Elon Musk Shakes Up SpaceX's Starlink Satellite Division By Firing a Bunch of Managers (reuters.com)

schwit1 shares a report from Reuters: SpaceX Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk flew to the Seattle area in June for meetings with engineers leading a satellite launch project crucial to his space company's growth. Within hours of landing, Musk had fired at least seven members of the program's senior management team at the Redmond, Washington, office, the culmination of disagreements over the pace at which the team was developing and testing its Starlink satellites. Known for pushing aggressive deadlines, Musk quickly brought in new managers from SpaceX headquarters in California to replace a number of the managers he fired. Their mandate: Launch SpaceX's first batch of U.S.-made satellites by the middle of next year, the sources said.

The management shakeup followed in-fighting over pressure from Musk to speed up satellite testing schedules, one of the sources said. SpaceX's spokeswoman Eva Behrend offered no comment on the matter. Culture was also a challenge for recent hires, a second source said. A number of the managers had been hired from nearby technology giant Microsoft, where workers were more accustomed to longer development schedules than Musk's famously short deadlines. "Rajeev wanted three more iterations of test satellites," one of the sources said. "Elon thinks we can do the job with cheaper and simpler satellites, sooner."

Comments

Mixed feelings

[wierd_w]

On the one hand, I am quite glad to see such an actively involved CEO that is not afraid to smack down on senior staff. (as this mitigates feelings of complacency, and resists the formation of entrenched bureaucracies.)

On the other, I am concerned about rushed deadlines and schedules, since you should not fuck around with things that can cause tremendous amounts of damage to other investments should they go awry. (Like a satellite, or a space vehicle of any kind.) To say nothing of the risks of the finished product not being suitable for purpose...

So yeah. Mixed feelings.

Re: Mixed feelings

[Anonymous Coward]

No mixed feelings here. The numbers of just terrible people pumped out of the Microsoft factory is staggering.

The good news is they tend to go back and then get paid more.

Maybe the good ones never leave. I just know they seem to not survive outside of that ecosystem.

Re:Mixed feelings

[Anonymous Coward]

On the other, I am concerned about rushed deadlines and schedules

I finally got more than a single persons limited feedback on the software i'm developing. I had another day of updates in, and was going to roll another point rev for tomorrow to incorporate that feedback while the customer was just getting started using the software.

I started on the changes only to hear, well none of that is getting used. Go to the other lab and help approve the previous version the customer hasn't given any feedback on. In short go backwards, ignore feedback so I can check my box. In theory they can eventually file bug reports (I tried to, so we will see what happens), but by the time action is taken they will be past the first phase of use.

Blindly following a schedule can allow one to make more apparent progress, well up till something really bad happens. For myself, I hate promising I will fix these issue to a customer, only to get smack by, "No you will not. The process we have largely been ignoring for six months is now absolute."

This is the kind of crap that happens when schedule not engineering is your primary driver. Of course for a satellite, you have to follow processes more rigidly or bad things happen, but for the work I had, me having to go back and do an additional patch was the worst case scenario of rapidly implementing minor customer changes, while the worst case scenario of forcing additional bureaucracy and delay is the customers hating the whole mess.

Re:Mixed feelings

[AmiMoJo]

It doesn't always work though. Look at Tesla, the self driving division had to fit a revolving door and they are still years away from delivering anything.

Re:Mixed feelings

[misnohmer]

Tesla recently removed the full-self-driving as an option for new cars. People who bought it 2 years ago still have absolutely nothing, zip, to show for it. But I bet Elon fired a lot of people for it not being ready when he said it would (end of 2017 was supposed be a coast-to-coast demo), hence the revolving door. From what I read and heard, nobody tells Elon something cannot be done or cannot be done within the time he said it can be done, unless they are looking to be fired. This is probably how horrible brain farts of Elon like "I don't need no stinking BSM radars like all the other cars, I can do it with PARKING SENSORS!" get put into the product (it works about as well as a PARKING sensor iwould be expected to work at NON-PARKING speeds, which is not well at all, but Tesla will not admit to it, they scraped their website of this feature being available int past and in recent hardware cars they just released camera based blind spot monitoring). I think a great example of how Elon delivers is AutoPilot 1 Summon, where Elon promised it would "find you anywhere on private property". What was delivered (final version as this is now discontinued hardware) is a feature where the car can drive up to 40ft in a straight line while someone is holding a dead-man-switch to make sure the car doesn't hit anything. That pretty much describes Elon's pattern for the last 5 years. He used to achieve great things, now he's just blowing a lot of hot air.

