Speculate: what the heck happened to Chris Lattner?

[Vitold]

Frankly the real reason was

Process without a cycle of review and continuous improvement is a path to obsolescence.
Without documented processes your path is repeating the same mistakes perpetually.

Processes today are not static structures that halt innovation. They are movable safety catches on elevators to success.

Where you see the breakdown in process and continuous improvement in software is when it becomes difficult reduce the relative number of bug reports, and in fact, they continue to climb per manhour instead. You never found out your root cause for shipping buggy software, so you cannot really do anything about it except allow it get worse. There is something broken, but since you don't know what it is, you have to let it grow.

Problem is people who preffer one system over another and are not willing to change. Claiming that Tesla has no proper revision or coding practices is silly.

 

[chillaban]

Frankly the real reason was



Problem is people who preffer one system over another and are not willing to change. Claiming that Tesla has no proper revision or coding practices is silly.

Not just that. Being in an organization for some time under 5 months and instituting "major" infrastructure and process changes is concerning. I don't think that's long enough to even understand the advantages and disadvantages of their processes, nor is it long enough to effect meaningful change, or evaluate if it worked better.

 

[suraj1194]

And yet.... No media player bug fixes or NAV feature updates of any kind.

Lattner, based on all publicly available information, has not been associated with any Tesla UX functionality, but rather with autopilot software engineering. My point was that he was unlikely to accept a general development manager role at all.

The implication rather is that Tesla doesn't place much urgency to UX, and knows it's not a factor affecting sales . They are not demand constrained, and if arguably they are, it's not because of the media player...

 

[Quick2Judge]

Claiming that Tesla has no proper revision or coding practices is silly.

Elon Musk "I don’t believe in process. In fact, when I interview a potential employee and he or she says that “it’s all about the process,” I see that as a bad sign....process becomes a substitute for thinking."

What impact do you think Elon's beliefs has on Tesla's coding practices?

 

[K-MTG]

Elon Musk "I don’t believe in process. In fact, when I interview a potential employee and he or she says that “it’s all about the process,” I see that as a bad sign....process becomes a substitute for thinking."

What impact do you think Elon's beliefs has on Tesla's coding practices?

Elon is a self learned programmer...I wonder how that influences his expectations

 

[Cosmacelf]

The thing is that the tolerance for crappy tesla software by its customers is decreasing day by day. As the cars go mainstream, the expectation for software fidelity is going to be similar to what folks expect from Apple.

I doubt it - my previous car to my Tesla was a BMW. It had a bunch of annoying UI and other bugs. They didn't even bother to update the firmware during my first service visit (they were actually surprised I would even ask for a firmware update).

Bottom line, other car manufacturers aren't much better...

 

[Altes]

It was a subject of an ESPN 30 for 30:

I Hate Christian Laettner - ESPN Films: 30 for 30

;0)

 

[verygreen]

don't hire anyone that you wouldn't marry

Hm, this sounds awfully illegal on so many fronts (gender, age, numbers (only legal to marry one person at a time in US), assumption about them willing to sleep with you, ...)

 

[riemannh]

Elon is a self learned programmer...I wonder how that influences his expectations

Honest question: Is he? Or is he a hacker?

Or, using other definitions, is he a developer or just a hacker? Based on the quotes above, I'd guess he's more of a hacker... which has its roles (e.g. me), but may not make a good member/leader of a dev team.

 

[calisnow]

...They are not demand constrained, and if arguably they are, it's not because of the media player...

THIS. But good luck convincing some very cranky forum members of this fact. ROFL.

 

[supratachophobia]

Lattner, based on all publicly available information, has not been associated with any Tesla UX functionality, but rather with autopilot software engineering. My point was that he was unlikely to accept a general development manager role at all.

The implication rather is that Tesla doesn't place much urgency to UX, and knows it's not a factor affecting sales . They are not demand constrained, and if arguably they are, it's not because of the media player...

I'm hoping 500k Model 3 owners with non-randomized music, random source changing, and random restarts of audiobooks will encourage them to focus on the media player soon.

 

[calisnow]

I'm hoping 500k Model 3 owners with non-randomized music, random source changing, and random restarts of audiobooks will encourage them to focus on the media player soon.

The 7 friends I have who are Model 3 res holders are young enough they won't care. They use their phones to control this stuff and will be delighted for electric smoothness and autopilot. You're kidding yourself if you think the media player matters in driving sales.

