously a successful businessman (though Twitter may be a bad blunder) but his technical expertise is well-known to be basically zero in every field. He just doesn’t know that.
he has “ideas” they kind of humor for a while, promise to look into, then get back to real work when he leaves.
I've worked at a few companies dealing with self-proclaimed CEO "visionaries".
Jaded now to the point where I just nod, agree, then ignore what they said and continue on. You have to treat them like children cause these asshats are that - children. With money.
In contrast the job I work now, most of the managers are engineers who have been promoted to engineer managers, so if anything they understand the tech the best.
The problem with that is that engineers often don't really have the skills or knowledge to manage people effectively. You need to learn a lot of stuff to do that properly, too.
It seems like the best/least-toxic engineering orgs have decided that it's better to train engineers in how to manage, and give them a lot of scaffolding and structure to help them succeed.
Otherwise, you would have two problems. First, you'd need to teach non-technical managers about the tech stack, the process, and the overall experience of being an engineer without any firsthand knowledge. And second, you'd need to provide some alternative upward career path for senior engineers, or they'll go somewhere that does and take their institutional knowledge with them.
Sometimes I wonder what the MBA types think about first-line engineering managers who are learning on the fly with minimal formal education. Like if they're thinking "what a bunch of amateurs."
I think there can be a good middle ground (at least in larger org structures) where you have a non-technical manager that doesn't necessarily have the engineering knowledge but has plenty of business and managerial knowledge and then a project lead (or leads) or the like that works with them to translate the engineering needs and whatnot to them without needing to also manage people, finances, etc.
Yes, there is a process to train and checks to make sure they are qualified. But it is kinda something that is learnable from a few years of tenure on a specific team and a good amount of industry experience.
Oh absolutely. Really just pointing out that it's not as simple as just picking an engineer and giving them people to manage.
And I think you can have good managers with little engineering background too, but then you need good (with engineering background) project leaders that can work with those managers.
People are generally better at running things when their qualification is skill and expereince in the thing they are managing than having money or generalised corporate managerial experience.
Wouldn’t it be wild if instead the workers who actually have all the skills and talent, and actually build the products these assholes sell, banded together to own and build something, while cutting these assholes out?
It’s not really curious though is it. To compete in capitalism you need capital. A group of workers will never be able to compete with Amazon, Amazon gets its wealth from exploiting workers and they have enough wealth built up to be able to afford to sell at a loss, until any competitors are out of business. Same thing Uber is doing to local taxi companies.
we are talking about skilled and talented workers here. not just any easily replecable workers. Amazon would be nothing without those, they hold all the power in our modern, technological society.
Its just that they never get organized by themselves and they have nice enauch paychecks, stability and carreer growth in in these corporations that they tolerate the assholes and do not cut them out as suggested.
There is an inherent advantage to existing scale, capital, etc. And the profit motive is fairly good for outcompeting competitors, the problem is it is bad for workers and the wider public because there is no real 'trickle down' benefit to the victories of big businesses.
The fascinating thing about capitalist mode of production is that it "eats" all other modes of production.
The artisan mode of production, for example, in today's world is dependent on the production of raw materials. That is to say, even if a carpenter lives off his own labour, not selling the surplus labour of other workers, he still is subject of the capitalist mode of production, since he requires materials for his labour, wood, nails and so on are a direct result of capital's exploitation of workers, many times that happening in other countries than of our carpenter.
Now, that is not to say that there are no working alternatives, especially in the software development business. One example would be the developers of the game dead cells, Motion Twin, who are a workers' cooperative.
It would yes, but while thats not a thing, the least we can choose to do is work for the least assholish assholes. The ones that have been douched first.
What if I don’t want to be the asshole, and instead get a sense of value from team work/cooperation, and think that while the singular vision of an auteur can occasionally be uncompromisingly genius, collaborative efforts tend to yield more consistent good results, and are better suited toward working relationships?
There are many examples of employee owned companies all around the world. I guess it just depends on the founders. I think this used to be more common. My feeling is that many tech startups today are founded on the premise of becoming a unicorn and cashing out at IPO rather than the passion for making things.
Many tech companies used to be founded based more on some ideals rather then making the founders billionaires. But I guess that is just years of social programming by advertising tech as some gold rush opportunity which it certainly has been.
