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It's cute but are there any actual nerds left in big tech leadership? Of the magnificent seven we basically only have Jensen Huang left as a technical leader an
by jamil7 10mo ago
It's cute but are there any actual nerds left in big tech leadership? Of the magnificent seven we basically only have Jensen Huang left as a technical leader and maybe you can count Zuckerberg.
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- jve 10mo agoElon Musk must be one. Seems enough techy to me: Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink - software being used for the hardware in innovative ways. Edit: Oh, wow, mentioning this guy is surely controversial, sorry. However discussing whether he is a nerd, understands engineering on very deep level/gets his hands dirty OR he only manages people - there must be some psychological aspect related, a form of disagreement to discredit or have a hard time believing it can actually be true. Here is a list of credible persons commenting on Musk whether he understands engineering or not. With all the sources: https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/evidence_that_musk_is_the_chief_engineer_of_spacex/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
- adev_ 10mo ago> Elon Musk must be one Spoiler: He is not. But he is very good at faking it. Anytime he tries to give a serious opinion on anything related to computers: It is laughably bad and out of touch (SQL, compilers, languages, performance, etc... ). He definitively has a scientific background but definitively not "Tech" as far as computer are concerned.
- n4r9 10mo agoGood example if anyone wants it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZslebJEZbE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZslebJEZbE
- sam-cop-vimes 10mo agoIt doesn't matter. He knows enough to be able to harness it for realising his worldview - and that is the problem.
- imtringued 10mo agoElon Musk is probably one of the most cutthroat businessmen on the planet. His skills don't lie in technological implementation whatsoever. Martin Eberhard was the technical co-founder of Tesla and Elon Musk is trying his best to erase his contributions to Tesla.
- adev_ 10mo agoYes. As far as business is concerned, facts speaks for themselves. But that has nothing to do with the valley chips and computer nerdery
- irthomasthomas 10mo agoEberhard and Tarpenning where the co-founders. Musk was an early investor, became the third CEO, and then sued to claim co-founder status.
- tim333 10mo agoYeah there's an interesting interview with Eberhard https://youtu.be/88KHfX_kPIY?t=88 https://youtu.be/88KHfX_kPIY?t=88 Eberhard wasn't that technical and was the CEO in the early years.
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- delichon 10mo agoUnlike the more common pattern, Elon doesn't hesitate to make straight up engineering decisions for his businesses, including ones that look unnecessarily high risk to a lot of his own engineers. Chopsticks catching spaceships made of stainless steel and self driving cars without lidar are well known examples. The success of those choices earns him legit nerd cred.
- adev_ 10mo agoAs far as physics is concerned (his initial background), he definitively is knowledgeable for a CEO yes.
- mikkupikku 10mo agoSelf-driving cars without LIDAR was a pure cynical business decision and hasn't worked well technically.
- delichon 10mo agoDisagree. The current limitations of Tesla self driving are not around difficulties in judging distances that lidar solves. They're around inference deficiencies with accurate geometry.
- tim333 10mo agoIt must be a bit embarrassing having Waymo and Baidu cracking ahead with the driverless taxis while the Tesla ones still don't work well though.
- mikkupikku 10mo agoLIDAR provides dense point clouds from which you can derive geometry that Tesla's vision methods struggle to perceive. (Subtle things, like huge firetrucks parked straight across the road.)
- ben_w 10mo agoIf the AI was good enough, vision-only self-driving would be at least as good as the best human. The AI isn't good enough. I'm starting to suspect that current ML learning rates can't be good enough in reasonable wall-clock timeframes due to how long it takes between relevant examples for them to learn from. It's fine to lean on other sensory modalities (including LIDAR, radar, ultrasound, whatever else you fancy) until the AI gets good enough.
- Treegarden 10mo agoI don’t see how “tech” is limited to software. While your case might be made for software, according to many accounts Musk is a strong driver on the hardware side. For instance, I’ve read the Tesla and SpaceX books by Eric Berger, which are much more focused on technical things compared to the more mainstream books. And while Musk is not in the trenches with a screwdriver, he’s not faking it either. To be honest, I’m actually interested in this hypothesis: is he legitimately skilled/knowledgeable, or is he indeed faking it? And for either side I would like to see evidence. This question is interesting to me because some of his companies have made substantial contributions to pushing the frontier of technology (reusable landing, high launch cadence, electric cars, energy). If he is really faking it, that might even be good, because the success of his companies might be replicable and could continue without him. But what if he is not?
- adev_ 10mo ago> or is he indeed faking it ? On a domain side to nerdery: video games. There is zero doubt he is faking it entirely. The streams he publishes on game like PoE or Elden Ring, have been long commented on online boards https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/1hwe0id/elon_caught_faking_his_path_of_exile_2_character/ https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/1hwe0id/elo... And honestly, I can understand it entirely. He has a public image of "geek/need hero" that is honestly inspiring. And that benefits him a lot because it bring people to trust his decisions. He has all the interest of the world to maintain this image.
- freilanzer 10mo ago> some of his companies have made substantial contributions to pushing the frontier of technology (reusable landing, high launch cadence, electric cars, energy). People he hired for these companies made contributions.
