It is a characteristic of those who claim to be intelligent.
Elon Musk is the best engineering manager this century. And a dickhead.
Edit: Just re-read the story. Going by the quote there, the interviewer lied about what Musk did and the story lies about what Torvalds actually said about him.
I have read that Musk was a complete cunt to the people working for him, long before he took over Twitter.
Beyond the joke truck thing, his car company hasn't released a new car in almost seven years. Twitter doesn't appear to have done much beyond release a few previously gated features (longer tweets, tweet editing, and the birdwatch/community notes thing were all things they were previously testing) since acquisition.
Like, I dunno, I'm not seeing it.
Twitter sacked a large %age of staff and kept going fine.
The Cybertruck failed because of marketing, not engineering, and I think we can assume Tesla will bring out some new products soon.
Yes; they have yet to have a proper orbital launch with their new product; it's substantially behind schedule. The best engineering manager in terms of getting things done could surely do better.
> Twitter sacked a large %age of staff and kept going fine.
I mean, I'd hope "the best engineering manager in terms of getting things done" would add up to more than "the service hasn't substantially changed in three years, except in that it is rather more unreliable and that the spam prevention, never wonderful, seems to have broken down entirely". That seems extremely unambitious. Wasn't it meant to be "the everything app" by now?
> The Cybertruck failed because of marketing, not engineering
Fundamentally it failed because it was ill-conceived, but it also had fairly severe quality and design defects. No amount of _marketing_ would have saved it.
Again, I'm just not seeing anything that makes me think "bestest engineering manager ever". Actually, I see no reason to think that he has any recent experience as any sort of engineering manager _at all_; he appears to spend most of his time spouting nonsense on Twitter and failing at ill-conceived joint ventures with Donald Trump. Neither of these are generally considered to be part of the core skill set for engineering managers.
- Again, Twitter is doing fine having sacked loads of staff. That is a sign of a good manager.
- No, the Cybertruck failed because of marketing, not engineering.
Musk made billions from being a great engineering manager whereas you and me are losers posting on a dying internet forum. But one of us can recognize genius.
Grok, is that you?
The missing context whenever this comes up is the fact that it was a surprise one off.
If developers have no idea they're going to be graded by lines of code at some random future date that's a much different situation than saying you're going to give bonuses away every month based on how many lines of code were written.
Everyone knows the second is bad, it'll be gamed massively. The first one could be useful though.
And yes doing it as a one off is still problematic and you can think of all kinds of exceptions, but if you think the organization is full of dead weight in general and overhired massively, a crude stack ranking by lines of code is a pretty good metric for figuring out which (e.g.) 50% is the bottom.
I mean, naughty old Mr Car didn't _invent_ this nonsense; IBM was fairly notorious for it in the 80s, say. He's probably the most prominent recent example.
> The first one could be useful though.
How?
> a crude stack ranking by lines of code is a pretty good metric for figuring out which (e.g.) 50% is the bottom.
No. It's really not. For a start, you probably lose basically everyone very senior by that mechanism. But also you lose the troubleshooters.
I can write you an efficient algorithm in 2 lines or an inefficient one in 50. The metric is about as useful as a doctor checking how often someone picked up a bottle to figure out how much they drink.
... Wait, does the author think that they are _actually_ the same person? If not, why the scare quotes?
I'd guess Elon and Linus's character sheets are more closely aligned on the same dimensions of intelligence than Linus would like to admit.
On average, more productive developers write more lines of code. Of course, writing more lines of code doesn't mean you are actually more productive, but the trend is there.
Elon Musk wanted to lay off 3/4 of a workforce of thousands because he thought 1/4 was enough, it is going to be disruptive no matter what and no matter how you chose, it is hard to predict the outcome. So, the general idea is to pick people randomly. But you want to bias that randomness towards keeping the best and laying off the rest, and so he picked up the number of lines of code as a criteria. It is semi-random and likely to be biased towards better productivity. It is thinking in terms of statistics, not individual people.
He is likely to be the kind of person who would have no problem banning black people from communities if it wasn't illegal. Indeed, there is more crime where there are more black people, so to lower crime, eliminate black people. And it will probably work if you ignore the fact that they are people and not just points on a chart.
This would be particularly on Torvalds' mind, I assume; people who fix bugs in the Linux kernel (generally not a lot of lines of code) are generally more valuable to the project than people who contribute device drivers for obscure hardware (many lines, much productive, wow!)
It is never obvious who is really important. There are the troubleshooters, as you say, and also the coordinators. They are not really management, not really developers, not really sales. No one really knows what their job is but remove them and things stop working.
Laying off people may have unintended ripple effects too. The not-so-productive guy you let go may be very good friends with your best engineers, and he may take them with him as he gets hired by a competitor.
The best employees are the ones who can quit the most easily, as they will have no problem finding another job. In fact, the reason they are working for a company may just be because they are comfortable in there and don't bother looking elsewhere. Shaking things up too much may just be the motivation they need to find something better.
You're doubting this now, but deep down you know I'll be right. Elon Musk wants to win the race not because he believes in AI, but because he wants to be in control of the perpetual present.
Funny how people remember this.
Hero rescue worker he was not. He just was one of the hundreds divers in the area, while total 10,000 people were involved ("The rescue effort involved as many as 10,000 people, including more than 100 divers, scores of rescue workers, representatives from about 100 governmental agencies, 900 police officers and 2,000 soldiers." [0]). There were teams from 11 countries, Musk included.
No one was asked out as per his made-up story during interview. Essentially he was slandering Musk...
> There were teams from 11 countries, Musk included.
What did Musk help exactly, other than coming up with an impractical solution, then calling the hero rescuer a "pedo guy" after getting his big ego bruised?
Ego's has been bruised for sure. Fact is pedo guy started this first, got called out, tried to sue and lost.
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