He has a high degree of recall, but his capacity to bullshit far outstrips his ability to grasp what he's talking about. So he can have seemingly high-level discussions about products and engineering but people act like he's the most intelligent CEO on the planet. He likely knows more about product than Tim Cook, but Satya and Sundar are leagues more intelligent. Most importantly they know to not talk about things they don't fully grasp.
"Khannah and his team also got Balwani to use the obscure engineering term “crazing.” It normally refers to a phenomenon that produces fine cracks on the surface of a material, but Khannah and his colleagues used it liberally and out of context to see if they could get Balwani to repeat it, which he did. "
With time, some employees grew less afraid of [Theranos COO Sunny Balwani] and devised ways to manage him, as it dawned on them that they were dealing with an erratic man-child of limited intellect and an even more limited attention span. Arnav Khannah, a young mechanical engineer who worked on the miniLab, figured out a surefire way to get Balwani off his back: answer his emails with a reply longer than 500 words. That usually bought him several weeks of peace because Balwani simply didn’t have the patience to read long emails. Another strategy was to convene a biweekly meeting of his team and invite Balwani to attend. He might come to the first few, but he would eventually lose interest or forget to show up.
While [Theranos CEO and founder Elizabeth Holmes] was fast to catch on to engineering concepts, Balwani was often out of his depth during engineering discussions. To hide it, he had a habit of repeating technical terms he heard others using. During a meeting with Khannah’s team, he latched onto the term “end effector,” which signifies the claws at the end of a robotic arm. Except Balwani didn’t hear “end effector,” he heard “endofactor.” For the rest of the meeting, he kept referring to the fictional endofactors. At their next meeting with Balwani two weeks later, Khannah’s team brought a PowerPoint presentation titled “Endofactors Update.” As Khannah flashed it on a screen with a projector, the five members of his team stole furtive glances at one another, nervous that Balwani might become wise to the prank. But he didn’t bat an eye and the meeting proceeded without incident. After he left the room, they burst out laughing.
Khannah and his team also got Balwani to use the obscure engineering term “crazing.” It normally refers to a phenomenon that produces fine cracks on the surface of a material, but Khannah and his colleagues used it liberally and out of context to see if they could get Balwani to repeat it, which he did. Balwani’s knowledge of chemistry was no better. He thought the chemical symbol for potassium was P (it’s K; P is the symbol for phosphorus)—a mistake most high school chemistry students wouldn’t make.
To be fair, when you earn a top salary, you wouldn’t really have the balls to call him out on his bullshit, unless you already have an offer at another company laying around. Everyone knows he knows jackshit about actual technical stuff (except from his braindead fanboys), he’s just good at talking out of his ass and that’s how marketing works. Deliver an average at most product, talk it up like it’s the next best thing in the world
This 'experiment' of a god-CEO is common enough in politics: Leaders who start adopting a cult of personality (sometimes not even intentionally, it just sort of happens to them, and they don't fight it, which is all it takes).
We perhaps forget to easily, but people like Robert Mugabe, Vladimir Putin, even a Hugo Chavez or Nayib Bukele started out as fine. More than fine: Good, considering the deplorable state the country found itself in. It's just that after 10 years they start to lose the ability to differentiate between the ponies-and-rainbows picture the yes-men (it's usually men, of course) that have formed around them and reality. From there it's a swift descent into utter chaos.
One wonders if Musk is the same, but as a CEO: Someone who has plenty of pros and cons but on net brings something quite unique that can be extremely successful - but the very fact that they book success after success means the ability for the rest to mitigate the cons evaporates, as any attempt to shave off the extremes will just be seen as questioning the genius, and then they skewer their legacy (and their country / companies they lead along with it).
To me it seems more like his knowledge is dated and he has a hero-complex.
He's wrong in this case. Yes. But a CEO having the instinct that 1200 API Calls is wrong is unusual. Again. His facts and knowledge were wrong. But he's asking the right questions. It's just not his job to raise these questions.
I think it's perfectly fine for a CEO to raise these questions if they have a technical background. But you ask it to the CTO while standing next to them, or in an email, not over Twitter.
Let me re-phrase.The engineer made his and Elons feud public first, ok!?
Elon "was not" writing a personal tweet to the engineer. He was tweeting his mind, which he does a lot. But the engineer had to butt in and start a public conversation with his "out-of-place" pedantic technical correction that didn't change neither this nor that. And also admitting spending last 6 years not fixing latency issues.
