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Interestingly, if you read the new Musk biography from Isaacson, Musk’s approach of committing to an overaggressive deadline, rallying all his workers to stay u

Interestingly, if you read the new Musk biography from Isaacson, Musk’s approach of committing to an overaggressive deadline, rallying all his workers to stay up until 3am on the shop floor and generally yelling at them like a military commander actually worked remarkably well again and again at Tesla and SpaceX. They accomplished business goals that no one thought was possible, continually pulling rabbits out of a hat. However, the evidence suggests that this approach does not work for a research problem like developing self-driving cars. It seems that you can’t just yell at software engineers and make them stay awake all night until they make an AI research breakthrough. The difference with SpaceX/Tesla was that the hurdles were fundamentally manufacturing and efficiency problems (after all, we made it to the moon in 1969 - and in both cases Musk had a basically working prototype very early on), not problems of science research.

93po 3y ago
His method of deletion and challenging requirements works well for manufacturing. It would appear to me that the same doesn’t work for software nearly as well.
- spiffistan 3y ago
  It probably does work for certain kinds of software, but groundbreaking research breakthroughs not so much.
IshKebab 3y ago
I think a bigger factor is the job market. Where's an aspiring rocket scientist going to go if they don't get a job for SpaceX? Or an electric car designer (back when Tesla started at least)? There just weren't really many other places for people who wanted to work on those cool problems to go to work. So Musk had the leverage to push them really hard. But software? Not so much! Programmers can work pretty much anywhere. Even for a cool project like driverless cars there's quite a lot of companies trying to do it. And how many of the driverless car programmers specifically want to work on driverless cars? They'd probably be cool with other AI projects, of which there are a gazillion.
- text0404 3y ago
  > Where's an aspiring rocket scientist going to go if they don't get a job for SpaceX? Or an electric car designer (back when Tesla started at least)? NASA, Boeing (or any defense contractor, really), Planet for satellite engineering, Google/Waymo was doing self-driving around that time. I contracted for some random small self-driving startup around 2010.
  - IshKebab 3y ago
    NASA and Boeing weren't doing exciting new rocketry though. What rocket scientist would prefer to work on SLS to Starship? > Google/Waymo was doing self-driving around that time I was talking about Tesla's electric car origins. When they started they were the only ones making electric cars that you'd actually want.

93po 3y ago

His method of deletion and challenging requirements works well for manufacturing. It would appear to me that the same doesn’t work for software nearly as well.

spiffistan 3y ago
It probably does work for certain kinds of software, but groundbreaking research breakthroughs not so much.

IshKebab 3y ago

I think a bigger factor is the job market. Where's an aspiring rocket scientist going to go if they don't get a job for SpaceX? Or an electric car designer (back when Tesla started at least)? There just weren't really many other places for people who wanted to work on those cool problems to go to work. So Musk had the leverage to push them really hard. But software? Not so much! Programmers can work pretty much anywhere. Even for a cool project like driverless cars there's quite a lot of companies trying to do it. And how many of the driverless car programmers specifically want to work on driverless cars? They'd probably be cool with other AI projects, of which there are a gazillion.

text0404 3y ago
> Where's an aspiring rocket scientist going to go if they don't get a job for SpaceX? Or an electric car designer (back when Tesla started at least)? NASA, Boeing (or any defense contractor, really), Planet for satellite engineering, Google/Waymo was doing self-driving around that time. I contracted for some random small self-driving startup around 2010.
- IshKebab 3y ago
  NASA and Boeing weren't doing exciting new rocketry though. What rocket scientist would prefer to work on SLS to Starship? > Google/Waymo was doing self-driving around that time I was talking about Tesla's electric car origins. When they started they were the only ones making electric cars that you'd actually want.