I look forward to Tesla getting into public transit
I appreciate your lengthy post (not sarcasm I swear), I really sincerely do. I always appreciate it when someone takes the time to provide an excellent explanation of their perspective. Let’s start here, I agree Bob Smith sounds like a total ass.
It feels to me, like there is an excluded middle. Your original quote was:
To me, the reality is more like Musk is ok at hiring people, i.e., I think your overselling this. There are likely few CEOs that are truly awful at hiring. I’m sure there are some but they would be more the exception than the rule. I’ve never been a CEO, but I was a hiring manager in software development, a military officer (no hiring, but I was leading troops and writing promotion boards), and most recently a research manager for a fairly large lab. I wouldn’t consider myself a genius at hiring, but I cannot think of anybody I ever hired that ended up being a total clown. Certainly some didn’t live the hopes I had for them, but that’s a different thing. And I’ll tell you, hiring for the research lab is much easier than hiring for the software development jobs because everyone who applies is very qualified. I could almost pick anybody and have things turn out out well. Kind of like when you’re hiring a head of design and the applicant has been the head of design from another company for years and years with success.
If you want to prove what you said in your quote is true, especially the second part (which you really didn’t demonstrate), then show me a trend where he has taken a nobody or more importantly somebody that everyone else has written off as having no talent, and hired that person and they ended up being a smashing success. That would show that he has an exceptional eye for talent. All you’ve shown is he’s not awful at it. These are very different things.
By the way, for clarity, I’m not the OP. I don’t think Musk has no business acumen. That’s going too far. I don’t think he has many talents (his biggest is promoting his own hype), and certainly not enough to warrant being the richest person in the world. Of course, I also don’t think anyone regardless of talent should have that much wealth, but that’s another story for another thread.
A couple thoughts.
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Agree 1950s was too early aesthetically. but it was also the heyday of the really, really really bad / uber-cheap movies. Which support the simplistic lick-and-a-promise aesthetic better than the later and much more sophisticated Landmaster you cite.
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Wow, an Angelfire URL. That’s totally cool. I haven’t seen one of those in ages. It’s like seeing a 1940s car drive by.
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I’d never seen Damnation Alley. The Landmaster is really cool. Thank you.
IANA but normally a loss is taken when realized. If the only thing that happens is that the value of a company goes down, the owner does not realize a loss, and it is not a taxable event. This is how it works for shareholders of public companies so I would expect the same rules to apply to shareholders of private companies. The way for him to realize a loss would be to sell shares of the company at a loss compared to his investment, or for the company to go out of business.
Also a loss is a tax break only to the extent of offsetting gains, and I’m guessing he is avoiding taking gains on any of his other investments as a tax avoidance strategy.
It’s not the steak, it’s the sizzle. The appeal of the Tesla isn’t the styling, it’s the nameplate.
Sounds like solid business acumen. Not sure what the OP is on about.
What specific mission? And Elon is constantly micro-managing. Maybe he can spot talent but so far it seems like it’s more the case he is not awful at it rather than particularly good at it, i.e. like most people.
So he maybe finds acceptable-to-good employees but then doesn’t give them any clear vision for what he wants (biggest and best! is a slogan, not a plan), and interferes constantly.
1 out of 3 (being generous on the one) is good for baseball, not so much for running a company with thousands of employees.
I don’t think that’s a fair comment about the styling. When the Model S first came out, it was justifiably praised for its styling. In the decade since, three things have happened:
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They became so commonplace that the styling no longer looked remarkable.
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Other cars appeared with similar styling (e.g.- the latest-generation Ford Fusion) making it seem even more common.
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The Model 3 (probably what your neighour has) is nearly a foot shorter than Model S and has a shorter wheelbase, so despite very similar styling it looks a bit less elegant.
None of which detracts from the Tesla being a fine piece of aesthetic design.
Now I hate myself for saying something good about Musk. 
Must be small details that make the difference, because at a glance, it doesn’t look much different than my 12 year old Honda Civic. It’s just a sedan with weird black wheels and odd door handles.
It’s a classic case of a guy with expertise in one field thinking that his expertise is transferable to another field.