Re:Mixed feelings

[monkeyxpress]

I've seen managers like this before. The problem is, if YOU are the one who decides to cut tests and take shortcuts, and then you send up 50 satellites and they don't work because of those cuts, you career is over. But if the boss is the one who makes that decision and the decision turns out to be a bad one, the issue gets filled under 'well, we had to try' and everyone moves on.

It's really just a product of having a boss with a ginormous ego - you're sorta screwed if you don't and screwed if you do. Eventually if you are the type who can be controlled by bullying and remain a faithful servant (i.e. much like Tim Cook - compliant and not a threat to the alpha), you will become protected by the boss as a useful asset and then life is much easier.

Now Musk has made the risky decision, everyone will be able to move forward knowing their necks are not so exposed if the gamble doesn't work out.

Re:Mixed feelings

[monkeyxpress]

I think Elon just has this magical view about computers. He seems to have a pretty decent at understanding the limitations of mechanical systems. He hasn't proposed anything rocket based that was not compliant with existing technology. And while the hyperloop has many, many details issues, it is not fundamentally unachievable. It's just that when he starts talking computers he seems to think the x86 in your desktop is a couple iterations away from being a monkey brain or something.

Re: Mixed feelings

[c6gunner]

Unfortunately there is a fairly tight deadline which isn't mandated by spacex but rather by the FCC. The license for the satellite constellation requires them to launch at least half of their satellites within 6 years of approval. SpaceX has applied for an exemption to this rule, but AFAIK it has not been granted. While it seems likely that the FCC will grant them some leeway as long as they make good progress, that still means that they can't afford any excessive delays.

Re:Mixed feelings

[mentil]

Interesting fact*, the 80186 original design called for transistors made from crystallized lemur neurons.

*Not a true fact.

Re:Mixed feelings

[Gavagai80]

When you're launching ~10,000 cheap satellites over the coming years you need a different mindset than the people who work on traditional satellite deployments. If there's a problem with the first hundred satellites it's really no big deal.

Re: Mixed feelings

[Type44Q]

I figured out that Family Guy must have at least two writers, including one who can be reasonably funny.

Are you the other writer?

Re:Mixed feelings

[bobbied]

Now Musk has made the risky decision, everyone will be able to move forward knowing their necks are not so exposed if the gamble doesn't work out.

Oh sure, until that gamble rolls craps, THEN you are done too.

If the boss is willing to ignore his direct reports, fire a bunch of them because he doesn't like what they tell him about cost and schedule, you don't feel better, you polish up your resume and start looking for another job. Unless the upper management was just garbage and everyone knew it, everybody knows what this means, regardless of how possible something is or isn't, you deliver, on time, or you are given your walking papers.

This is absolutely the crappiest way to motivate labor and foster team work. Mustk has unwittingly created a dog eat dog world with CYA "I told you so" documentation flying off the printers at all levels. Nobody will want to be left holding the bag and everybody will be setting up to blame the other guy in hopes of keeping his job. Team work be damned.

You see the real "solution" (if there actually is one) is well motivated teamwork. Getting everybody pulling the same direction at the same time on the stuff that matters most. That kind of culture doesn't get built on firing folks. You build such a culture using carrots, not sticks.

Re: Mixed feelings

[Anonymous Coward]

People who babble about space junk watch too much TV. These are low orbit, and will burn up in a pretty short timeframe.

Re:Mixed feelings

[Hodr]

From the sounds of this article they already had a fairly toxic work environment with management split about the appropriate way forward. Elon simply picked a side and fired the rest so they wouldn't remain a festering wound.

I have lived through similar (though smaller in scale) shake-ups and by and large they have been beneficial in focusing the team and removing the stress of politics and having to please bosses with opposed goals.

