John Carmack, "Elon is definitely an engineer. He is deeply involved with technical decisions at spacex and Tesla. He doesn’t write code or do CAD today, but he is perfectly capable of doing so."
Kevin Watson, who developed the avionics for Falcon 9 and Dragon and previously managed the Advanced Computer Systems and Technologies Group within the Autonomous Systems Division at NASA's Jet Propulsion laboratory: "Elon is brilliant. He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction.
He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy.
He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time. It’s amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years."
Elon also understands deep neural nets a lot more than I think people imagine. He starts with good intuitions and mental models, but also actively asks for technical deep dives, and has very good retention. E.g. I recall teaching him about our use of focal loss in contrast to binary cross-entropy for the object detection neural net (I said it had given us a 5% bump and he asked to know more) and he understood how it works about as quickly as you'd expect a PhD student to. The fact that he can do this across many technical disciplines is impressive and borderline superhuman. I don't think people understand or would believe how low-level and technical typical meetings with him are. Just saying because I get triggered reading way off innacurate takes on this topic (original comment).
I think what upsets a lot of the Silicon Valley types here on HN is that people just like them are being called on their bullshit and fired en-masse for it. That has got to be uncomfortable.
You know the old saying: "It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It."
That's what's happening here.
That engineer that was humiliated publicly for defending a slow-as-molasses JavaScript-heavy microservices Rube Goldberg machine? Hacker News is filled with people just like him that have built near identical software in other orgs.
Understandably they're upset and are looking for any excuse to dismiss Elon's criticism of not just Twitter, but their entire industry.
I doubt you'll find many people arguing that the value of employee output is evenly distributed across all people in a company: regardless of discipline, there's always a minority who are delivering the most value. There's always the most valuable software engineers, the most valuable sales people, the most valuable executives. The problem with Elon's specific brand of this take is that it's ignorant of the real-world human aspect: Elon could pick the best software engineer he has ever worked with, and helicopter them into a dysfunctional environment, and they would struggle to deliver value.
If Elon had joined Twitter, and spent time understanding the business and environment and then excised the people he felt weren't contributing towards his vision, that would be one thing... but he has made arbitrary judgements based on absurd metrics like lines of code or willingness to show up at 1am to draw on a whiteboard, he has not made judgements based on the quality of the work or the value people have delivered.
Likewise, to suggest that a software engineer is bad because they were a part of a team that built a "...slow-as-molasses JavaScript-heavy microservices Rube Goldberg machine..." is absurd: what if that person was the only reason that it wasn't 10x slower? What if, they were the lynchpin in that team ensuring that brought everyone else up to a much higher standard which ensured that what they built was usable (even if it was bad)? You cannot judge the contribution of an individual without considering the wider context.
I have no problem with a company cutting most of their software engineers (I encourage clients to minimise their exposure to software engineers, I encourage careful hiring over volume) but what Elon is doing is... not that.
> ...spent time understanding the business and environment...
You're probably right, but there's a decent chance that Elon's heavy-handed approach was necessary.
I've seen the "gentle" approach fail.
For example, at $dayjob a bunch of on-prem stuff is being slowly modernised into the cloud. Very slowly. Slow enough to give the dinosaurs time to play politics and protect their turf.
For example, the networks teams that are used to legacy in-line firewalls will cozy up to some non-technical senior manager with a budget and get them to approve a project to roll out this legacy technology in the cloud. That way they don't have to retrain or -- worse -- risk being made redundant.
If instead some team comes in and simply bulk-migrates workloads from on-prem to the cloud... breaking a handful in the process and just fixing forward, then it appears to be messy and crazy, but the effect is that the legacy data centre teams are made redundant virtually overnight. Now they've got no clout, no time, and no pull. They're simply walked, and will find jobs elsewhere.
I've seen both approaches, and the latter style worked better long-term.
Every org has slow-as-molasses, badly designed, illogical components. It is about ratio.
Time will tell. I don't think Musk/twitter's case will set any precedent. He is too much of a character to provide broad meaningful insights into industry. Also he has accumulated a list of failures which are rarely mentioned.
If that is the case, why has he been making mistakes that seem fairly elementary on Twitter? Like, I understand not understanding a problem space and wanting to learn more. But you say he has good intuitions and mental models–I would've expected at least some basic background research before posting online. Why aren't we seeing that?
Has he ever make a public statement, at least a paragraph in length, explaining something technical?
It's hard to blame people based on his decades of public behavior and lying about his education, falsely claiming to have a physics degree and to have been admitted to grad school.
> "Anyone who actually writes software, please report to the 10th floor at 2 pm today. Before doing so, please email a bullet point summary of what your code commands have achieved in the past ~6 months, along with up to 10 screenshots of the most salient lines of code"
Actual quote.
Anyone using the term "code commands" comes out a little detached from programming reality, let alone the rest of this request, it is out of a Dilbert strip.
"Code commands" is very plausibly an autocomplete flub of what was supposed to be "code commits." When I type "code comm" my iPhone offers up "commands" as the completion.
I've seen a lot of mockery of this request, but I suspect people aren't considering the wide variance in employee quality that can exist within a mismanaged organization. What Musk was asking for here wouldn't be a good way to evaluate skilled, conscientious developers, but it would be a pretty effective way to rapidly identify people who are basically incompetent or just aren't really doing anything.