This image shows how the Model 3 is shorter than the somewhat more elegant-looking Model S. I think both look pretty sharp although the design is getting a bit dated. The second picture is a Ford Fusion, which could be mistaken for a Tesla at a glance.
This is the right answer to the wrong question. The question is not “is it a good idea to slim down Twitter’s codebase?” In principle, of course that’s always a good idea. But it’s notoriously hard to rationalize that kind of work in relation to the financial bottom line.
The question is how does Twitter need to change to become profitable? And it’s not clear that this is even a question to be answered in the technical domain. Reducing code/service bloat is not on the list of priorities when one is parachuting into a new company to rework the business offerings. You’d likely tolerate the addition of more bloat in the short term, and plan to reduce it later.
This is different from building a car. It’s really costly to ship a bloated car and trim it down, and there are real material and energetic costs to bloat in a motor vehicle. Aggressively de-bloating a Tesla makes good business sense.
But whatever you think of Twitter’s features or policies, before Musk took over, Twitter worked. It was fast, it was reliable, it was free of visible defects in behavior or appearance. It did not need a debloating shock treatment. It didn’t need anything but routine reviews and adjustments.
With that understanding, it’s fairly irrelevant whether it’s a good idea to delete lines of code or not. This whole thing about “too many microservices” is just Musk blowing hot air to make himself seem technical. The code bloat is not a relevant factor in anything that’s going on right now.
Very true. Which is why Microsoft has gotten away with producing hugely bloated software, even though the bloat has to be supported directly by their customers, by hardware that they have to pay for. Nevertheless, I stopped complaining about it as soon as I got a sufficiently fast computer. It just isn’t a major factor. Badly designed software that’s hard to maintain and constantly buggy is a much bigger factor.
And I note that nothing Musk has been trying to do addresses that. His “code review” bullshit certainly doesn’t address that, because it has absolutely nothing to do with the all-important matter of competent high-level software design and a software engineering methodology focused on consistency and institutionalizing excellence. In fact his indiscriminate firing probably removed some of the company’s best engineers and demotivated the remaining ones. If I was working for Twitter and had not yet been fired, I’d be making urgent plans to fire myself and get the hell out of there.
Certainly. And I appreciate your reasoned response here.
Sure, I’ll acknowledge a little hyperbole in trying to make a point. However, I think there is truth in that he makes it a point to really seek out people who are the right fit for the job–not necessarily those with the most experience, or the best credentials, but those with a particular kind of drive. The word “passion” gets massively overused, but there are people out there with a kind of obsession for one thing or another. And SpaceX is filled with people with this kind of obsession.
My point b) above is not just about people stuck someplace–it’s also about giving them a great level of responsibility when they join. I mentioned Tom Mueller above. He said this (a while back):
Today SpaceX has more than 700 employees, 500 of them at corporate headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif. Mueller is vice president of propulsion. “TRW is a huge company with a tiny propulsion department,” Mueller says. “Here, I’m kind of king.”
From the very beginning, he was made propulsion lead. And kept that position through massive subsequent growth. Mueller was certainly quite competent in his old job, but he was capable of a great deal more.
Another example: Lars Blackmore, the lead for the control systems group at SpaceX:
http://larsblackmore.com/
He led the development for the landing guidance systems for the Falcon 9 boosters, and now is working on Starship. Before, he worked on similar problems at JPL and developed some impressive algorithms. And before then, finished a PhD on the same topic.
Now, in some sense, that was an easy hire. Lars applied to SpaceX–Musk didn’t seek him out. But what did happen is that Lars was very quickly put in a significant leadership role, despite being under 35 at the time and not having previous experience leading a giant team. Nevertheless, the team prospered and landing orbital-class boosters is now routine for SpaceX–something no other company is doing.
Lars did good work at JPL. There just wasn’t room to do something big there.
This happens at multiple scales. Even interns are given responsibilities that would be equivalent to full-time roles at other companies.
That seems very likely. I have done hundreds of interviews in software development and poorly-performing people are very common.
If you’ve been in the software world, you may be familiar with the FizzBuzz problem:
Short version: many programmers cannot solve even a trivial programming problem. I’ve never asked that problem directly, but I have posed similarly-easy problems and a surprising number of candidates cannot do them. The test is not about picking out the rockstar programmers. It just about rejecting the people that genuinely cannot program at all.