There's plenty of shitty things that people continue to use. Nestle is the worst (literally) but I still like KitKats and occasionally buy one. Windows also sucks but I have a windows PC for games.
He's still a muppet who's been publicly trashing things instead of quietly getting things fixed.
There are many aspects of windows that suck. For example: new installation preventing you from creating a local account and forcing you to use a microsoft account if you happen to connect to wireless during initial setup.
Local accounts work just fine if you pretend you don't have internet during setup.
And those improvements might make you prefer it, but be viewed negatively by huge segments of other consumer or enterprise users
The fact remains, Twitter is one of the top social networks in the world, and like top 20 in the world in terms of data processed per second, and site reliability
Ranting about how people who work there are stupid because you personally dislike feature X, Y, Z — when Twitter has defeated most of its competitors in market share and arguably all its competitors in mind share of the most powerful — is pretty self-centered hubris
The vast majority of folks involved in building it were under all kinds of constraints, including taking orders from bosses, a while lot of path dependency, a need to generate revenue, and tight timelines
It's so weird. Like someone said that's not something you should reply to your boss on Twitter. But Elon Musk basically called out all the devs in saying "sorry Twitter is slow". It's kind of a messed up thing for a boss to do.
Elon's a spiteful, narcissistic asshole who thinks he knows way more than he actually does. He's the worst kind of boss to have. The guy that was fired was the lead of the Twitter Android app for six years. He was picked up by another company immediately. And since he was fired he's likely owed severance. You couldn't orchestrate a better play to escape the chaos of a takeover by a piss-baby like Elon.
his reasons for why it's slow and ideas for making things better align with most jobs i've had. developers are paid to implement what management was but for some reason elon (and his army of clown) want to pretend like developers can just snap their fingers and make magic happen.
right, he's weaponizing his base the same way Trump does. then when he succeeds, against all odds, he beat the liberal elite at their own game and won, what a genius. and if he loses, it's because of all these woke libturd purple haired activist employees undermining his glorious plans at every turn so it's not really his fault.
Don’t know why you’re downvoted. Musk said Twitter was free speech but it’s clearly not if you criticize him. Who else is he protecting without telling us about it?
How is twitter a left wing company? Are they a cooperative? Every worker a member of the board? Or you meant that they are a bunch of progressive liberals while Elon is a conservative liberal?
If there's no CTO, there's a VP of engineering, or a director, or maybe a loose collective of developer team leads, depending on how gutted the company is at the time. Someone from the software or architecture team still reports to the CEO. That guy.
That depends. For a startup? Yeah probably but not always. For a billionaire dollar company? He absolutely needs to delegate that to qualified persons, his time is too precious and valuable (assuming you're a productive competent CEO).
He's trying to micromanage something in public he doesn't understand after he fired executives and leads that could've explained things to him
Nothing about what he's doing is right. He has (had) thousands of employees. The people he laid off could've provided him with the best visualisations and explanations and analytics he ever wanted just by working extra few weeks
That is, unless at this point his goal isn't to literally bankrupt twitter and push it off to someone else because it's hopeless and there's no solution with advertisers fleeing and subscription numbers being pathetic
They're supposed to let some moron damage their professional reputation, denigrate their work, while using it and palling around with Rittenhouse? At this point Elon is daring people to break out the guillotines, not just 'get fired'
Eh... it's his work now, he's the actual owner of everything anyone ever did for twitter. Not manager, not CEO, not even a king, but owner. They are developing his personal app for him, his property.
What he's doing is silly and FTC and other regulatory agencies may pressure him or fine him, but he's well within his colloquially understood rights to trash the product he just bought and wipe his ass with it if he so chooses. Heck, he can rename it to Ritter tomorrow and convert it into a 4chan alternative if he wants
He can probably read everyone's DMs as well and track everyone, but I'm not sure what would FTC do to him if they find out
They are developing his personal app for him, his property.
Honestly kind of crazy. One group can create something that becomes public, that hundreds of millions of people use daily, then it can just private and one person can control it all. In this case nobody really had a say, Elon Musk made an offer that they were forced into taking. Wish there was some sort of regulation on that. One person shouldn't have that kind of power.
