We can tell he’s utterly out of his depth simply because his first impulse was to force everyone to print out their code and fly into SF to meet at 3am.
100% yes. Lead programmer at an internet startup, Stanford, etc ALL contradict what you said.
Is he a good manager?
I don’t think so, but what you initially posted was wrong.
Dejin
4668
According to Wikipedia, he really never went to Stanford. He was accepted into the Material Sciences department for a PhD, but dropped out after two days.
His Bachelors and Masters degrees were in Economics and Physics from UPenn. There are certainly some very good software engineers who picked it up on their own, but FWIW he doesn’t have any academic computer science study.
Noman
4669
Timex is right. Musk is not a software engineer, from any perspective. At best he can act as a project manager trying to improve software development processes from a high level, though he lacks any real knowledge or expertise to do that efficiently.
His code reviews by the way have happened before at other places and under even more ridiculous circumstances but folks learn to work around this idiocy to get him off their back.
The Stanford thing is bogus, and lead programmer doesn’t mean anything without knowing what exactly he did for the job. Especially not as part of a start-up where you can assign your own job titles.
Passing as a programmer is relatively easy. Hell, the MtGox crypto exchange that once upon a time facilitated millions worth of transactions was created by a guy who didn’t even know PHP before he started building the exchange. And it worked, right up till the moment the myriad of code security gaps led to coins being stolen and the exchange’s demise. Just because you can write software doesn’t mean you can write good software.
Even if I’m super generous and believe everything Musk claims about himself is true (which I don’t), the way he handled the ‘code reviewing’ tells me he doesn’t know shit about proper software engineering.
If he has any experience in coding, even if he was good, what he did/knew about the subject 20 years ago while he was actively coding would be of practically zero use today as it relates to modern application design and web technologies. And with no formal training in the field, he’d be a hindrance in any team he was overseeing.
jsnell
4672
In a vacuum, it would be totally reasonable for a non-engineer to have that job. Twitter’s failures haven’t been in engineering but product and business. So if you came in with the right attitude and a clear mission (e.g. “we need to cut server costs by a billion a year”), and worked with the experts on the system to figure out what tradeoffs are you need to do to achieve that goal, and then empower them to make those tradeoffs and teach the goal… Well, that could totally work, and only requires a product vision and being able to believe the experts.
Unfortunately pedo guy Musk is not capable of either.
In a vacuum, you’d probably want an astronaut to have that job.
Well played, sir, well played.
JonRowe
4676
I am the lead programmer of the wordpress site I manage.
I was the sole lead programmer of my home VHS.
My cat was the lead programmer of my employer’s VM and UX (I assume, as it’s the only thing that makes sense).
And a very technically challenging role that was from memory.
Did you sell your word press site for $300 million to a tech company?
There’s a difference.
Look, I get it, the guy is an egotistical, narcissistic POS to work for ( or be involved with in pretty much any way, shape or form ( see the serial kids with mistresses, etc) and it’s nice to think he’s a no skill idiot like Trump, but he’s not. (Even tho before looking into this a few months ago, I wanted to believe he was a South African POS who inherited all his money).
He certainly may well be over his head now wrt coding, but his Tesla coders did come over with him and he knows then we’ll enough to get the ones he wants and they’ll do the job.
These aren’t just the grifters and sycophants that Trump bright with him.
I think if the question is “Did Elon ever write any code,” then the answer is “probably yes.” I think if the question is “Does that make him a good choice to run an enterprise software organization,” then the answer is “probably no.”
JonRowe
4682
Are we back in Worthington’s law territory?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25sSLBvk_M8
More money = Better than
Theranos, Enron, Madoff. All titans of business!
I’m sure the skills involved in “getting a python ai to realize the moon isn’t a stop sign” will translate quickly and well to Twitter’s stack.
