You’re underestimating him - he’s succeeded brilliantly at his goal to turn Twitter into Gab.
Gab’s mailing address from their SEC filing below:
16 Likes
The worst case of this I experienced was an engineer telling me that the company I worked for for the past 20 years doesn’t do what it does. He had the name mixed up with another similarly named company, told me I was wrong about what products we make, and wouldn’t accept my explanation that there are lots of companies with similar names and he must be thinking of a different one.
23 Likes
At engineering school there were a handful of Musk-like people: They were very great writing the documentation, and performing confidently at the presentations, and getting the extra points by sweet talking the professors but knew next to nothing about the inner details of the projects’ implementation, and as soon as they joined the workforce all of those I remember immediately starting to push to get into management and a couple to cuddle with angel investors, and they are doing very well actually.
They actually have degrees, though, but my theory about Musk is that he got very close to people that knew how to get things done and then told about the effort as his. For SpaceX he started shopping around in Russia, then hired people that knew how to built rockets, so he has the biz acumen for that, merit to him, Tesla just got there while it was starting, PayPal I don’t know, guess some other people coded the thing. Twitter, we are seeing history unfolding!
14 Likes
This. He’s not even an engineer. He’s some one who demands that engineers do something and then he takes profits when they do.
But Twitter is a social environment and his main problem is that he doesn’t like how other people think and wants them to stop… Which isnt an engineering issue in the first place.
Now I want a graphic of a dead fail whale belly up and tethered to an ocean floor by a sink.
28 Likes
I know that it is just the photo stitching errors, but boy, I wish Gab’s headquarters really looked like that
8 Likes
I think the site reliability and infrastructure engineering teams might disagree with you on that one. Let’s see what they have to say about that. Oh, they all left or were fired. We might get a practical answer to this in a few days, though.
4 Likes
I’m assuming that it’s a completely accurate representation. It’s a small town outside of Scranton. They used to use a location in Center City Philadelphia- within walking distance of where I lived. They rented desk space.
I like the dish antennas- very high tech!
12 Likes
I’m sorry, this just feels like gatekeeping to me as to who and what an engineer is. I have never been formally trained as an engineer. Yet, I built what was at one time the fourth- or fifth-largest ad network on the planet, from the very first server, deployed to all the infrastructure for it, and eventually an entire team to run it, including tech specs, design documents and principles, and then moved on to run the infrastructure team for the sixth-largest website in the world, including being accountable for the tech specs, RFP’s and selection, and design analysis for their first structured infrastructure buildout. And now, I’m responsible for tens of millions of dollars of infra spend and run the architecture committee for my Day Job™. I never refer to myself as a classically-trained engineer because I’m not, but two decades of working on engineering tasks, working side-by-side with those same engineers, then managing them, and collaborating daily with them has absolutely given me “an engineer’s mindset” and I have substantial, precisely-executed engineering projects to show for that experience and effort.
To suggest that Musk hasn’t picked up a large chunk of that through osmosis ignores my real-world experiences. I, however, know where my domain knowledge starts and ends! I don’t treat everything as an engineering problem to overcome. I don’t believe all that experience with infrastructure somehow applies to other areas (for example, moderation here on BB has very little to do with engineering and a lot more to do with transparency, empathy, and perhaps most importantly, _community collaboration that remain true regardless of the technical capabilities of the platform the BBS runs on.)
@beschizza makes a great case that Musk has indeed developed “an engineer’s mindset” but seemingly unlike many who also possess humility and self-reflection, has failed to realize his domain knowledge doesn’t translate into other areas, let alone all areas of one’s life, as he seems to be attempting to accomplish. Those, IMHO, are the traits that make him the most dangerous and almost certainly amplify the Dunning-Kruger effect to astronomical(ha) proportions as a result.
38 Likes
Munchausen’s engineering by (self) proxy syndrome?
Also, I had no idea what ‘Babylon Bee’ was and had to Google it. I wish to apologise for clicking through. Ugh!
ETA
Good word!
In Musk’s case (and several other Silicon Valley ‘fake it till you make it’ types - including the one sentence yesterday) omni-con-potent.
Their claimed omnipotence is a con.
10 Likes
oh, I don’t doubt it’s the building - was referring to the warped and lovecraftian geometry of the stitched together streetview image
9 Likes
It’s still accurate. 
14 Likes
I think the difference is that you put in the work to understand how to build that network and were humble enough to learn from others. You’re not coasting on your daddy’s apartheid dollars, but are genuinely interested in understanding the technology, and building something useful for humanity.
I don’t think it’s an attack on you to say that he’s not really an engineer, though.
Because you’re self-aware and smart enough to know that you can’t know everything (none of us can).
27 Likes
Having the mindset acquired from mere proximity isn’t the same thing as having the necessary skill set to do a job effectively and consistently, though.
I don’t doubt that Musk suffers from a lethal combination of Engineer’s Disease, Dunning-Kruger and a massive dose of cis-het White male supremacy.
I concur with Mindy; comparing yourself to Musk is like comparing apples to rocks.
26 Likes
13 Likes
I agree with all this, I have worked with people trained as marine biologists and theoretical physicists, that are great software engineers without a degree, even better than some with a masters.
But! In the case of Musk, what seems to be unraveling is that he in the end is a salesman that used a now-dubious engineering background as his sales pitch, which is kind of fraud-ish. And currently, there are reports that he asked for printouts of code to personally review, and was measuring engineers by the lines of code written, or that tasked Tesla engineers to review Twitter operations, which use completely different tools and methodologies. Software engineering has moved past that for decades now! So the facade seems to be starting to fall apart for him.
12 Likes
This is pretty much the point I was trying to make.
You actually built things yourself that work and acquired actual, valuable knowledge and experience in your field. You know what you don’t know. Your work builds on the work of others and adds new elements to it.
And that’s engineering, formal training or no formal training.
25 Likes
13 Likes
Can we still acknowledge possibilities like that…? Sometimes it seems that people are rushing to assume that people operate with a cold, meticulous malice precisely targeted against everything that is Good and Decent, as if Hanlon’s Razor is dead.
13 Likes
Engineer? In his heart? If so (but he’s not), he’s an incredibly incompetent and dangerous one (ex: disregard for safety) who – if he worked in my organization – would not have survived past one year. An engineer who sucked that bad would not be allowed to stay on as an engineer because they just don’t have the chops to be an actual functional workaday engineer.
13 Likes
Well, to that end, some of the smartest men I know (who happen to be in IT) never went to school for it; instead, they worked hands on in the industry, for 10+ & 20+ years, respectively.
They have the knowledge, just not the accreditation.
ITA.
And again, none of that applies to Musk; who, from all appearances, used his vast wealth and connections to buy an illustrious reputation which he never came even close to earning.
25 Likes