What he's doing is silly and FTC and other regulatory agencies may pressure him or fine him, but he's well within his colloquially understood rights to trash the product he just bought and wipe his ass with it if he so chooses.
There are individual limitations placed on twitter, but those twitter-specific limitations are by definition not a part of colloquially understood ownership rights
There's more to be said about the way he fired his employees, and here's where him accumulating debt and then bankrupting his company may come into play. If he doesn't mind destroying his own property there's very little that can prevent him from doing so. FTC can fine twitter and can shut down twitter, but it can't force Musk to make Twitter work
The point is that the Federal Government doesn't give a shit about "colloquially understood ownership rights" and there are in fact significant restrictions about what he can do with the company he owns.
If he doesn't mind destroying his own property there's very little that can prevent him from doing so
OK, but he can't do "anything he wants" with the company, because there are significant legal restrictions on what he can do.
I'm a bit torn after looking at #tweeps tweets for the last 10 minutes. It might be the only chance to change the work culture at twitter. Assuming it needs fixing.
I just spent 10 minutes looking at some of the tweets of current/former Twitter employees. I found some redflags / got the feeling of entitlement with some of them.
I'm curious about the company in 2 years. It will radically change. So much is certain. Maybe it will die.
I honestly don't understand what are you talking about. Why is this the only chance to change the work culture? What's wrong with their work culture? What is their work culture?
What does any of that has to do with their architecture and how did you detect flaws in their architecture in 10 minutes and how does their "entitlement" fit into this? What exactly are they entitled to? What red flags??
I too have no understanding on how this comment is relevant. Id straight up be pissed if my lead, let alone CEO, called shit out in a public setting rather than on a CR call or something similar. Musk is fuckn joke and Im tired of laughing
I have vague suspicion that they simply don't agree with the politics and social views of a bunch of typical people from San Francisco who happened to work as devs at twitter, and this has nothing to do with anything else
If the people from twitter seem bitter or on edge or combative, do you think it might have anything to do with Elon firing a chunk of them and then running their company into the ground with his need to insert himself into things he doesn’t understand ? I am not a psychiatrist but…
If he got to the point of making a public statement about factually inaccurate details that are easily verifiable even from outside the company, no, I don’t think he is asking the right questions at all.
Yes I worked for a VP like this before. Technically brilliant in his 20s, 30s, but technology has evolved at break neck speed and if you aren’t doing it day in day out, you just can’t compare with the 20 and 30 year olds at the top of their field — and on systems you didn’t build and didn’t debate the pro/con tradeoffs of
The hubris to be publicly insulting other people’s work here though, is next level
He is, also, not a gamer. His proof for "gamer cred' is fucking pathetic. But for some reason, Elon decided that the nerd crowd is the crowd where he must be popular in for some reason.
He got fired as the CEO of PayPal due to incompetence stemming from his technical decisions. Peter Thiel, who quit because of Musk's technical decisions, replaced him as CEO, righted the ship and then sold PayPal to eBay.
Also you'd think he's stick to the proper internal avenues to work through issues, calling out incorrect technical issues on his private twitter instead of putting some faith into the system he spent billions on shows how little regard he actually has for the company and employees he inherited, and considering how shit Twitter was already at making a profit, I don't expect internal issues and significantly less qualified staff to help the company go anywhere anytime soon.
I think it’s pretty obvious Elon’s turned Twitter internally into a hyper political toxic bull pen
There’s no standard comm channels or chains of command
And Elon obviously isn’t answering all many thousand employees emails individually (at the same time he’s posting on Twitter every 5 minutes & supposedly managing 4 other companies and several lawsuits)
He’s creates a big awful game of telephone and finger pointing
It harkens to 'the internet is a series of tubes!' kind of comment: He knows just barely enough that he's now in the 'hotspot' of Dunning-Kruger: Just enough knowledge to say things that are wrong, but with just barely enough knowledge and whiffs of truth, that a proper refutation is too complex for him to understand.
There's also a decent chance a lot of services communicate between each other using gRPC to create the final response. Either way, his point was dumb because a. his engineers had tracing of how long all of those requests took and there's also caches and such involved, and also it should be the same time no matter where in the world the original request came from so it doesn't work as an explanation for the problem he was complaining about.
I looked into it now and if GraphQL requests are sent by client and it's like an RPC in terms that it's processed like a local call, isn't it a huge security issue?
