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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.
Well, the guy is known for compilers and languages. He was asked to make autonomous car software. I honestly don't see why anyone would assume because he could do one means he could do the other. Especially when compiler and language work is refining things which have existed for a very long time and autonomous car software is making something that's never been done before. They're two very different mindsets. I'm personally good at the first, but garbage at the second. But my ego is small enough that I understand this about myself. I'm a good engineer and a terrible research scientist.
Or folks just disagreed strongly with each other and it doesn't really reflect poorly on anyone (at least until one or the other side is proven right or wrong).
In this level of doing things, compromise and moving forward may not be as feasible as it is in the lower levels. If you have leadership that really don't want to be on the same page, it will impact the quality of that leadership.
I have been in places where it has been very obvious that executives don't agree, and one is ostensibly yielding to the other, but it's clear that whether he meant it or not, his leadership was undermining the other because he didn't genuinely believe in the other's direction. Even as he tried to tow the party line and said mostly the right things, you couldn't help but to see his true thoughts bleed through and inspire decisions that did not work well in the context of the stated strategy.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.