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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.
He is the main author of LLVM
Way too many co-workers were forced or voluntarily tried the Engineer -> Engineering Leader route and turned out to hate it.
Code, unlike subordinates, does exactly what I tell it to do. If a mechanical design of mine fails it's because I screwed up not because my subordinate did.
I'm hearing rumors that Mr Lattner and didn't want his name all over it when people start dying. He (and most of the engineering team) wanted proper hardware but Elon Mush overruled them. (Most sensor companies have blacklisted Tesla for misusing their hardware, claiming full antonymous capabilities, and them blaming the hardware for failures)
I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla writes a big check to settle some DOT investigations and Chris Lattner gets a 10% whistle blower bonus.