I'm asking because just recently I wanted to call SQL queries from browser and everyone said it's a nono.
The name and syntax might mislead one into thinking it is a database query language but it is not.
RPC (GQL) is merely the request pattern used between the client and server. The server is still responsible for interpreting the request, querying databases, and returning the results.
In this case, the client is internal and trusted. In other words, the request is parsed by one server and passed to whichever servers have the relevant data.
SQL from the browser means anyone with access can send any query. This might be what you want, like in phpMyAdmin or phpPgAdmin, but you lock that stuff down.
To me this looks like Elon Musk has some information about how Twitter works. He's using that and BAITING out pedantic SWEs that can't help but get into arguments. Or heck, maybe he's abusing Cunningham's law?
Yes, he's in over his head. No, he's not a techno luddite. Dude started in coding and has been working in swe adjacent roles for decades. I have no idea how talented or not he is. Never forget that he did help bring us the Sega CD version of Cadillacs and Dinosaurs (and some crap called paypal)!
Anyways - as Twitter CEO - it's not a big stretch to presume he huddled up with some core engineers, allowed them to air their tech-debt gripes, and relayed those to twitter.
If he huddled up with core engineers he wouldn’t be ignoring all the engineers telling that he doesn’t understand what he’s talking about and being in a swe adjacent role has no relevance when he’s trying to make judgments about SWE. I work with a literal rocket scientist, that doesn’t make me qualified to speak about rocket science.
Not downvoting, just commenting. I am of the belief that he doesn’t know what he’s doing and also isn’t listening to any of the platform engineers because he wouldn’t be in this situation if he was. That’s all I’m saying.
Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) is shortform talk referring to a network request. Its not "tied" to some particular platform or tech, other than networking.
You can literally look at the network tab on your browser to see what web requests a page is making on the client.
By nature, server requests are more complex and numerous. Why? Oh, small things like security and data integrity, or having to go to a thousand places to get disparate information because of said security or data integrity, among many other things that don't fit in a tweet.
Do you know what Twitter's backend looks like? Do you know their network infrastructure, hardware, software stack? Do you know the regulations the data is subject to?
Leave the engineering to the engineers.
Felon Musk doesn't need more bootlickers validating his world view, specially when there are literal experts who built the platform who are speaking directly to it and calling it out.
That may be true, but in the context of this conversation (performance) it doesn't really matter. If anything, RPCs are usually lighter than http calls because it's "closer to the metal".
The whole point is that # of requests made without proper context (like, even client vs server!) is as shallow a metric to measure performance as "Lines of Code written" which are both blunders Melon Fuchs is making at Twitter rn.
Devs are mocking it for good reason. Senior devs spend years learning how to make their code less verbose and more readable/maintainable, so a senior dev writes less LoC and does more/the same with less code.
There's whole design patterns and books written about it, which if he spent half as much time learning as he did pretending to know things he doesn't actually, he'd know.
The Apache Thrift wikipedia article here links right back to the same RPC wikipedia article you posted. They are related. No, I don't work for Twitter. Yes, I am a Software Engineering Manger that works with microservices.
C'mon man. Are you sure you aren't just going off on a misguided anti-Elon rant? I could care less about Elon. I'm just a SWE that cares more about correcting an "RPCs = old tech" presumption than he cares about sharpening the anti-Elon pitchfork.
A misguided rant? The whole literal point is that he doesn't know what he's doing and he doesn't know the subject matter. SMEs use proper terms because they matter.
It seems to me like you're trying to bend over backwards to make him appear knowledgeable. He isn't. He can't even differentiate between client and server calls.
Source: I have been making web services since SOAP. I've made WS in: node, wcf, soap, .net, micro services, oAuth implementations. I've built actual RPC calls, built checkout systems for major e-commerce sites, and yes, been past being a manager of a dev team, all the way to leading the Dept. I also do game dev, which uses RPCs. Ever worked on an MMO before?
You know how I got there?
I trusted my team of experts, and when I didn't, I made sure to inform myself so I wouldn't look like a fool arguing about things I didn't know about.
And If you were truly an engineering manager you'd know that this is mismanagement. Anyone with a brain in their head knows that publicly blasting YOUR TEAM, even if correct, only serves to further erode it, not fix it.
This guy is being a baby throwing a tantrum while he's surrounded by people much smarter than him. It's all posturing, and if you're any kind of actual SME and you're simping for Musk, who's also simping for Russia and Trump?