 

[whitex]

Elon Musk: "I don’t believe in process. In fact, when I interview a potential employee and he or she says that “it’s all about the process,” I see that as a bad sign....process becomes a substitute for thinking."
Elon Musk’s Mission to Mars

Chris Lattner "I made massive improvements to internal infrastructure and processes that I cannot go into detail about."

I've worked in companies on both ends of the process intensity spectrum and neither extreme produces good results. In a process heavy environment, everything is super slow an expensive, sometimes progress is paralyzed to almost a standstill. An environment without process produces prototype quality work at best those make for really cool demos, but not products. There exists a healthy balance between process and innovation, however in my experience it's a balance difficult to maintain - organizations tend to want to drift towards one or the other extreme rather than stay in the middle. What constitutes a healthy balance is different for different products (e.g. alarm clock vs. heart paces) and also depends on the size of the organization (don't need as much process in a 5 person team as you need in a 500 person team). Then there is a separate issue that for different stages of the product, different process, or lack thereof, is most appropriate. For example, doing R&D, proof of concept type things works best in small teams without much formal process. Once that works, that's then you move the product to production where the last 80% of the work is managed with appropriate process to produce a reliable piece of software. Tesla doesn't seem to differentiate much between cool demo proof of concept and production software, and they seem to be learning the hard way that a functional demo is at most 20% of the way to finished product (80:20 rule - 80% of the functionality takes 20% of the time, and the last 20% takes 80% of the time).

 

[MarcusMaximus]

Elon Musk "I don’t believe in process. In fact, when I interview a potential employee and he or she says that “it’s all about the process,” I see that as a bad sign....process becomes a substitute for thinking."

What impact do you think Elon's beliefs has on Tesla's coding practices?

"Individuals and interactions over processes and tools"
-The Agile Manifesto

 

[supratachophobia]

The 7 friends I have who are Model 3 res holders are young enough they won't care. They use their phones to control this stuff and will be delighted for electric smoothness and autopilot. You're kidding yourself if you think the media player matters in driving sales.

Even 5% is 25k people. Can't ignore that many.

 

[Krugerrand]

I'm hoping 500k Model 3 owners with non-randomized music, random source changing, and random restarts of audiobooks will encourage them to focus on the media player soon.

Because the reason I get in my car every day is to listen to music and books.

 

[supratachophobia]

Because the reason I get in my car every day is to listen to music and books.

Seeing as how I spend 2-3hrs in the car per day, yes, those things are important to me. There's no reason to have such an integral feature work against the driver in the form of frustration and distraction.

 

[calisnow]

Seeing as how I spend 2-3hrs in the car per day, yes, those things are important to me. There's no reason to have such an integral feature work against the driver in the form of frustration and distraction.

What's the issue here? I put 30K plus miles on per year - I have my streaming stations which I like - and I have my phone. On my phone is audible, google play music, etc. If I want an audio book I select "phone" as the audio source and bring up a book on my phone - meanwhile autopilot is keeping me in lane on the freeway. What do you wish the car did that it doesn't?

 

[thecloud]

What's the issue here? I put 30K plus miles on per year - I have my streaming stations which I like - and I have my phone. On my phone is audible, google play music, etc. If I want an audio book I select "phone" as the audio source and bring up a book on my phone - meanwhile autopilot is keeping me in lane on the freeway. What do you wish the car did that it doesn't?

I want it to play my music in the highest quality of which the sound system is capable, and that should be no less than CD quality. Currently, high-quality audio formats like FLAC can only be played from a USB-connected storage device. Streaming music over 3G, or from a phone over Bluetooth, is not anywhere near the same fidelity. There are artifacts because the sampling rate is atrociously low, or dropouts because the transport layer is too slow, or both.

But the car actually does play high-quality music from USB, so that isn't the point. The real issue is that I wish the random shuffle feature actually worked.

 

[supratachophobia]

I want it to play my music in the highest quality of which the sound system is capable, and that should be no less than CD quality. Currently, high-quality audio formats like FLAC can only be played from a USB-connected storage device. Streaming music over 3G, or from a phone over Bluetooth, is not anywhere near the same fidelity. There are artifacts because the sampling rate is atrociously low, or dropouts because the transport layer is too slow, or both.

But the car actually does play high-quality music from USB, so that isn't the point. The real issue is that I wish the random shuffle feature actually worked.

Exactly this.