- Treegarden 10mo agoCan you elaborate how this relates to his own competency?
- petra 10mo ago
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- mikkupikku 10mo ago> Elon was an enthusiastic reader of books, and had attributed his success in part to having read The Lord of the Rings, the Foundation series, and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.[11][28] At age ten, he developed an interest in computing and video games, teaching himself how to program from the VIC-20 user manual.[29] At age twelve, Elon sold his BASIC-based game Blastar to PC and Office Technology magazine for approximately $500 (equivalent to $1,579 in 2024).[30][31] I think it's fair to say he at least was a nerd. He was a dweeb getting beaten up in school, burying himself in books and computers at home. His skills are doubtlessly outdated now, but does that really mean much? Woz's skills (which to be perfectly clear, outclassed Musk's by miles) are doubtlessly out of date now too, but nobody would say Woz isn't a nerd. I think the part where he grew into an unstable dirtbag might be influencing the way people see him now. Saying that is is, or at least was, a genuine nerd shouldn't be seen as any sort of excuse for his scamming, lying, etc.
- sidibe 10mo agoHe definitely has talked about a lot of nerdy books. Don't know about his attention span and not sure how to square what he likes with his values. He brings up the Culture all the time but I have my doubts that he's actually read them
- mikkupikku 10mo agoI don't know either, I haven't read the Culture books (yet) either so I can't really evaluate that. I do believe he read a lot of sci-fi in his youth, if only because that would fit the pattern of a young boy who doesn't get along well with their peers and turns towards solitary pursuits like computer programming. He seems exactly the sort to have read lots of Heinlein.
- ben_w 10mo agoAlmost everything about The Culture will be immediately apparent from stuff Musk talks about, but only about half of it would look like he's understood it. The only real crimes are reading/writing someone's brain without permission (at which point others may call you names and stop inviting you to social events) or destroying a consciousness without backups (where you'll get permanent supervision to make sure you don't do it again). Most biological citizens have a full-brain computer interface for backups and general fun, called a "neural lace". The AI Minds in charge of everything give themselves fanciful names, which Musk has used for his SpaceX drone ships. For the reverse: Almost every biological citizen is gender-fluid, can change physical gender by willing it, and there's a certain expectation that you try things both ways around so you know how to be a good lover. They dislike explosive population growth regardless of if it's organic or machine reproduction, and as everyone can get pregnant if they want to (because everyone can be a woman if they want to and it all works), it's considered quite scandalous to have more than one child. It's sufficiently post-scarcity that money is considered a sign of poverty. They mostly avoid colonising planets, instead living on ships, or on habitats so large that if one was located at any Earth-Sun Lagrange point (including the one on the far side of the sun), we could see it.
- tim333 10mo agoHe wrote and sold his first software aged 12. He may not be very good with computers but does have some nerd origin.
- xg15 10mo agoI think Elon Musk just wants to be Tony Stark and cultivates the appropriate image for that. And possibly a genuine obsession with (rightwing-ish) meme/youth culture, which I think got him a lot of his initial followers on twitter/reddit/4chan/etc.
- actionfromafar 10mo agoIs there a difference? I mean, he may be Tony Stark to himself but end up an oppressor to others.
- tim333 10mo agoMusk is a complicated character. He's had nerdy times programing, fascist turns including the famous salute, emperor delusions - he was named after The Elon, a fictional ruler of Mars.
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- ben_w 10mo agoA lot of people miss how much of a tit Tony Stark (at least the Robert Downey Jr. version) was. Smart, but not as smart as he thinks he is. Not good with anything interpersonal. Flair for the dramatic (and dad jokes) at the expense of those working with him.
- shawn_w 10mo agoHe thinks he's Tony Stark but he's actually Justin Hammer.
- happymellon 10mo agoExcept that he didn't invent any of it. Just a savvy investor, and as far as I understand, hasn't really worked on any of it. His contributions were rants until he just took ketamine. His work was making a yelp clone.
- tim333 10mo agoHe invented the very successful hyperloop.
- beAbU 10mo agoDid you forget your /s ?
- tim333 10mo agoI guessed people would figure that.
- youngtaff 10mo agoI know it’s sarcasm but he didn’t event invent it… just promoted it to undermine high speed rails
- happymellon 10mo agoHe also successfully managed to invent a company that takes government contracts and fails to deliver to block momentum for public facilities. (Boring company...)
- FranzFerdiNaN 10mo agoMaybe he used to be one, who knows. But I doubt he read a book or seen a movie in the past few decades. He got roasted by Joyce Carol Oates on X recently for being an oaf and he immediately started replying to tweets about acclaimed movies. And nothing insightful that proved he had seen them, just 'this is a great movie' or some other stupid oneliner. It would be hilarious if it wasnt so sad that the richest man on earth is such a pathetic little man.
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- robocat 10mo agoThe list is missing my #1 quote from Jim Keller (an epic engineer type) although unfortunately quote is in middle of a long YouTube vid. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33662764 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33662764 Aside: I don't understand why they even mention what journalists think - only engineers opinions matter when judging engineering ability.