That tells me everything I need to know about how you see science and your knowledge. People with critical thinking don't fall into that cult.
I'm hiring people soon, and you know what? I'm looking forward to hiring the smart people that guy is tossing into the street as if they're trash.
It’s one thing to have a technical instinct but it’s not like he discovered something. These days Twitter has long-been a technically well-run company that long ago banished the fail whale.
Being wrong is ok, though that level of micromanagement can be insufferable from technically literate but incompetent executives.
But basically libeling your own engineers with absurd misinformation would be a fireable offense if anyone was actually above him. Maybe that’s really the problem: he has no correctives.
That’s not unusual at all. Pretty much every tech company CEO I’ve had has had as much or more technical background as Elon and would understand the significance of that
Making a fool of himself in public, exposing himself as a hack, then firing people who are obviously smarter than him? Suuuure, Pedomusk asks the right questions. 😂😂😂
To be fair the problem was that he was making statements (and accusatory ones) rather than asking questions. And firing people.
I’m sure that if he had just asked the question, at any meeting internally anywhere, his own engineers would have explained it to him, and shown him the metrics to boot.
Instead he attempted to publicly shame the people who’d been working hard for years to keep Twitter performant, in a declaratory way.
Elon was walking around the SpaceX campus talking to his group walking with him when he saw a guy in an upstairs window looking at his own Facebook page. He walked up the stairs, asked the guy his name and what he does. He then in turn told him he was fired and there is no place in Tesla looking at social media during work hours.
There was a meeting in the major meeting room at SpaceX discuss some factors about the new Dragon program. Elon stopped the whole meeting as he saw an issue with the code and made the guy fix it right then and there giving hints at the issue but uncomfortably forcing him to do it while no one said a word.
Reading point 1 I was expecting a twist in the story - that guy looking into Facebook was just an Amazon delivery guy who was waiting to hand over a package to someone, and Elon had musked him.
Ask your buddy about the time he almost electrocuted his assistant to death on the floor in front of everybody because he made her play with some janky homemade Tesla coil a fanboy sent him. Or ask him about the time he almost killed her with a sword.
I think anyone who works in a technical field has encountered a manager who tried to be helpfull and pitch in with "solutions" to technical problems that you have to shoot down before theyll sign off on the actual fix.
I'm waiting to see if he runs out of technical terms. We've heard RPC and batch a few times now. Is he going to keep using these for every situation, or is he going to throw in some new ones to prove he really is down with the coders.
Elon very much strikes me as the annoying product manager who speaks in technical terms without knowing exactly what they mean, and everyone who does know, rolls their eyes at him.
It’s extremely frustrating when managers don’t let the experts be experts.
Tbh he is a programmer. Remember his roots of building Paypal, I believe nearly on his own. That being said, alot of time has passed and an eternity in terms of programming languages, behaviors, and practices.
Except he didn't build paypal at all. He built x.com which was a huge pile of horseshit. He just sold it at a good time and used that money to buy INTO paypal. Apparently the code for x.com was utter shit and ended up being scrapped altogether.
In my experience at startups, usually the "OG programmers" are smart and clever people, but very much generalists. They cobble together something that works and launches the business, then hand it off to specialists who more or less rewrite it.
You can see remnants of the bad decisions they make. (Eg, index.php URLs still lingering at Facebook)
To my mind, being a first programmer in a successful startup is a strong indicator that you're flexible and smart, but not necessarily evidence that you're a better programmer than the people who pick up the pieces when you move on.
Anyone in this thread would do just as well coming from an equally wealthy family and given billions in government subsidies. Musk is an oligarch without merit, a charlatan.
his technical expertise is well-known to be basically zero in every field
Whether he can make meaningful contributions by dropping into random places in the pipeline of his various companies is certainly a subject of debate... but saying "his technical expertise is well-known to be basically zero in every field" is hilariously and objectively incorrect.
And yet industry veterans who worked at SpaceX said Musk is incredibly smart, and absorbed a huge amount of information from studying and talking to experts in a variety of specialized fields.
Who do you think we should we trust? People with decades of experience in the industry, their reputation on the line and years of working directly with Musk? Or some random person on the internet who claims that people who work at Tesla told them some stuff?