Sometimes, these people end up getting hired anyway–even in well-run companies. Or perhaps something changes and they simply lose the ability after being hired. Regardless, I know a few, even though my company has a pretty solid reputation. But no one really wants to fire them; sometimes their immediate managers seem to keep them only so that they can maintain their team size.
It doesn’t take enormous talent to fire/reject these candidates. It’s just not always done.
FWIW, I do have a friend who applied to and was rejected from SpaceX. He is an excellent programmer. Just, apparently, not quite good enough (though I did tag along when he visited and got a nice tour of the SpaceX factory).
Well, that’s going to be difficult, as you might imagine. People share their employment history; not so much their interview rejection history. Plus, even if someone was accepted at a place, it might have been that their role would have been smaller. If Blackmore had been hired by Blue Origin, would he have just been put in some junior position and told he had to work his way up through the corporate ladder? Obviously, I can’t answer that hypothetical. I can just say that’s not what happened at SpaceX.
Still, I’m willing to accept “not awful” as the standard. The trouble is that many companies are in fact awful at hiring. They hire middle managers with no technical experience and are unable to properly lead their teams. They hire people with great resumes, often putting their thumb on the scales when it comes to other factors, just because they appeared to have some key experience. They hire executives with a mysterious habit of “failing upward”. Etc. I work for a successful and generally well-regarded company, and I still see this stuff from time to time. And I think it probably causes more damage than people imagine.
I’m not going to claim that Musk is some 99.9th percentile hiring manager or anything. But his companies appear to be consistently well-staffed. And there have been a number of times where there was great hand-wringing about some personnel shuffle, allegedly a sign of some impending trainwreck, that apparently ended up being exactly the right decision.
I don’t think I can give a more solid answer than that. Sorry if my response is a little scattershot. But I will emphasize the argument again: suppose the people at Tesla and SpaceX aren’t actually better. That regardless of appearances, the average level of talent is the same as it is elsewhere. If that’s the case, then, why the difference in the level of success? Why is SpaceX the only company reusing orbital-class boosters? Why has Crew Dragon flown 22 people now while the Boeing Starliner has not flown any? Why is Tesla the only company making significant profits on EVs? It must be something.
To state the obvious: bring in more revenue, and reduce expenses.
Given the other layoffs in the industry, it’s clear that many are expecting a downturn in ad revenue. Even independent of bailing advertisers–a problem which was seemingly overblown, with Apple and others coming back onboard–reduced revenue is probably inevitable. So that leaves expenses (I’m not going to count the $8 blue checks).
Twitter’s costs are almost entirely headcount. So while one might argue about how one actually reduces headcount while maintaining a similar level of service, that is fundamentally the key thing they needed to do.
Twitter had something like half the revenue per employee of Facebook and Google. That’s not a great position to be in. But: is that because of bloat, or is it just a fundamentally inefficient organization?
It’s impossible to know from the outside, but I lean towards bloat. Twitter roughly doubled their headcount in the past 4 years. Did they add any compelling new features? Did something about the business somehow get more difficult? It doesn’t seem like that should be the case. It looks a lot like they went on a hiring spree without all that much to show for it.
And as best I can tell, that’s still the case now. To be sure, there have been some reports of minor problems. SMS password verification stopped working for like a day (though who even uses that?). There was a small spate of suspensions, which arose because some service didn’t have a rate limiter and unknown parties (no doubt people excited to find out what they could get away with) poked at it until it did something. Maybe a few other issues, but clearly no widespread outages or slowdowns.
Lines of code do not, by themselves, have a cost. But people do, and services need maintainers.
One problem in the software industry is that it’s often virtually impossible to determine the value of some kind of work. At my own workplace, I maintain close to a dozen different tools in my spare time. The amount of maintenance work is small, less than an hour a week each on average. I just keep them going and only implement the most requested features. In many cases, I can actually measure how much time I’m saving people, and it’s much more than the time I put into it: a significant net win for the company. In other cases I can’t, but the low level of work required probably still means they’re a net win.
