We had a design engineer like that. He came in with Masters in Mathematics, and he made himself into a brilliant rocket propulsion fluid dynamicist. Zero ego. No nonsense. Fun to work with.
18 Likes
He could afford to hire the best engineers but instead chose to be a dick.
28 Likes
Everyone else has said what it is, just far better than I could, but I take severe umbrage at trying to wash clean his actions by saying “he’s an engineer at heart.”
He’s not, he hasn’t ever been. He’s stolen the ideas from other people, he’s bought his way into everything he’s ever had, and he’s apparently committed fraud multiple times to do so. He has not done anything unique with regards to electric cars, he has not done anything unique with regards to rockets, he’s not done anything unique with regards to maglev trains in vaccuum space, and he’s not done anything unique with suggesting the rich get tunnels everywhere. Every single one of “his ideas” he stole from someone else, sometimes often blatantly. He’s not a genius. He’s not an engineer. He’s a shitty knockoff Lyle Lanley, trying to sell people on the fact that he’s a white man who profited off of extreme racism. And finally, oh finally, he’s getting fucking exposed for it.
15 Likes
He’s almost certainly looking at the wrong thing even from the perspective of twitter’s engineering side:
Aside from the this-has-to-be-a-joke demand for code samples in screenshot form (if only there were some sort of mechanism for computers to store text in a readily modified and displayed format…); he seems to be expecting everyone to trot out a few snippets of brilliance, as though this were a demoscene thing or competition coding; rather than attempting to get to grips with the pervasive attempt at architectural sanity that keeps a large to very large scale operation from falling over in deeply cryptic ways under its own weight.
I’m not sure whether he has drawn the wrong lesson from his other projects, which are more likely to be of (comparatively) manageable size and include particularly elegant work in certain critical components; or whether his last interaction with consumer-facing internet services was Paypal; and he doesn’t really realize that there have been a few changes in the intervening years.
He’s obviously arrogant and overconfident to expect to learn what he needs to know on the astonishingly aggressive crash-interview schedule he proposes; but he also seems to be going out of his way to ask the wrong questions; which is a much worse sign.
16 Likes
In professional terms, “He IS a fucking idiot.”
12 Likes
OK, so for a wee palate cleanser after reading all of this heavy analysis:
Every time I see this pic (or in this case a parody photoshop):
I think of this meme:
20 Likes
Twitter: just walk away.
16 Likes
Dang! You’re good!
4 Likes
19 Likes
Hell, he doesn’t have the staff to keep it where it was without spending a fuck ton of money. From furry insider shit I was hearing just as he took over just dealing with plugging in regulation and DMCA shit would crumble and be VERY expensive to plug back in at scale. I expect entropy to hit in over the next few weeks and when we get whatever new fail whale all the time he will bleed off people. Subcultures tear away. The furries are already looking at other pastures and trying to regroup so I expect other subcultures are weighing their options. He will not entice any good talent to join so given the regulatory shit they have to maintain I expect that to crumble even faster.
TikTok has really become my main platform TBH and it’s probably healthy I back off on the doom scrolling on twitter anyways. At least I now I have double check marks over at Tumblr so I at least have that going for myself.
14 Likes
It’s nice to see Elon faceplant, but… as much problems as Twitter has had, it does serve some useful functions, and it’s also sad to see it destroyed like this.
4 Likes
Musk isn’t an engineer at heart, because he thinks that logic can be applied to solve problems, without understanding that Twitter is all about perception rather than logic. Even I, with my engineer brain, know the difference.
10 Likes
10 Likes
Jesus. I would argue that those are shitty engineers. But there are a lot of shitty engineers in the world. I’m an engineer, or was, and I never had that attitude. I will say the fact that I never had that attitude cost me a job offer coming out of college. I interviewed with this company, and the engineer interviewing me posed a hypothetical situation where an experienced worker on the assembly floor was telling me, the engineer, that I had designed something wrong. And he asked me how I would handle that situation. I said I would listen to the worker because he had way more experience than I did, and so he might know something I don’t. That was the wrong answer. The interviewer told me I needed to assert myself as the engineer because I had the superior knowledge. Just ugh with that attitude.
26 Likes
It’s possible he’s just an angry narcissist
This is what they do
15 Likes
Could it perhaps be that the similarity is simply from too many engineers being narcissists, rather than Elon Musk having any real engineering in him? 
6 Likes
In my own similar experience as someone without formal training in the engineering field, there can come a point where those with the degrees decide “this person gets it” and value your contributions.
To get to that point, though, there has to be a level of true humility and respect and patience and willingness to do the “dog work” to take the burden off others as they do the job their education qualified them for; Musk lacks all those characteristics.
8 Likes
I mean, radio antenna engineering is pretty specialized and complex, but that doesn’t mean it makes you an expert in something completely unrelated. 
I like that.
I’m the opposite with my impostor syndrome, but at least I admit when I don’t know/understand something rather than trying to fake it until I make it (or not, and ultimately make it someone else’s problem).
Indeed. I like to dabble in other things and learn about lots of stuff. Like home repair, plumbing, electrician work, automobile repairs, electronics, and other things outside of my core competencies. I do this because my engineering brain wants to learn about new things and try new stuff. Unfortunately I’ve had times where I do a couple of new things well, and then become overconfident in my abilities. That often leads to expensive mistakes that involve calling in the real professionals to fix. (On the flip side I’ve at times had frustrating experiences where I called professionals only to find it was something I could have easily done myself.)
This is a big part of my imperator impostor syndrome. I began a career in tech when I was 18 and I am not classically trained. Even though I have a good body of work, decades of experience, and am considered reasonably competent, I have some weaknesses I’m very self conscious about. Then again I’ve worked with plenty of classically trained engineers who may be able to whiteboard complicated algorithms from memory but can’t code for shit, so…
9 Likes
Of course managers have the same problem. They have a great disdain for actual expertise and knowledge and think that any company can be managed in the same way as any other*, regardless of what it actually does. Yet, Musk does not seem to understand the root dynamic between a company and it’s customers. I mean it’s not like the people who are deciding to “wait and see,” whether they should be advertising on the new twitter are actuallty “woke.” They do however realize that a reasonable percentage of their customers are and don’t wan their brand linked with Nazis, racists, and pranksters that tend to take over any unmoderated platform.
Yeah, I’m not a coder, but that seemed strange to me.
Edited to add: And he seems to think that the heart of twitter is the software, rather than the content created by all the “tweeters.” And he seems convinced that he can solve any moderation problems with said software. Which reminds me of Boeing trying to fix 737 max problems in software. That did not work well.
Add to that the DEEP misunderstanding of human nature of giving people the choice of “Work yourself to death for me or take three months severance.” As it turns out, instead of filtering out the hard workers (who can get jobs elsewhere) from the chaff, it turns out that he filtered out people that NEED their health insurance to have NO lapses and people that will lose their green cards if they don’t have a job.
- also added. --Which probably explains why so many corporations are essentially run as “shell games” to borrow money and buy back stock. They’re main purpose seems to be financial shenanigans rather than turning raw materials into products and selling them.
13 Likes
Admittedly, I was thinking that record company executives are a bunch ready for the Blackadder treatment.
3 Likes
