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The highs and lows of SpaceX have been interesting to watch. I have to wonder though if, at least partially, some of their recent troubles are partially because
by jmward01 1y ago
The highs and lows of SpaceX have been interesting to watch. I have to wonder though if, at least partially, some of their recent troubles are partially because people are loosing passion for their mission. You can definitely see it in the reporting, and some of the comments here, that there is less willingness to give them the benefit of the doubt and while that is far from a technical measure, passion is a big part of what makes a team get through things and continue to make progress. I know for my own part there was a time where I was looking for positions at SpaceX purely because I wanted to be apart of what was going on but now you couldn't pay be enough to join them. If your key people start thinking of things as just a job instead of a world changing opportunity then your rapid iteration cycle can go from 'this is brilliant and gets things done fast so I better try harder' to 'this is stupid and I am putting in my minimum hours to get paid'.
- TowerTall 1y agoI think what SpaceX has accomplished is awesome and extremely impressive, but because of Elon Musk, I hope that some other company will one day leapfrog them and push SpaceX into oblivion.
- hiddencost 1y agoThis is what happened to Google.
- apples_oranges 1y agoThere are still people who have basic professionalism and desire to improve their skills, regardless of the vision they buy into or don't buy into. Motivation only goes so far, and in my humble opinion, unless Space X hiring was special in some way, the people who build space rockets are not the kind of people who underperform because they no longer buy the story. They just quit and excel elsewhere.
- fisherjeff 1y agoWell, equity vesting can be one reason to stick around and underperform
- vjvjvjvjghv 1y agoI could imagine that Musk's political escapades have driven away a lot of people. SpaceX may also have lost Musk as the referee who makes quick decisions and keeps things moving forward. I think people like Thorvalds, Gates, Jobs and Musk are a superpower for organizations. Their decisions may not always be perfect but at least a decision is made so people can proceed. Otherwise you end up with the usual committee decisions that take forever and are mostly driven by internal politics and not about the product.
- more_corn 1y agoNot just that but he aggressively fires people for little or nothing, spontaneously rescinds outstanding offers, fires contractors, initiates hiring freezes, cancels bonuses and throws up Nazi salutes on national television. So I’ve heard working for him can present challenges.
- numpad0 1y agoI guess the moral of the story is, dice rolls can be surprisingly useful, but when the dice stops being a dice and becomes its own reactionary camp inside the committee, the optics can get surprisingly di... No, I'll show myself out.
- lukeschlather 1y agoThat isn't an instant process. Someone who has been working at SpaceX for 5 years and is excited about Starship might have reached a tipping point where they can no longer ignore their boss's behavior, but also they are conflicted about abandoning Starship.
- jordanb 1y agoYeah I'm sure they could walk out the door and get a job at the other rocket company across the street.
- mempko 1y agoI don't know, but if I saw my boss do a Nazi Salute, I would definitely lose passion.
- have-a-break 1y agoProblem is with the numbers 36. Everytime i see those related to cars or "random passwords" I know somethings going to happen. As a developer I'll manually change those numbers if and when they appear.
- vjvjvjvjghv 1y agoOr, more generally, if your boss's post on X make him sound like an insufferable asshole that has no self control.
- ethbr1 1y agoOne benefit of being quiet is that people may assume you're more competent than you are. If you're loud, that collapses into a more realistic appraisal.
- pantalaimon 1y agoSi tacuisses, philosophus mansisses.
- EdwardDiego 1y ago> Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt. -- Most likely not Abraham Lincoln.
- csours 1y agoYup. I have not experienced anything nearly this serious with a CEO, but I have had company leadership say and do very stupid things that reduced my focus on the corporate mission. Fortunately, they do still occasionally provide me with interesting puzzles (and they still pay me).
- cyberlimerence 1y ago
- csours 1y ago> because people are losing passion for their mission. Or perhaps they are losing people with the passion for the mission.
- MegaDeKay 1y agoI think more likely is that the bones of the people working there are being ground to dust as Musk demands more and more from them faster and faster. You can only do so much so fast before things start going south hard.
- ethbr1 1y agoIt's amazing how underappreciated or cared about morale is in the corporate world. "How happy are people at this company?" is a non-negligible performance differentiator. Yet somehow CEOs seem blindsided when everyone at a company hates it and is mailing it in. (Probably because they're only listening to the management chain, which is concealing the problem)
- aeternum 1y agoIs this actually true? Amazon was pretty notorious for poor culture and high employee turnover yet the company performance has been stellar. Covid-era twitter clearly cared a ton about employee morale but the product stagnated. I find it's often the opposite causality, IE the success/trajectory of the company is the primary component that determines morale. An increasing stock price makes employees happy.
- quantified 1y agoAn increasing stock price makes employees with stock happy. Generally, morale is a variable but the coefficient to apply to it is also different from company to company.
