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

Engineer or Engineering Leader?

[0100010001010011]

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.

Re:Engineer or Engineering Leader?

[ShanghaiBill]

Way too many co-workers were forced or voluntarily tried the Engineer -> Engineering Leader route and turned out to hate it.

Not all techs can lead, but some of them need to. Non-techs can't effectively lead technical teams. Some may claim that "leadership is leadership" but that is not true. You can't lead if you don't understand the issues.

Quits?

[monkeyxpress]

"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.

Re:Quits?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Quits?

[Junta]

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.

Re:Quits?

[HornWumpus]

Dad (a PhD) tells me that a doctorate is proof that someone can come at a problem and learn everything there is to know about it and then extend the world's knowledge, if only a little bit.

In my experience in industry, a doctorate is proof that a person could do the above, once, when they were young, not necessarily anymore. I've seen an awful lot of awful PhDs working, cluelessly, in fields outside their expertise that they treat as 'easy', while doing completely wrong. Some that can only be compared to 'know it all' teens.

Management wasting another good engineer?

[ErichTheRed]

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.

Re:Explains Autopilot 2.0?

[vtcodger]

"At the moment it can't even stay in lane properly..." OK in Boston, but might be a drawback elsewhere.