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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.
"Chris just wasn't the right fit for Tesla, and we've decided to make a change,"
He may have technically quit, but it kinda sounds like he didn't have a lot of choice in the matter. I also find it quite interesting that they talk about 'fit'. I doubt he is a high level asshole, given that post Jobs' Apple is not known for HR scandals, and in my experience personal issues have to be devastatingly bad before a company will let go of someone who knows their stuff. So maybe he didn't know his stuff (which bodes poorly for the Apple car), or he got off side with Musk (which bodes poorly for Tesla).
Anyway, I hope he negotiated one hell of a golden handshake. I don't imagine the Apple car project will be excited about having him back.
I've heard Tesla has a ruthless startup culture even though they're a huge company -- kind of the worst stereotypical SV startup taken to a new level because Elon Musk is so driven. If that's the reason he's out I'm not surprised. Coming from Apple where employees are pretty much pampered and living off the constant money flow from the App Store might be a pretty big shock.
But -- this guy is the "main author of LLVM". I've seen this one play out over and over, and have experienced it personally. Almost every company that isn't producing actual software treats their IT and development resources the same way the rest of the company regarding career path. Every individual worker in non-IT/non-engineering departments dreams of becoming the supervisor, then the manager, then the director and maybe a VP someday...mainly because most people aren't passionate about typical corporate jobs. The problem is that people management skills and engineering/work skills are completely orthogonal. No problem in the other departments -- who would want to be some random report analyst when they could be the boss of a bunch of report analysts and never have to see a report again? This is a bad fit for many engineers, scientists and IT people though, because most of us got into the job because we enjoy it.
Some companies are just starting to come around to the fact that not everyone is hard-wired for management and would rather just be doing more interesting and impactful technical work. That's how I've been able to structure my career (luckily.) When my current company figured out I was good at what I do, liked it and wanted to keep doing work like it, they gave me more responsibility on the technical side instead of a Kindergarten class of employees to manage. I'm hoping I can keep going in this way because I've done the whole department manager thing. I really tried liking it, but it's just not where my skills are best used. Being a senior engineer/architect type, teaching the newbies the ropes and figuring out our long term technical path is what I'm good at, and companies who figure this out with their smarter employees will benefit in the long run IMO.
That would be false. It was after hiring him that Apple was willing to re license LLVM as GPL to get it integrated into GCC.
The patch I'm working on is GPL licensed and copyright will be assigned to the FSF under the standard Apple copyright assignment.
https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/200...
"At the moment it can't even stay in lane properly..." OK in Boston, but might be a drawback elsewhere.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
To add to my other post.
Maybe that was true initially but Chris kept going on:
If people are seriously in favor of LLVM being a long-term part of GCC, I personally believe that the LLVM community would agree to assign the copyright of LLVM itself to the FSF and we can work through these details.
That doesn't even make sense. FSF doesn't need copyright assignment to distribute LLVM under the terms of GPL. The BSD-like license allows for that already. They never promised to assign copyright of all of LLVM to the FSF. That wouldn't make sense because it would prevent anyone from distributing it under the less restrictive BSD-like license.
The patch to allow GCC to easily use LLVM as a backend needs to be GPL-licensed because it's a derivative of GCC which is itself GPL-licensed. Assigning copyright on that patch to FSF would have allowed integration into GCC. However, the FSF are opposed to making GCC modular in any way. They think this will be a gateway to integrating GCC with non-free (as in beards) development environments (yes this also makes it hard to integrate into FSF-approved development environments, but that's their choice).
But clang/LLVM has been the best thing for GCC in years. It's provided real competition in the compiler space, and without that GCC was just stagnating and getting buggier. C++ support, error messages, compile speed and plenty of other stuff has improved enormously since clang/LLVM has been on the scene.