Re:Mixed feelings

[jellomizer]

From my experience, when these projects get delayed and take a long time, is because most of the work going on is protecting your own butt. This is prevalent in work cultures which when there is a problem, the direction goes to who did the mistake and punish them. So people learn to have documentation, gigs of emails (copies of it if email is purged) to show off if there is a problem, that they have record of disagreeing with it, to showing they were told to do it that way, or someone else didn't do it the way you had said.

All this work doesn't make the product any better it just gives middle management the impression they are doing something about it. While the correct course of action is to 1. Fix the problem found. 2. Make sure that problem doesn't happen again. 3. Implement this plan to make sure that problem doesn't happen again.
Most catastrophic mistakes made by a company are not done in a vacuum, sure there is that one guy who hit the Run button that started the mistake in action, but they are often built off of problems in the entire company. And often when big mistakes happen, everyone was doing their job as they were suppose to, it was just lack of big picture planning which causes the failure.

Re: Mixed feelings

[jellomizer]

I have worked with people with Microsoft, Google, AOL (when it was a thing).... And for the most part they are not any better then those guys who worked at small companies, or even in Government.
Actually people from small companies, are actually much better, because they know how to do more with less.

Re: Mixed feelings

[Hodr]

As long as you consider ~150 years a pretty short timeframe. The very first US satellite launched (70+ years ago) was launched into LEO and hasn't de-orbited yet.

Satellites launched into LEO are supposed to be setup to de-orbit within 25 years, but that is an assisted de-orbit. If the satellite is unresponsive space junk and if it is relatively small (as these are) it they could be up there a very long time.

The one benefit is that these are planned to be on the lower side of LEO (think I heard something around 100 or 150 miles) so you could knock a few years off of that 150 as the normal LEO satellites sit around 400 miles, but these are also smaller satellites so they would have less drag and any "junk" would probably be the result of collisions and would be smaller still.

Re:Mixed feelings

[bobbied]

From the sounds of this article they already had a fairly toxic work environment with management split about the appropriate way forward. Elon simply picked a side and fired the rest so they wouldn't remain a festering wound.

If that's what Musk was trying to accomplish, he's every bit the idiot his detractors claim. You don't fire your underlings for not agreeing with your views, you fire them for not following your instructions or some kind of inexcusable behavior. What Musk did was to beat his underlings with a stick, which may produce immediate and visible compliance at first, but is counter productive in the long term, where they will react in fear. You want employees to take pride in their hard work because they care about the project's success, not because they fear failure and beating.

Fear stifles creativity, suppresses team work, and creates a culture of CYA, where everybody is rigidly following the process to avoid a beating. You want employees who are working hard, interested in the success of the project and willing to go that extra mile, work that extra hour or help out others with their tasks, not because it keeps them out of trouble, but because it's what the program needs to be successful. You don't get that behavior using sticks.

Re: Mixed feelings

[sfcat]

I have worked with people with Microsoft, Google, AOL (when it was a thing).... And for the most part they are not any better then those guys who worked at small companies, or even in Government. Actually people from small companies, are actually much better, because they know how to do more with less.

Damn, I already posted so I can't mod you up. I couldn't agree more and only HR drones who wouldn't know a well run tech company from a tire fire wouldn't know this. For everyone else, you have no excuse for not knowing this. Working at Google these days should be a black mark, not a sign of quality. 10 years ago it would be different but that was a different Google.

Re: Mixed feelings

[Enigma2175]

The very first US satellite launched (70+ years ago) was launched into LEO and hasn't de-orbited yet.

Really? From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...:
Explorer 1 was the first satellite of the United States ... Explorer 1 was launched on January 31, 1958 ... It remained in orbit until 1970

And that's with a 358x2550 km orbit. The majority of the Starlink satellites are slated to be in a 350x350 km orbit, they will decay much faster than Explorer 1 because of the lower apogee.

Re:Mixed feelings

[vadim_t]

So what this tells me is that this piece of news might as well not exist. The only reasonable reaction is "Oh, okay".

