
Chris Lattner: “Turns out that Tesla isn't a good fit for me” - po
https://twitter.com/clattner_llvm/status/877341760812232704
======
hoodoof
Getting a job is like getting into a nightclub. If you're a celebrity, the
bouncers open the velvet rope and usher you straight into the club, leaving
the long queue of punters waiting to be told that their shoes aren't right, or
that its a private party.

~~~
guessbest
I wish I was so successful I could publicly declare my failures without it
affecting my all future job prospects.

~~~
TheDong
You are. No one cares if you declare "X company was not a good fit" or "I
messed up on doing this".

You clearly haven't because you, in error, think it'll nuke job prospects.

It won't. They won't care. Trust me.

~~~
Pica_soO
The most important men in town will come to fawn on me They will ask me to
advise them, Like a Solomon the Wise "If you please, Reb Tevye?" "Pardon me,
Reb Tevye?" Posing problems that would cross a rabbi's eyes Ya va voy, ya va
voy voy vum

And it won't make one bit of difference If I answer right or wrong When you're
succesfull they think you really know.

~~~
yumaikas
> If I were a rich man

------
Aron
I've had the impression it's pure chaos over at Tesla's autopilot division for
quite a long time. They have so much to gain if they get the pieces right, but
I'm not sure it's guaranteed to happen.

~~~
haberman
I just saw their latest marketing literature on their website. They promise:

> All Tesla vehicles produced in our factory, including Model 3, have the
> hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level
> substantially greater than that of a human driver.

[https://www.tesla.com/autopilot](https://www.tesla.com/autopilot)

It seems somewhat irresponsible to promise that you have enough hardware to
achieve something that nobody has ever achieved before, with any hardware.

Tesla has plenty of impressive-looking videos on their website of autopilot
working well, but if you Google for "Tesla autopilot fail" you can also find
plenty of stuff like this, which is just surprisingly bad:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ1XLqc5IUg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ1XLqc5IUg)

Tesla strikes me as over-promising and under-delivering here. I wouldn't want
to work in a division like that.

~~~
nostrademons
They say "at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human
driver". This is a low bar to meet - some human drivers are _really_ bad. I
know I would much rather trust my life to one of the Google self-driving cars
than some of the people I got in a car with in college, for example.

It's also the wrong bar to meet, because lawmakers are going to be much
tougher on AIs than on human constituents. It's not enough to be better than a
human, you have to be _so much better than a human that it 'd be irresponsible
not to mandate self-driving cars_.

~~~
skrause
I also don't think the bar should be "safer than a human driver", but "safer
than than an experiended, sober, well-rested, defensive driver who doesn't use
this phone while driving".

~~~
maxerickson
Why should the bar be any higher than the median actual human driver?

Adding vehicles operating at a higher skill level than the median to the pool
of vehicles driving around should reduce incidents per mile driven.

And then if autonomous vehicles become prevalent, it becomes less punitive to
raise the standards for licensing humans.

~~~
Aissen
> Why should the bar be any higher than the median actual human driver?

Marketing. The western world is mostly afraid of robots so they'll need to be
at least 10x safer in a hybrid (human/autopilot) environment in order to gain
adoption.

------
devit
Working at Mozilla on the Rust compiler would be the best possible fit skills-
wise (other than going back to LLVM).

~~~
kibwen
There does happen to be a research engineer position open at Mozilla right
now, but it's for Servo, not Rust. To say nothing of the irony of having Chris
Lattner working on Rust while Graydon Hoare works on Swift. :P But hey, Rust
could undoubtedly benefit from a full-time LLVM engineer...

~~~
edko
From one the presentations of this year's WWDC, I had the impression that
there may be some of Rust's ownership concepts incorporated in future versions
of Swift. It would definitely be very interesting.

------
deepGem
I wonder what's the connection between Lattner and autopilot. When Tesla hired
Lattner, my impression was that he would oversee the entire systems software
architecture. Why they couldn't have retained Lattner and also hired Karpathy
is beyond me.

~~~
swah
I had understood he would help with getting as much performance from the Tesla
hardware as possible.