Occasionally I’ll find out about tools with a similar level of functionality, but have 2-3 full-time maintainers. The people aren’t sleeping on the job. It’s just that they spend all of their time implementing what must be fairly low-value features. I can’t believe that all of these features really pay for themselves. They are on the wrong end of the efficiency curve. But they keep going because the value is hard to measure, and so sheer momentum carries them along. This is acceptable in a company that is highly profitable. Not so much in one that’s losing money.
All of those microservices at Twitter must have had an owner. Probably some people maintained a large number of them, while other services had whole teams behind them. But it is impossible that the actual value of each of those services is equal. Surely, some of them are for features which are barely used, or duplicated by some other service, or were low-value for a variety of other reasons. Eliminating these means they no longer need a maintainer. That person can do something else (or be fired).
Due to the lack of concrete information (including financials, since Twitter is no longer public), there’s really not much more we can do than see what happens over time. It’s clear now that #RIPTwitter did not happen. The site is working normally, and there doesn’t seem to have been a great exodus of users. This could change, but it seems unlikely at this point. The trauma surgery is over and the patient is recovering. We’ll just have to see what happens.
I do actually think there’s significant potential for some kind of marketplace. That will take some effort, but could amount to significant non-ad revenue.
I’ve read the cites and I would interpret this as many programmers who are actively applying for jobs cannot solve even a trivial programming problem. The presumption is that most of the good programmers have secure jobs that they’re happy with or seek jobs through their professional network. Now I’m going off to read up on tail-call optimization.
This is the way I read it, too. The last decade or so has convinced a lot of people that they should try to break into programming as a career, and sends a lot of candidates who have just been told what a for loop and if statement are in to interviews. And if any due diligence at all is done they get rejected.
I guarantee that Elon Musk didn’t show up at Twitter, find out that 3/4 of them couldn’t solve FizzBuzz, and fired those. Twitter does due diligence in hiring.
…diving deeper into the comments section on both the original article and the one that cited it: that isn’t the way that I read it at all. They’ve been arguing in the comments about the correct answer to the FizzBuzz question since 2007 which leads me to believe that it isn’t that great of a screening test at all. There isn’t any real data behind this. Just the anecdotal experiences of people who are inclined to believe it and now it has become “accepted wisdom.”
That is the dominant effect, to be sure: applicants that cannot program keep trying many times until they find a job (or don’t), and so the applications are dominated by people that cannot program. That is perhaps not surprising.
What is surprising is that many of these people–and I have seen them–often have years of industry experience. I don’t ask FizzBuzz in my interviews, but I have asked questions like “write a function to reverse a string” or “compute the average of this array,” and there is a distinct set of people that cannot give good answers.
How did these people survive for the past 5 years at well-known company X? I can only presume they got Milton’d into some low-impact role because it was too much trouble to fire them, but I really don’t know.
And, well, I have encountered people in my own workplace who were not quite at that low level, but in the ballpark. They work slowly and still produce low-quality output. They don’t learn new techniques or develop systems to increase their efficiency.
The “10x programmer” isn’t quite a myth, but a company should probably not count on filling their ranks with rockstars. However, the “1/10x programmer” is absolutely a real thing in my experience.
Through most of the 2000s I was in IT. We were doing web development on the Microsoft stack, so C#, ASP.Net, T-SQL, etc. Real mainstream stuff at the time. We were a small ~30 person company with a niche product. All the ~10 devs worked for me.
We / I often interviewed people who had been working for one or another body shop contracted to the half-dozen Fortune 500s who had HQs or big IT operations in our city.
My favorite interviewee from that decade was a ~25yo who’d graduated 3 years previously with a Bachelor’s degree in computer-something-something from the local state school. And had immediately landed a “consulting” (read “temp worker”) gig deployed to a local MegaCorp. Now 3 years later he’s ready to move on and answers our advert for experienced MS web stack devs.
He tells me that for the entire 3 years all he did was attach text to controls on ASP.Net pages. As in the “Click Here” appearing on a button or the “First Name:” appearing to the left of a text box. That was his only task. Not code; text.
The interview ended quickly enough that he still had time to go to lunch on the way back to his cubicle at MegaCorp.
I never did find out whether they’d just production-lined the work to be that dumb and he was an innocent victim of corporate bureaucratic stupidity, or whether they’d quickly found his Peter Principal level and it was that close to the floor.
Either way I wasn’t going to deal with it.