Comment by skizm
2 days ago
I think that is part of the point. "As hire As. Bs hire Cs." A-tier folks want to work with the best, B-tier folks want to work with lackeys that will do their bidding. It's pretty clear there's no A-tier folks in charge at the moment.
This gets repeated a lot but in reality hiring is a skillset that good programmers sorely lack.
If you've ever worked on a government contract, you would know there are not and have never been A's on the government side.
This is not and has never been true as a blanket statement. Contractors perform to expectations just like in every other sector of the economy, so variation is high, just like in every other sector of the economy.
I’ve seen both high and low-performing teams in .com, .edu, and .gov and there’s nothing magic about any sector: you get what senior management sets the incentives to get. The NSA gets really good hackers because they don’t leave that to chance, just like how NASA or MIT hire really good scientists and engineers, and the places which just trust the big consulting companies usually get taken to the cleaners.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43094283
Yes, Elon hires Cs.
eyeroll
It is pretty well known Elon companies pay shit and churn through young engineers willing to work long hours for no overtime fueled by “passion”. It’s why he is pushing for more H1B1s. He wants desperate people worried about being deported if they lose their job.
When is FSD shipping again? Why is Tesla falling behind in the market they defined for a decade? When will Boring actually deliver on the hype? Why is X suing former customers trying to get the revenue they so desperately need to pay off debts best on wildly over-estimating the company’s worth?
He’s been able to buy some good companies but nobody has a magic trick for being good at everything and the man is stretched really thin between all of his CEO positions and spending hours per day on politics.
Has anybody more competent than Elon (which isn't a very high bar) survived contact with him in one of his firms? It is well know he doesn't tolerate any pushback and that e.g. SpaceX has a whole team dedicated to babysitting him away from operations.
> Has anybody more competent than Elon (which isn't a very high bar) survived contact with him in one of his firms?
Gwynne Shotwell.
1 reply →
In government, yes, he's hiring Cs. I can speak to SpaceX--they're all As. But it's also the company he's most shielded from himself.
Elon qua SpaceX and possibly xAI and Neuralink is an A. Elon qua Boring Company, X and DOGE is very, very clearly a B player. (Idk what's going on with Tesla, he seems to be treating it more like a piggy bank to be raided to get to Mars (A) and indulge his impulses (B).)