- jve 10mo agoMiddle of a long YT video is nothing: you can make links to auto seek to a specific place in YT video. When you share link on computer, it even allows you to check-a-box that will include timestamp within link Or append &t=1h2m3s to the link to prevent writing long sentences on where to seek and save users from manual seeking :)
- sam-cop-vimes 10mo agoIt shouldn't matter whether the leaders are actual technical nerds. They are highly focused and motivated individuals who are harnessing tech for the stated purpose. Maybe this is by design and a coordinated movement - or maybe it is the inevitable consequence of uncontrolled and unregulated capitalism. If profit maximisation is the ultimate goal every smart individual chases, the current trajectory seems inevitable?
- alecco 10mo agoZuckerberg? The genius coder according to the movie. Programming in PHP.
- lagniappe 10mo agoAre you new? PHP was the standard for that type of app at the time.
- orzig 10mo agoYour point is 100% correct, but for the sake of our discourse please strive to be more polite!
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- lagniappe 10mo agoI'd prefer you focus your attention elsewhere
- JuniperMesos 10mo agoAnd that was really bad, although Mark Zuckerberg himself can hardly be blamed for that.
- myvoiceismypass 10mo agoAt the time your choices for dynamic server web apps were php or perl. The LAMP stack (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP or Perl) was very popular back then (early to mid 00s)
- nmfisher 10mo agoThere are numerous criticisms you can level at Zuckerberg, but writing the first version of Facebook in PHP is not one of them.
- disgruntledphd2 10mo ago> maybe you can count Zuckerberg I think that you definitely need to count him. He's always been a massive nerd, his attempts to bulk up and become a MMA competitor notwithstanding.
- lagniappe 10mo ago>his attempts to bulk up and become a MMA competitor notwithstanding a lot of us nerds value physical strength, it's 2025, we're not mouthbreathers anymore.
- RealityVoid 10mo agoMy body is just the vehicle that carries my brain around - and my brain deserves a smooth, luxurious ride.
- lagniappe 10mo agoYour brain doesn't live in isolation, your body and the fitness of it are crucial to fueling that brain.
- PNewling 10mo ago> Your brain doesn't live in isolation Well, we can't completely prove that...[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat
- disgruntledphd2 10mo ago> a lot of us nerds value physical strength, it's 2025, we're not mouthbreathers anymore. Sure, I don't disagree. I just put that in to prevent people from claiming he was a jock now because of that (which would clearly be absurd).
- JuniperMesos 10mo agoThe nerd/jock dichotomy is at best loosely pointing at some genuine clusters of interests and predilections that exist among people in the world, and is more often taking a set of tropes from 80s Hollywood movies about high school and using them to try to explain how real people in the world are today, which is stupid. (Who wrote all those 80s movies? Bookworms! Who acted in them? Theater kids!)
- pjc50 10mo agoCarmack? Also ended up drifting right, but you can't fault his technical credentials. Wozniak is still alive and seemingly not in the rightwing set, although also too retired to count as "leadership".
- sillyfluke 10mo agoYeah, as I recall Carmack came out against some of the anti-trust actions of Lina Kahn, soecifically blocking certain type of acquisitions and mergers by big tech companies. Though I'm curious what the take of "founders first" type of VCs like YC on the Figma IPO is, after the acquisition by Adobe was blocked. Whatever the stock price of Figma is now, would they specifically argue that of the two outcomes the Figma IPO was worse for the founders? To be clear, if that acquisition wasn't blocked the IPO wouldn't have happened.
- Lerc 10mo agoWhen I watch Ex-machina the degree to which I loathed Oscar Isaac's character surprised me. While much of it was because the character was objectively loathsome, part of it was because I felt the type of person he represented was infecting the tech world. The thing that seemed really inconguous to me was that he actually made the amazing tech. I don't think I have ever encountered a personality like that who actually made things. Certainly I've seen them talking about how great the thing they made is, but invariably, to them, I made means 'my employees made' Which is not to say that there aren't toxic people who do actually make things. They exist, but it presents somewhat differently to the 'Tech bro' archetype.
- tim333 10mo agoGoogle has some tendencies - Sundar Pichai was a materials engineer, Brin is back working there who considers himself a computer scientist. Maybe Hassabis - depends how you define it I guess.
- ycombigrator 10mo agoHassabis is absolutely a nerd. Joint honours physics and maths from Oxbridge and a PhD in neuroscience (and a Nobel prize in none of these fields). His driving interest was always games (master standard in chess at 13, five-time winner of the all-round world board games championship, video game programmer in his teens then his own studio in his 20s). He's the end game boss of nerdland.
- tim333 10mo agoYeah but the dictionary has "intellectually passionate but socially awkward, or someone considered unstylish and lacking social skills". I think he might be a bit social.
- ycombigrator 10mo ago[dead]
- myvoiceismypass 10mo agoI thought it was super cool when a few years ago I found out that Eric Schmidt was the author of Lex! I struggled mightily with lex and yacc in college, but that was a me thing, I think.
- wtcactus 10mo agoOne of the reasons I enjoy coming into HN. Is to read comments stating that the guy that created Facebook, alone in his dorm room, could “maybe“ be counted as a tech lead.