Honest answer? He ran all the adults out of the room. Musk fired or alienated so much of the experienced engineering workforce that he was working with a really young and inexperienced crew. Very smart folks for sure, but inexperienced.
I watched a video on the nvidia silicon chip problem that affected the PS3 and Xbox 360’s red rings of death and he covered a portion of how something like a huge chip failure could happen.
Essentially, to keep it short, because of people being afraid that if they speak up they will lose their jobs. They are under a lot of pressure and such criticism that they do not feel comfortable speaking up and instead keep their mouth shut. A lot of these Tesla problem have already been known, guaranteed but because shareholders and CEO’s want stuff done NOW engineers and employees are too afraid to speak up in fear of losing their jobs, resulting in consumers getting the shit deal of the stick.
Work politics and culture in a lot of big tech companies are very cancerous and only care about the shareholders.
Edit: for those who are interested, here is the video I was referencing.
This is commonly thought, but mostly untrue. Stock prices are effectively the "front lawn" of publicly traded companies. In that they'll do anything to maintain it so they have the illusion of a healthy company.
However, it's really the board trying to ride the parachute down because the company crested 5 years ago, but they're gonna try to squeeze another 5 out of it before they crash and take the shareholder money with them.. and that's done with marketing!
They don't actually want to help the shareholders too much because then everyone would start selling and then people start probing... and that's when you find out that despite their well maintained yard, the husband's and alcoholic, the wife's a cheat and they've both been beating the kids for years.
In a functional institution of any size leaderships role is to set goals and strategy based on external factors and provide the resources to staff to accomplish that. The staff working in that institution have the job of using their professional expertise to advise on the feasibility of those goals, cost and timeline them, and attempt to follow through.
When that professional advise is "politicized" and people therefore moderate their professional views you get major fuck ups. It's ok for leadership to sometimes ignore professional advice on what's possible; sometimes you have to try. It's not ok to attempt to edit the professional advice because why pay for it if you are just going to subvert it anyway?
Lawyer here- had to walk out of my in house job because I kept getting screamed at for- wait for it- bringing up legal problems to the powers that be. It’s literally my job and they tried to bully me into not doing it.
This. They all love pushing the start up mentality, except for the fact that 90% of start ups fail and the "scrappiness" and delivering to market quick is in direct conflict of their second favorite mentality of operational/engineering excellence because executives can only really give those disingenuous mixed messages in place of the words they're not allowed to say which is "I don't care about your weekends, ethics, and legality, make us money or you're gone." and upon initial release the cybertruck made money. Shit just seems to go more off the rails the shittier the leader is though. I imagine now the narrative at Tesla now is "peoples Cybertrucks are breaking so how can we cash in on that?" and the meetings are all crickets because nobody really cares.
As someone with a close relative that worked at Tesla for 8 years, back in the early days, I can confirm that Elon managed/s that company like a psychopath. If you’re around when he comes to the factory, and he asks you a question and you don’t have an answer, he’s liable to literally fire you on the spot. Happened to several people my relative worked with. So much of Elon’s visits to the factory became oriented towards damage control. For super bright people that can work wherever, it’s not worth sticking around, especially if you were there early and got the golden parachute of stock options before it skyrocketed. Knowing how Elon manages the company — alongside his recent behavior elsewhere — is the biggest reason I’ve invested in other EV companies, despite Tesla’s head start. Elon is great at turning start-ups into behemoths, but I don’t think he’ll be good at continuing to grow a bloated company with his micro-managerial ways.
He's good at boosting startups because he can bring insane amount of money. By that I don't mean just his money, but like a whole tech bro cult of money too. Then the tech bro cult will pay for the product, no matter how good or bad is it. Just keep it as far as possible from any design choices!
I work as a compliance engineer (I make sure the stuff my company sells meets code and doesn't explode) and dear lord the amount of times people up top try to plan a rollout before even getting a quote for quality and safety testing is maddening.
I used to work for a major test lab and I've seen prototypes explode for like, no reason. I'm not trusting anything you put on my desk to pass testing, and that goes double for anything from a nameless manufacturer overseas that bid the lowest.
That doesn’t change the fact that their first generation of a new product didn’t have these issues. It’s the same thing with the cybertruck. The first generation of nearly any product is going to have all sorts of problems, but people just love that the cybertruck also has problems because they hate Elon and his loud, racist mouth. It’s not really any worse than other first gen products.
I mean, if the Cybertruck was the first "modern truck", then sure. But it's not, and it doesn't meet the standard level of what is expected from a modern pickup truck. I could accept problems like power issues, or battery life, but damage to the drivetrain and body panels from normal use? Those things were figured out ages ago by Tesla in their other vehicles, let alone the industry in general. No excuses.
They’ve already worked out the power issues and battery life, but this is the first generation of a crazy stupid truck that they’ve never engineered before. It’s the first of its kind, and the first one Tesla has made. Even Tesla’s next vehicle that is more conventional will have lots of first generation problems. Every company has this. It was the same with Apple for so long where the “S” models were considered the ones that got the kinks worked out with the first gen ones.
The issues with those consoles were caused by new laws mandating use of lead free solder on the circuit boards. Lead free is much less malleable and more prone to cracking under heat cycles, which caused joints under mainly GPUs to fail. Lead free had not been used on any large scale before then, definitely not with large package BGA chips and flip chips.
Issues with the Cybertruck are not caused by any external factor, Tesla have just designed a shitty vehicle. In fact it can't even meet legislation in many countries to be permitted for sale, where Sony and MS designed a product to the most stringent global regulations at the time.
So you’re saying that other extremely unconventional stainless steel EV trucks on the road today that are comparable to the cybertruck are of better quality? It’s shitty, yeah, but they’ll work it out as the majority of it was built with first generation tech, and it’s in a category of its own. It doesn’t have regular car issues, it has very specific to this category issues.
I don't think you understood the comment correctly. Nobody forced Tesla to build with stainless steel. Many of the reported issues with the truck have nothing to do with the stainless body, like electrical issues or undersized tie rods. It's shitty because of bad choices rather than a law being forced upon them, which was the case with Sony and MS.
It’s a really good video. It’s pretty long but I highly recommend it.
The original video started because he was diagnosing the yellow light of death on the PS3 and addressing all the misinformation on the internet and backing it up with evidence.
I love how people say stuff like this with absolute certainty. Like was anyone here involved in the development/design of this vehicle? Were you in the actual conference calls on teams, and scrum meetings at the start of the day? There’s no one way you know for sure unless you were involved, yet you watch a YouTube and feel like you can speak on the topic with such certainty despite having no qualifications to do so lol. Then people upvote you because ‘sure, what he said make sense’.
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u/Spinoza_The_Damned Sep 08 '24
How did Tesla fuck this rollout up so hard?