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Anecdotal, but: Startup I worked at hired a bunch of SpaceX and other musk company employees as middle management, during the hyper growth phase and every singl
by throwawaymaths 4y ago
Anecdotal, but: Startup I worked at hired a bunch of SpaceX and other musk company employees as middle management, during the hyper growth phase and every single one of them was simply awful.
Some were just abusive managers, many were just not that effective. The worst one was a manager that would swoop down with heroics, take credit for other people's work, not support reports on ideas you had, played the blame game, etc.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- yawnr 4y agoVCs and other startups love to shower these people with money like they’re the second coming only to find out that their success was purely circumstantial and mostly a confluence of a ton of factors that had nothing to do with them like luck and timing.
- robocat 4y agoThe VC model is invest in a bunch of companies, with the idea that one goes to the moon and the rest fail. One success pays for a lot of failures. So if you personally see a lot of failures, that doesn’t mean the VC model is failing. Although most VC funds lose money (there’s a power law for their returns too!) Paul Graham wrote a scathing summary of VCs, and one reason for YC is to be more honest and fair (YC still aims for capitalist gains, they just play the game differently). http://paulgraham.com/venturecapital.html http://paulgraham.com/venturecapital.html He also wrote that it is near impossible to pick investment winners (which is what VCs are “supposed” to do).
- majkinetor 4y agoStrange generallization. In any environment there are always those that don't belong. There must be some double digit percentage of them who are genuinelly sculpted in specific way in that harsh working environment. Or you are saying that stressor doesn't make you better in any way (if you survive it). Probability looks higher that you will find such people at ex-Space X group then other more relaxed and/or bureaucratically leaden companies, IMO. They shower them with money because, as always, they don't know who is genuine and who is not, only results will tell but looks like a solid bet anyway, more then showering with money random engineer of ex anything.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago> Some were just abusive managers, many were just not that effective. The worst one was a manager that would swoop down with heroics, take credit for other people's work, not support reports on ideas you had, played the blame game, etc. Also anecdotal, but this is identical to my experience with a handful of ex-employees of some Elon companies. They were basically office politics machines, optimized to promote themselves at the expense of everyone else. One claimed to have worked closely with Elon, but after seeing him lie about so many other things I don’t trust anything he told us. They were weirdly, unnecessarily ruthless in everything they did behind your back. But they were also highly polished and charismatic when addressing you directly. Obviously this isn’t unique, but it was weird to see how consistent it was from this group of people.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- hikawaii 4y agoThen that means that office politics optimizers were able to make Boeing, Lockheed, and NASA look like jokers at something they'd been doing for decades. If I thought this about SpaceX management and ex employees was representative of the culture as a whole,I would throw out all the modern books on managing tech organizations and go all Taylor immediately.
- santoshalper 4y agoOr maybe it's just the ones who left?
- jpgvm 4y agoOr fired.
- SilverBirch 4y agoThis is a common fallacy. Modern businesses are enormous and succeed or fail for all sorts of reasons. Trying to figure out who is actually responsible for the success of a company is difficult. Just because a company is successful, doesn't mean every employee of the company is great. It's essential to understand what the dynamics of an industry is in order to understand why a company is successful. In the case of SpaceX there's no doubt there are some people there who are great engineers. But that's probably not why they beat Boeing.
- mkolodny 4y agoI'm the founder of a 1 person company. If the company ever grows to 2+ people, I hope to give my teammates the freedom I wish I had as an employee.
- majkinetor 4y agoThat naive utopian attitude will change as soon as you have 2+ people.
- lnsru 4y agoYes! When you think, that these resources each cost you 80000€ a year, you want to use them really well and get some serious output.
- MikeDelta 4y agoRemember: it is all up to you to set the company culture. If you find the right people who can thrive under the freedom and responsibility that comes with it, I am sure you will have created a great place to work! All the best with that!
- nebula8804 4y agoMan These Elon companies are really the biggest split personality companies I have seen. I have heard stories like what you describe from some people but then you have people like Astronaut Garrett Reisman, Chip Designer Jim Keller, and AI Research Andrej Karpathy all give amazing praise to Elon and his companies. And when the cars are torn down we see top tier engineering execution and innovation while at the same time we see mediocre build quality. I just don't understand how such organizations can be both filled with terrible people and rock stars at the same time and survive for as long as the Elon companies have done so.
- jjulius 4y agoHot take: The people you mentioned are hired to bring big-name cred to the organization. None of them stuck around (correct me if I'm wrong, I've only done a cursory glance just now), they all left. Eg, they're the "top tier engineering" part of the companies, and other employees (and I've dealt with these employees at Tesla in a past life, so I can attest to their terrible attitude) are the "mediocre build quality".
- adastra22 4y agoMight be generally true, but there are some major exceptions. Gwynne Shotwell for example.
- cma 4y agoBased on her TED interview about passenger travel on rockets being in service by 2028 cheaper than business class, I'm gonna say they might be doing well in spite of her rather than because.