- marcusverus 1y agoI would never want to work for an Elon, but I understand the allure. Like most of us, I'm giving a solid ~75% effort most days, just punching the clock. My work life balances is fine. I have time for my family and hobbies, etc. It's a nice, steady way to live. But every once in awhile, circumstances will conspire to provide me with hard work with an aggressive, drop-dead delivery date. It makes me mad at first--there are things I'd rather do than work, after all--but there is something to be said for letting go and locking the fuck in for a week of 14 hour a days. It feels good. It doesn't feel like work. It's a drug. It keeps me high until midnight, but makes me sleep like a rock. It makes me sleep like a rock, but has me springing out of bed 5 hours later! I feel like I'm the master of the universe. I'm impervious to stress. Even that's not quite right. It's not just that I'm immune to stress, it's that I start to feed off of it. I welcome it. And then d-day comes and it's over. The impetus is gone. And every single time, I try to hang on to it. I give myself new projects and fake deadlines. I force myself to get up early and stay up late, but the moment that magic is gone, those things become... work. And like I said, there are things I would rather do than work. I think a lot of Elon's success stems from his mastery of this "lock in" phenomenon. He is (or at least was) able to induce it in himself to drive himself harder than normal people do. He is able to induce the same state in his workforce as by setting bold and inspiring goals and setting absurd deadlines. This is not a secret, btw. Nobody goes to SpaceX without understanding that they're signing up to work double the hours for way less than double the pay. For many, this sounds like a nightmare. If you're a young single guy looking to lock the fuck in, to take on huge responsibilities and grow in the company of some of the smartest, hardest working people on earth, it sounds positively amazing. tl;dr: It's a feature, not a bug.
- rich_sasha 1y agoI think they're also doing things that are very, very hard, but they set the expectations very, very high. Hard things fail from time to time. When you aim for something really at the edge of human enginuity, it might work or it might not, and if it works, it will probably still be a close call. But somehow years ago already SpaceX and it's followers convinced everyone that Starship will definitely happen. And it still might, but if it does, I still think it will be a rocky road. I would say SpaceX has been extraordinarily lucky for years (not in the sense that they fluked it, but rather that they achieved so much and made it look easy), and this is just reversion to the mean.
- GolfPopper 1y agoNot just hard things, but much harder than they've done before. Note that Booster appears to be coming along pretty well. But Ship, which has a much, much more difficult mission profile than Falcon 9, is really struggling, because going to orbit and back is far more difficult than going most of the way to orbit and back. (Please forgive the abstraction - I don't have the relative numbers at hand.)
- inglor_cz 1y agoAn alternative explanation is that they are trying to push the design of Starship to its limits. All the failures have happened with Starship v2, where the ambition is to put 100 tons to Low Earth Orbit. The previous design, Starship v1, was only (theoretically) capable of lifting 80 tons. 20 tons is a huge difference, basically what Falcon 9 can lift when launched in expendable mode.
- LorenPechtel 1y agoBut this was an explosion on the pad. Something leaked or something broke while not under flight stress. We also have that Falcon 9 that blew in space due to a leak. I think they're skimping on quality control.
- inglor_cz 1y agoThis is what I have read so far: https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/1lfayba/em_update_on_s36_possible_failure_of_nitrogen/ https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/1lfayba/em_update_o... So yeah, a QC problem, it seems.
- bluescrn 1y agoWith this one, given the seething hatred for Musk these days, I wouldn't rule out sabotage. It's not the most likely cause, but in a world where people have been torching Tesla dealerships, I'm sure there's a lot of people now who really want to see Starship fail.
- FireBeyond 1y agoI think you're drawing a VERY long bow here. That's a long hustle, to work in a field where you'd get to be an intimate part of the launch control process at a company that is going to be very selective on who it hires because it can be, security clearances, and then be able to do this. No, it's rocketry. Sometimes things go boom when they're that volatile to begin with.
- EdwardDiego 1y ago
- freejazz 1y agoI guess Elon isn't inspiring quite like he used to.
- Zardoz84 1y agoWorking for a nazi, isn't very inspiring
- StopDisinfo910 1y agoWell, it does have a proven track record in the American space industry.
- lukan 1y agohttps://xkcd.com/984/ https://xkcd.com/984/
- EdwardDiego 1y agoSomehow I missed that one, and the alt text was an amazing 2000s reference.
- markus_zhang 1y agoNASA teams under a nazi were pretty performant, just for saying.
- rurban 1y agoIt wasn't under a Nazi, it was Nazis only. Until Lyndon Johnson destroyed it, there was only them. But they were no immature manchilds as Elon, they were known to be excellent engineers and managers.
- jordanb 1y agoNah he was apolitical. His job was to make the rockets go up. Where they come down was some other guy's problem.
- pxmpxm 1y ago[flagged]
- kanbara 1y agothis is a pretty bad take. if you don't think that elon's antics don't colour the decisions of his employees or companies that could sign deals with his companies then you're really quite oblivious. few people want a loud, extremist man, in bed with one of the most polarising figures of our time who seems quite unstable ranting at all hours of the night, especially when his company isn't delivering. politics is everything, you cannot divest from it.
- pxmpxm 1y agoHe's done the same asinine antics his entire career - friends at early-days at Tesla corroborate the identical on the spectrum nonsense that conveniently is now all over mass media. The only difference is back then he was saying batshit things that were on-canon for feel good progressives. This is the same thing as twitter folding in like 3 days when he did those grand layoffs; arguments entirely grounded in feels of the aformentioned group.