> What Musk was asking for here wouldn't be a good way to evaluate skilled, conscientious developers, but it would be a pretty effective way to rapidly identify people who are basically incompetent or just aren't really doing anything.
So it's basically a FizzBuzz test, but for existing employees?
Many people who have worked with Musk have shared similar sentiments in interviews. But it seems that people just refuse to believe any of it. People think that there's no way it's possible for someone to be that deeply technical and be a CEO of multiple companies at the same time. I've talked to people about it and they straight up refuse to believe it saying that it's impossible and that any evidence of him being technical in interviews is all set up and that he was trained on the materials and questions ahead of time.
With a handful of tricks or a patsy in your pocket, it's easy enough to pull things like this off. These are all self-reported encounters, which lends some doubt to them; as I've never seen any public performance of his that suggests he has this exceptional intelligence or that he isn't subject to the same amount of irrational thinking that most humans are. You may be able to do some type of rocket equation in your head, but if you constantly promise things that aren't ultimately delivered.. people have good reason to question this narrative.
He clearly does know how to make incredible sums of money. Why that's not enough and people need to find excuses to exaggerate or demean his intelligence is beyond me.
> but if you constantly promise things that aren't ultimately delivered.. people have good reason to question this narrative.
This is the insane thing to me. He's promised a lot of things, but he has also delivered some pretty huge things. Tesla kicked off the electric car migration and has millions of EVs on the road. SpaceX has reusable first stages on their rockets and are the only private company to send humans to space. Just those two things alone are massive achievements. But people look at some things he's promised but has not yet delivered and that somehow is more important than what he has delivered?
Maybe I'm a particularly dull engineer, but I've taken several aspects of personal advice from what he has said in interviews (the especially technical ones, not the ones aimed at a mass audience where he repeats his standard canned speech) and found them useful for myself personally.
Here's two examples I've found particularly insightful that shows he has some ability to talk about engineering details.
This example where he talks about the choice of steel for Starship as opposed to any other metal, something that would be an otherwise unsual choice: https://youtu.be/vLC5W53Fsyg?t=936
This example that I've personally incorporated into my own thinking where he talks about his "five step process" for engineering design refinement (watch at least until he starts talking about Tesla Model 3 battery stuff): https://youtu.be/t705r8ICkRw?t=805
>This example that I've personally incorporated into my own thinking where he talks about his "five step process" for engineering design refinement (watch at least until he starts talking about Tesla Model 3 battery stuff): https://youtu.be/t705r8ICkRw?t=805
I knew what you were talking about when I started reading your comment. "Make your requirements less dumb" first seems so obvious once you've learned it.
All the denigration directed at him seems to come from people who've only read headlines about him from sources who hate him.
Something doesn't compute in this scenario though. Either his tricking everyone around him or is unfortunate enough to slip up publically. Not knowing what GraphQL is and talking about RPCs in HTTP is a very revealing slip up.
My guess would be that he has some knowledge but also is very good at faking it which is not necessarily a bad thing - those are good traits for a CEO. Though people should be aware of this fact when evaluating the whole persona.
I'm inclined to believe this is true. The problem is that Twitter's challenges are social/political, not technical, and Musk has demonstrated little competence in this area.
This is the absolute root of what's going on, right here. Twitter is only nominally a tech company; it's a media company. It may be that he had to cut the fat over there, I don't take issue with that necessarily (though I certainly do take issue with the disrespectful way he went about it), but image is incredibly important at a media company and he's notoriously bad at comms except with a small subset of people. Twitter needs sensible policy and thoughtful communication, and he wants to ram his ideology through it like he would shake up any technical process.
Another area where Musk's "brilliance" has faltered is in his transportation ideas and there's a connection here to twitter in that the challenges here again are not technical, but rather political around land use.
Brute forcing a problem with better technology not always the actual solution when technical problems aren't actually the problem.
Channing Robertson, the face of Stanford chemical engineering department and the associate dean of Stanford’s School of Engineering, who taught and mentored Elizabeth Holmes, has said the following to say about her:
“She had somehow been able to take and synthesize these pieces of science and engineering and technology in ways that I had never thought of.”
“I never encountered a student like this before of the then thousands of students that I had talked”
“You start to realize you are looking in the eyes of another Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs.”
He also maintained that Holmes was a once-in-a-generation genius, comparing her to Newton, Einstein, Mozart, and Leonardo da Vinci.
Excerpt from: "Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup" by John Carreyrou.
Adding another datapoint from one of my previous comments:
In response to someone saying on Twitter how Elon doesn't understand the technical stuff of rocketry, Tom Meuller, former CTO of Propulsion at SpaceX and the designer of many of their engines responded
"I worked for Elon directly for 18 1/2 years, and I can assure you, you are wrong"
Kevin Watson, who developed the avionics for Falcon 9 and Dragon and previously managed the Advanced Computer Systems and Technologies Group within the Autonomous Systems Division at NASA's Jet Propulsion laboratory: "Elon is brilliant. He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction.
He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy.
He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time. It’s amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years."