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."
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.
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.
Citation needed ;D
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.
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.
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.
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.
So it's basically a FizzBuzz test, but for existing employees?
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.
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?
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
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.
Brute forcing a problem with better technology not always the actual solution when technical problems aren't actually the problem.
“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.
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"
https://twitter.com/lrocket/status/1512919230689148929?s=20&...
