Andrej Karpathy responds to 'Tesla should remove Elon Musk as CEO'

The problem with this management style is the burn out. You need to replace people and it doesn’t mean you can match the folks who leave. You need a balance.

I worked for AMD in the semi custom business unit. Elon’s style was part of the culture amongst the SOC design leaders. Especially the take charge part when a team was stuck. A good SOC lead was on the phone to Lisa Su when we needed server power to run simulations or chip layout as an example, Also if we were slipping due to some low performer, changes were made to the team. That low performer was not outright fired though, Instead he might get dinged on his performance review and get less of a merit increase or bonus payout. Then he’d have to put together a plan to improve his own performance. If he continues to slide, he may be the first to go if there is a reduction in workforce/layoff… Pay for performance and reward stellar work is a good thing. Oh small teams are also used whenever there is a challenge. The best and the brightest are called in as tiger teams to solve any given problem. It is a silicon valley work ethos at its best. Elon just takes to a higher level.

80% of a companies achievements are typically by the square root of the number of employees...

I think a lot of people who has worked for Elon long enough know they are in a very unique position, one they can thrive when surrounded by highly productive people. There is no question that this environment is made for very specific people, and bad for those that doesn't match this high ground. This place is made for people who want to limit break, go over the ceiling imposed by the mainstream in the industry.

replacing elon with jim farley, feels questionable

Still too much hero worship. Musk is still mortal. He could still die suddenly or otherwise be sidelined for health reasons. Even now his superior management style should be studied and understood well enough that others could step in and continue the success of Tesla at any moment. Not to do so would be corporate negligence. I expect this is already being done.

I talked to somebody who worked at Tesla and asked him if he met Elon. He said he hadn't, but if you met Elon it means something had gone horribly wrong.

There are hundreds of employees at Tesla that have been there for a decade or more. They thrive on challenge and pushing themselves to achieve more. This is exactly the kind of employee Tesla wants and needs. They would rather hire someone with this type of drive, but burns out in a year, than hire someone who is maybe a great worker (and would stay a decade) but who doesn't push themselves to excel. More than anything you have to be a self directed worker. If you think you need management permission to do something or make a change then don't hire on to Tesla.... you will be sorely abused of that notion.

Thanks!

This style of management is only possible if you work with generic technologies for which you find abundant number of people. Lots of industries rely on people which are hard to find, where sourcing people is costly. This kind of micromanagement is in most cases not needed if you hire highly motivated people from good universities. I worked in crazy efficient teams and the management would intervene indeed to remove people blocking a team or to remove bottle necks. But they relied on us specialists to run the project. If Elon constantly wanted to remove people then why did they hire them in the first place? I start to understand why Tesla has these difficulties to scale. It is fine to be an involved manager but you must build up teams that can work independently (self steering teams following company principles) with minimal input. How else can you expand your company?

Andrej said that he left Tesla because he was not doing as much actual hands on AI work as he wanted. He didn’t like being a manager. He didn’t say that he was leaving because he had been working too hard. He is someone who is internally driven to work hard,

Thank you for the keen insight!

Or if you don't like the way the company is being run you can leave and start your own company........

It is a well know fact that people doint leave companies, they leave managers.

Crazy deadlines are critical… Near-sighted analysts and traders who get disillusioned with Elons predictions don’t understand how he operates.

The problem with Elon is a lot of bad X/Twitter stuff, including algorithm trashing which make him look like a very bad person to a lot of potential Tesla customers, add to that the anti Tesla FUD and it very bad for EVs

The throwing more bodies at it approach doesn't work as all it means most of the time is that with so many involved you have larger meetings that get out of proportion to the task especially when multiple teams are involved making it so the only time productive work gets done is by multitasking in overtime when people are tired and make more mistakes. A project manager and I as a programmer analyst were assigned to help another division with a project that was falling far behind and still in meetings with little to no progress after 3 years had passed. What we found was that with so many people involved they weren't able to keep everyone on track as to what was the results of the meetings or what SLA's had been agreed to nor what had already been tried and failed. After several painful hours of going through the minutes of the 3 years of meetings we were able to get the project on track to where it should have been in the first 6 months just by attending the next meeting and referring to our notes on what the project requirements were, what had already been tried and failed, what SLA's had been agreed upon and telling them when they were trying to implement things that the client clearly did not want and were out of scope. Sadly most of their meetings were bogged down in bringing a vast multitude of people up to speed on points they had missed at previous meetings too often by people who didn't have a good grasp on the projects requirements. What made it worse was that the meetings were not being led by a Source Matter Expert but by Severity Call Managers who worked on a rotation and often had never been regularly involved in the project plus with so many involved the meetings were on Skype/Zoom so participants were often attending multiple meetings at the same time while fielding emails and trying to get work done. Sort of played out like informationally overloaded yet partially informed people today spreading misinformation on Social Media due to misconceptions and partial understanding/misunderstanding of a matter. Bottom line was that of the hundreds of people at those meetings only about 10 to perhaps 20 at best were needed to get the job done. This was at a major multinational corporation that had been bought out by a Private Equity group who would implement these processes, gum up the works and then buy another functional company to overcome the problems they caused only to force them into the same broken mold making them dysfunctional too. Whats that definition of insanity in business... Doing the exact same thing over an over again expecting a different results. Best!

hehehehe Your really pumping these out.

Mr Musk is a top guy and Tesla team do the good work 👍

If they make Elon leave it will be apple and Steve Jobs part 2….they will beg him to come back