Chris Lattner, Poached From Apple To Become Tesla's Top Software Executive, Quits After 6 Months (bizjournals.com)

Tesla said last night Chris Lattner, the vice president of Autopilot software, has left the company about six months after the electric car-maker hired him away from Apple. From a report: Lattner had led the software development team in charge of Autopilot. Tesla executive Jim Keller is now in charge of Autopilot hardware and software. The company announced it had also hired OpenAI research scientist Andrej Karpathy, who will serve as Tesla's new director of artificial intelligence and Tesla Vision. "Chris just wasn't the right fit for Tesla, and we've decided to make a change," the company told reporters in a statement. "We wish him the best." Lattner tweeted last night, "Turns out that Tesla isn't a good fit for me after all. I'm interested to hear about interesting roles for a seasoned engineering leader!" Lattner is a widely respected figure in the industry. He is the main author of LLVM as well as Apple's Swift programming language. We interviewed him earlier this year.

Comments

Re:Management wasting another good engineer?

[jeremyp]

Doesn't mean he was actually any good at it.

I've never worked for him or even met him, but I followed the Swift Evolution list after Swift was open sourced. When they first open sourced it, they announced a set of about seven priority goals for the next release (Swift 3). As the date for the beta arrived six months later, he sent out an email with a completely new replacement set of goals and then announced a great release that met the new goals. There was much congratulations and back slapping, but in reality the release was a failure because it failed to meet all but two of its original goals. My email pointing that out was not well received.

If you are not willing to honestly assess the work of your team and yourself, you are not a good manager. If Chris was unable to keep his team focused on their objectives, I'm not surprised he was let go. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if it turned out that was why he left Apple. One of the goals missed on the Swift 3 release was ABI stability. That basically means that every Swift application has to have a copy of the run time statically linked and you can't distribute Swift frameworks in binary form (the frameworks and the application have to be compiled and linked with the same version of the Swift compiler.