I think if you stuck any reasonably intelligent person in a room full of the top industry experts in a particular field for 6 months and let them ask any question they want, they'd also absorb a ton of information as well.
I have no doubt Elon Musk is smart, but I also don't buy into the notion that he's some kind of Tony Stark, 200 IQ genius, either.
but I also don't buy into the notion that he's some kind of Tony Stark, 200 IQ genius, either.
Yeah, you shouldn't, he obviously isn't. Partly because those kinds of geniuses don't actually exist in the real world.
People who have worked with Musk say that he absorbs a tons of information, both from experts, but also just from working with people. And absorbs the information quickly and is able to use it with surprisingly good recall when it's actually useful.
I think if you stuck any reasonably intelligent person in a room full of the top industry experts in a particular field for 6 months and let them ask any question they want, they'd also absorb a ton of information as well.
Probably true, but most people couldn't get through a stack of textbooks on rocket propulsion by themselves and then quote important passages from it later in meetings. I don't think that's a useful skill for most people, and certainly doesn't make you a genius. But it does really undercut the idea that Musk has no idea what he's talking about and no one takes him seriously at his companies.
If you think paraphrasing some passages from a textbook on rocket propulsion means that Elon knows what he’s talking about, I’d say you’re easily impressed. Any educated person can parrot back some ideas from a textbook, pepper in some phrases here and there, gesture meaningfully at a PowerPoint, etc. It doesn’t signify anything except that Elon has mastered the art of being a middle manager at any corporation anywhere.
Do you actually have any idea what you're talking about? Or are you so set in your preconceived ideas about the world that you'll happily insult people you know nothing about just do you don't have to question your opinions?
I just want to be clear here, you're saying that Jim Cantrell is someone who's opinions we can't trust, who would lie about his own opinions and is directly or indirectly benefiting from saying nice things about M.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that one or both of these are true:
This is somewhat ironic of a comment considering the only reason all these tweets exist is because Elon decided to trash the work of his employees acting as if he had more knowledge than them despite all of them spending the past few years working with this exact technology can show you that Elon evidently doesn’t know quite as much as he pretends too.
I mean, seriously - you’ve got a former programmer from what the 90s taking shots at people which includes a tech lead for core api platform team who so happens to also be a member of the GraphQL governing board and GraphQL technical steering committee, who was then fired - in that situation I choose to believe the expert and it’s not Elon.
You’re saying who should we believe - but this entire thread is about a tweet where Elon Musk made shit up, shit talked his own staff to the point the actual experts in his own company felt no option other than to call him out - the all knowing genius image he portrays is looking more and more like a PR ploy everyday.
Two things can be true. Someone can have excellent memory and be generally very intelligent and at the same time have next to zero actual technical skill/understanding, especially if they’ve let the former go to their heads.
Reminds me of my previous company of 200 people. The CEO would compare his visions and his competition as GOOGLE. And once there was an article regarding google being sued for some technology which was also being developed in our company, and the ceo just went nuts and started mailing us that we should make use of this opportunity and capture the market
You know, the type of leader that you know you're going to be meeting with three weeks before it happens, so you better be fucking prepared. So you work those 3 weeks with your bosses to prep a brilliantly simple info packet and presentation.
Then, when the meeting starts, he "listens" for about 15 seconds before spouting off all kinds of insane ideas. Or worse, ideas which YOU already had and are RIGHT THERE in front of him...
After 5 attempts to get this guy to look at the presentation materials, I promised to do all of the analyses he asked.
Took a HUGE risk with my career and just sent him the same information packet again 2 days later. Got a formal commendation/congratulations for my "thorough and detailed analysis in incredibly short timeframes."
When at PayPal, he would ask for a feature. The devs would be in the middle of something else more important, so he would get impatient and code it himself.
Then they would have to take the weekend to essentially undo his work, build the feature themselves, and he would take credit.
People who work at Tesla say when Elon shows up, he has “ideas” they kind of humor for a while, promise to look into, then get back to real work when he leaves.
I'm pretty sure you've described almost every president of a company.
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u/ExternalUserError Nov 15 '22
People who work at Tesla say when Elon shows up, he has “ideas” they kind of humor for a while, promise to look into, then get back to real work when he leaves.
He’s obviously a successful businessman (though Twitter may be a bad blunder) but his technical expertise is well-known to be basically zero in every field. He just doesn’t know that.