Because whether this is a good or a bad decision on Musk's part depends on whether those managers were doing a good job or not, and not having insight into those managers' work and reasoning we can't tell if they were doing a good job or not, and therefore whether Musk's decision to fire them was a good one or not.

Re:Mixed feelings

[ledow]

There's a reason you can't pick up a cheap Cessna, and why you have to go through certifications, and why pilots are decrying the use of drones outside of their (heavily restricted) legal limits.

Nobody cares about what happens to your satellite. It's what it crashes into that's important. A rogue / malfunctioning satellite could easily take out anything - and orbits are getting more and more packed every day and just launching 10,000 things up there carelessly will end in disasters that won't just have you go "Oh well, launch another 10,000" but be brought before people with billion-dollar space programs demanding you never be allowed to launch anything ever again.

You've only got to hit something quite unimportant in the same orbit, and you could bankrupt the company overnight. Hit something that you didn't even really "know" was there and you could be looking at militaries (your own, or foreign) breathing down your neck.

Space is a controlled environment. Media stunts like launching cars on joke orbits aren't really compatible with that. We haven't got to the point that we can de-regulate ordinary airspace, so literally the only thing keeping you "safe" up in space from amateur idiots and commercially-produced tat is sheer volume of space. As that narrows, things get more and more stupid and dangerous.

You can't make cars without abiding by manufacturer regulations. You certainly can't build saleable aircraft without a shed-ton more regulation. Just lobbing things up into space isn't a behaviour that will be tolerated for very long once the first mess-up is made.

P.S. It took SpaceX years and dozens and dozens of test landings where they destroyed drone-boats, rockets, broke off their landing legs, abandoned landings to just plunge into the sea etc. before they got a landing that you can coo over. This stuff isn't "easy" and certainly isn't reliable.

Applying the same principle to something that might share an orbit with an component from your rivals that's so expensive that it might cost your company every profit it's ever made (yeah, right) in order to put something equivalent back up there in reparation? That's not "a different mindset". That's "commercial suicide".

Re: Mixed feelings

[BusDrivinBilly]

I have worked with people with Microsoft, Google, AOL (when it was a thing).... And for the most part they are not any better then those guys who worked at small companies, or even in Government. Actually people from small companies, are actually much better, because they know how to do more with less.

That has been my experience as well. People from both large companies and government tend, more often than not, to have personalities congruent with bureaucracy - there is a level of comfort and security that comes with the size and resources of the organization, but it kills drive and efficiency... In small companies, if something needs to get done and there is nobody else with experience in the task... congratulations, you just signed up for a new, probably stressful, learning experience. But shit gets done... Of course, small companies are usually little dictatorships, and if the dictator (e.g., owner) is an actual dick, then you have to deal with that.

Re: Mixed feelings

[Guspaz]

They have two up there for testing right now. Apart from the more technical tests they've obviously done, they've specifically called out YouTube playback at 4K and Counter-Strike: Go as two use cases they specifically tested. That might sound a bit silly, but they demonstrate high throughput and low latency in applications that the general public can understand. Reportedly, the cause of the dispute is that the manager(s) wanted three more generations of test satellite before the initial launch, while Musk wanted just one more generation before the initial launch. Considering they wanted to start launching the final satellites in 2019 in order to hit the FCC deadline of having half of them (~2,200) launched by 2024, his desire to get stuff up there, even if it's not perfect, is understandable. Even if there turn out to be issues with the first generation of satellites, SpaceX is planning a very short lifespan (replacing them every 5-7 years with de-orbit within a year after that), and would have the opportunity to make improvements in subsequent satellites of the initial constellation.

I'm here to kick ass & chew gum, & I'm out

[ClarkMills]

Well from my 10,000' view I would say that did look like Starlink had stalled. It certainly didn't seem to be progressing as quickly as I would have hoped. And now that SpaceX has lost some funding from the US military and Tesla wasn't bought out in the "funding secured" fiasco Elon needs to organise his future revenue streams.

He's not getting any younger and he's still working in a car factory... (and doing a bloody good job but that's just a means to an ends).

Ive worked with microsoft

[Harlequin80]

And it takes them AGES to get anything approved and everything goes through 100 hands.

