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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

by memish 4y ago

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."

minhazm 4y ago
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.
- akira2501 4y ago
  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.
  - mlindner 4y ago
    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 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 https://youtu.be/t705r8ICkRw?t=805
    - NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
      >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 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.
  - minhazm 4y ago
    > 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?
- h11h 4y ago
  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.
  - overthemoon 4y ago
    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.
  - Tiktaalik 4y ago
    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.
- wraptile 4y ago
  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.
  - Thorentis 4y ago
    What's wrong with his RPCs tweet? If Twitter is using microservices that make RPCs to fetch data and render content then it makes sense.
thefz 4y ago
> "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.
- no_op 4y ago
  "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.
  - mlindner 4y ago
    Thanks for the note about autocomplete. That explains it very well what he actually meant.
  - lupire 4y ago
    What about "most salient lines of code"?
  - sundarurfriend 4y ago
    > 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?
karpathy 4y ago
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).
- saagarjha 4y ago
  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?
- jiggawatts 4y ago
  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.
  - sgu999 4y ago
    > That engineer that was humiliated publicly for defending a slow-as-molasses JavaScript-heavy microservices Rube Goldberg machine? Citation needed ;D
alsodumb 4y ago
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" https://twitter.com/lrocket/status/1512919230689148929?s=20&t=b54KqusOOFAraUOaXtTeXQ https://twitter.com/lrocket/status/1512919230689148929?s=20&...
hackfrednews 4y ago
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.

by memish 4y ago

minhazm 4y ago

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.

akira2501 4y ago
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.
- mlindner 4y ago
  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 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 https://youtu.be/t705r8ICkRw?t=805
  - NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
    >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 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.
- minhazm 4y ago
  > 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?
h11h 4y ago
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.
- overthemoon 4y ago
  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.
- Tiktaalik 4y ago
  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.
wraptile 4y ago
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.
- Thorentis 4y ago
  What's wrong with his RPCs tweet? If Twitter is using microservices that make RPCs to fetch data and render content then it makes sense.

thefz 4y ago

> "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.

no_op 4y ago
"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.
- mlindner 4y ago
  Thanks for the note about autocomplete. That explains it very well what he actually meant.
- lupire 4y ago
  What about "most salient lines of code"?
- sundarurfriend 4y ago
  > 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?

karpathy 4y ago

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).

saagarjha 4y ago
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?
jiggawatts 4y ago
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.
- sgu999 4y ago
  > That engineer that was humiliated publicly for defending a slow-as-molasses JavaScript-heavy microservices Rube Goldberg machine? Citation needed ;D

alsodumb 4y ago

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" https://twitter.com/lrocket/status/1512919230689148929?s=20&t=b54KqusOOFAraUOaXtTeXQ https://twitter.com/lrocket/status/1512919230689148929?s=20&...

hackfrednews 4y ago

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.