- adastra22 4y agoI’m sorry but you clearly know nothing about what you’re talking about. Throughout the entire industry she is absolutely credited with SpaceX’s success. SpaceX dominates because of reliability, and the reliability stems from business units Shotwell manages, not Musk.
- fhe 4y agoselection bias? in that the people who were let go from or decided to leave SpaceX were the worse performing ones to begin with?
- simonh 4y agoIndeed, it seems premature to conclude that a set of people who all left SpaceX must be representative of employees who stayed at SpaceX.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- throwawaymaths 4y agoWell the op article is specifically about people who left SpaceX and are seeding into startups, so in this thread we very much care about this selection bias.
- submeta 4y agoI have seen this kind of behaviour in the consulting business here in Germany many times. Actually so often that I started to believe this is the culture around those companies. No integrity, no real teamwork, lying behind your back, ego driven, playing the blame game, very poisonous atmosphere.
- dragonelite 4y agoClassic office politics.
- SCUSKU 4y agoMy personal anecdote is that I had an ex-SpaceX engineer as a VP of Engineering for a startup I worked for. And he was great. He is a nice guy, super friendly, very knowledgeable, solid manager, always bringing people into the fold, and technically very talented. The company he was the VP of Engineering for was an indoor vertical farming startup (which is failing), and he moved onto a new venture in the climate space.
- uxcolumbo 4y agoWhy is it failing? Poor management or not viable? Vertical farming seems key for our future.
- catmanjan 4y agoWe still aren’t fully utilising horizontal farming which is significantly cheaper
- prox 4y agoMy uncle is in that business. Even with organic (so no chemicals) techniques the amount of optimization that can be done is staggering. Companies do keep their knowledge very secret, so you won’t know as an average farmer, it’s definitely not an open source spirit in the farming industry.
- blatant303 4y agoSetting the topic of weed aside, are there pharmaceutical crops that would make sense economically to grow in a controlled environment ?
- philwelch 4y ago> Vertical farming seems key for our future. This has never made sense to me. Vertical farming is just greenhouses except with artificial light instead of natural sunlight. Presumably the renewable source of energy for that artificial light would be solar panels. So why not just build normal greenhouses?
- bombolo 4y agoAt my previous company they hired a guy from amazon (aws) to be our new manager. He sucked. Overnight he implemented all the bullshit meetings they had over there. At said meetings he wouldn't listen what people said, and he'd forget what tasks he'd tell people to focus, so the next meeting he'd scold people for wasting company time doing stuff that was not the task they had been assigned.
- robomartin 4y agoWell, at a place like SpaceX you have many layers of people. First, you have people like Elon and the managers who learned from him. Elon is famous for ripping people to shreds in meetings. Yelling and screaming at them. Telling them just how stupid they are in front of the entire room. Layers of managers emulate this and treat people like shit in meetings. Not everyone, of course. You then have thousands of young freshly-graduated people who are in a range between not having a clue to believing they are hot shit because they come from a top university and work at SpaceX. In the middle of all of this, you have a —-relatively speaking— small group of older, experienced people who make it all work. They work around folks who can’t create a decent Excel spreadsheet to save their lives and the “I have a Masters degree from MIT” crowd who truly need to be humbled. Somehow the entire thing works. A reflection of society in some ways? It seems every company and society is, in some form, carried on the shoulders of a select few who actually get it and are capable enough to make it happen.
- throwawaymaths 4y ago> Somehow the entire thing works This is basically cargo culting/ type I error. I've worked for companies that were explicitly NOT this way, they were just fine. Hell even my immediate boss at aforementioned company was not that way but he was tanked by my skip boss (the musk co. Guy) and immediately my productivity tanked too.
- LightBug1 4y agoSounds familiar. I guess the apple doesn't fall far from the ...
- zpeti 4y agoAnecdotal, but I’ve found many people who complain about abusive managers are doing a terrible job and are looking for any excuse to be a victim or explain why their crap work is not appreciated. Misunderstood genius syndrome.
- throwawaymaths 4y agoWell in this case more than one of the managers was not someone I reported to (only one was my boss) and a bunch of them were actively let go because of their awfulness. I don't actually care about the perception of my work. I care specifically about the startup community and am trying to get other people to not bring in middle managers from musk companies without carefully vetting them, because it will mean pain for their employees.
- uoaei 4y agoIf a manager can't be kind even to underperforming employees, that makes them a bad manager.
- sandworm101 4y agoWell, they were former SpaceX people. Perhaps the good eggs are kept and these were SpaceX castoffs? But that is probably giving SpaceX too much credit. I get the sense that they simply have an insane turnover rate that sucks a little good work from everyone before kicking them to the curb. I would expect people grown in such an environment to be at least a little poisioned.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago> The worst one was a manager that would swoop down with heroics, take credit for other people's work, not support reports on ideas you had, played the blame game, etc. Sounds the type of person that typically gets promoted into those roles.