It doesn't come as a surprise that short deadlines and pressure is a massive culture shock.

Forward thinking move

[Chrisq]

Elon Musk Shakes Up SpaceX's Starlink Satellite Division By Firing a Bunch of Managers

Into space?

Re:Forward thinking move

[cascadingstylesheet]

Elon Musk Shakes Up SpaceX's Starlink Satellite Division By Firing a Bunch of Managers

Into space?

Better than burying them alive with the Boring company ...

Fire them all

[Anonymous Coward]

Lazy Seattle people only want to work 100 hour weeks.

Elon owns you now.

Speed is everything

[nospam007]

If one woman needs 9 months to create a baby, just put 9 women on the job and it will be done in 1 month.

Re:Speed is everything

[mentil]

That's how it works with Warlock summoning rituals, yes. Wait, that IS where babies come from, right?!
Mommy, why'd you lie to me?!

that explains the shit features

[cheekyboy]

Cant do anything right, but yet, some retard wants to buy Nokia, and fucks it up inc Win Mob, and gets paid millions.

Reminds of a job I had,

[Anonymous Coward]

The sales guys took a project (and the awesome commissions) with a sick deadline - without engineering's input.
When we were told about it and complained, "It's not out deadline, it's the customers! And if we didn't take it, someone else would have! And if you don't think you can deliver, then maybe this isn't the job for you and you don't belong here."

Those that didn't put the stupid hours in got "didn't meet expectations" on their next review.

After a year of 12+ hour days 7 days a week, we missed the deadline. The company got (rightfully) sued, the stock crashed and many of us jumped ship because we couldn't take the bullshit.

My point? Musk takes on shit and makes deadlines that he knows he probably won't make but does it anyway. So, it is NOT the FCC's fault. You do NOT take work that you are not sure you can deliver.

Re:Reminds of a job I had,

[Anonymous Coward]

The sales guys took a project (and the awesome commissions) with a sick deadline - without engineering's input.

Jesus, this reminds you of only one job?

I've lost track of how many times I've seen that, and by the time the project is falling apart, the sales guy has gotten his commission check and moved on to lying to other customers.

Hell, one time one of the products I maintained got sold to a customer for ... well, who knows, actually.

We got a support call, and it went something like:

Customer: So, we're trying to re-enfrobulate the flux capacitor, but it isn't working.

Us: Flux capacitor? It's an add-on to manage the life-cycle of web pages, it doesn't do flux capacitors.

Customer: We were promised something which will re-enfrobulate the flux capacitor.

Us: Ummm, nope, it can't do that.

Customer: OK, we need to file a bug report because it can't re-enfrobulate the flux capacitor.

Us: Ummm .. it's never going to re-enfrobulate the flux capacitor, it wasn't built for anything related to flux capacitors, and we know nothing about those. Are you sure you have the right product?

Eventually the angry customer was passed on up the food chain to yell at whoever they pleased.

Eventually management comes around and says "why aren't you helping them with the re-enfrobulation of the flux capacitor? We now have an angry customer!!"

Eventually one of the dev managers had to quite forcefully explain that the customer has been outright lied to, the product cannot and never will assist in the re-enfrobulation of a flux capacitor, and that we should not be getting harassed.

Did anyone ever go to the sales guy and say "what the hell are you doing"? Nope, he kept going on, and 3 months later ... after he was informed via several mechanisms that the product did not, and would not do what he was claiming it did and that he needed to stop doing it ... we got another call from another customer bitching that they could not re-enfrobulate their flux capacitors.

Sales people are dangerous on two fronts, they'll outright lie to suit their purposes, and they're completely oblivious to what is true and false, and will say things they believe to be true but which are horribly false.

Never trust a sales person for anything technology related, and never allow them to ever see a demo of a proof of concept, because they'll have it sold within a week even if you say "this is years away from being anything real". They will literally say and do anything to get that commission, and don't care what they leave in their wake.

Re:All while smoking a huge doobie

[Aighearach]

Your a dick shit

"You're"

Re:Do you want it to work or probably work?

[Opportunist]

"Probably work" is enough. He hired Microsoft managers, he must have prepared for "we'll fix it after delivery" processes.