------
coldtea
What's strange to me is why he would think it was a good fit in the first
place.

His main work has been in languages, compilers and developer toolsets. Sure,
Tesla makes use of those, and might even make a few of their own, but it's
nowhere near their core interests.

Google maybe?

~~~
swah
Well, Swift on Android would be pretty cool.

~~~
ewmailing
Swift on Android already exists.

[https://news.realm.io/news/swift-on-
android/](https://news.realm.io/news/swift-on-android/)

------
suninwinter
I wish I had been this decisive the last time I joined a team that was a bad
fit.

------
arcticbull
I'd recommend he join the Go team but, like, they seem pretty committed to
their non-LLVM based compiler strategy.

~~~
binarycrusader
I agree. Although, I would point out they recently accepted the Go LLVM port
in a somewhat more recognized role:

[https://go.googlesource.com/gollvm/](https://go.googlesource.com/gollvm/)

Unclear to me in what capacity it is "recognized" or "official" though.

------
JKCalhoun
I have no doubt Apple (and the Apple developer community at large) would love
for you to come back.

------
Jayakumark
They just hired karpathy as director of autopilot division

~~~
gkoberger
Andrej Karpathy, research scientist at OpenAI.

[https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/20/tesla-hires-deep-
learning-...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/20/tesla-hires-deep-learning-
expert-andrej-karpathy-to-lead-autopilot-vision/)

------
tyingq
I liked the tweet that suggested he should work on server side Swift. Doesn't
sound like he's wanting to start a company though.

~~~
mayoff
IBM has people working on server-side Swift, but (as I understand it) those
people are mainly focused on ways to make the IBM cloud service more enticing.

------
kensai
Well, Julia just got some financing. He should go there and help Julia's
future interoperability with Swift.

~~~
coldtea
I might be wrong, but I think Julia's financing is nowhere near enough to hire
someone like Lattner.

------
valuearb
Chris has updated his resume

[http://nondot.org/sabre/Resume.html#workhistory](http://nondot.org/sabre/Resume.html#workhistory)

"Tesla

VP Autopilot Software January 30 - June 20, 2017 When I joined Tesla, it was
in the midst of a hardware transition from "Hardware 1" Autopilot (based
primarily on MobileEye for vision processing) to "Hardware 2", which uses an
in-house designed TeslaVision stack. The team was facing many tough challenges
given the nature of the transition. My primary contributions over these fast
five months were:

We evolved Autopilot for HW2 from its first early release (which had few
features and was limited to 45mph on highways) to effectively parity with HW1,
and surpassing it in some ways (e.g. silky smooth control). This required
building and shipping numerous features for HW2, including: support for local
roads, Parallel Autopark, High Speed Autosteer, Summon, Lane Departure
Warning, Automatic Lane Change, Low Speed AEB, Full Speed Autosteer, Pedal
Misapplication Mitigation, Auto High Beams, Side Collision Avoidance, Full
Speed AEB, Perpendicular Parking, and 'silky smooth' performance. This was
done by shipping a total of 7 major feature releases, as well as numerous
minor releases to support factory, service, and other narrow markets. One of
Tesla's huge advantages in the autonomous driving space is that it has tens of
thousands of cars already on the road. We built infrastructure to take
advantage of this, allowing the collection of image and video data from this
fleet, as well as building big data infrastructure in the cloud to process and
use it. I defined and drove the feature roadmap, drove the technical
architecture for future features, and managed the implementation for the next
exciting features to come. I advocated for and drove a major rewrite of the
deep net architecture in the vision stack, leading to significantly better
precision, recall, and inference performance. I ended up growing the Autopilot
Software team by over 50%. I personally interviewed most of the accepted
candidates. I made massive improvements to internal infrastructure and
processes that I cannot go into detail about. I was closely involved with
others in the broader Autopilot program, including future hardware support,
legal, homologation, regulatory, marketing, etc."

The original version apparently ended with the text "In the end, Elon and I
agreed that he and I did not work well together and that I should leave, so I
did."

------
Apocryphon
Perhaps it's time to try a non-hardware company.

~~~
discordance
"People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware"
\- Alan Kay

------
hoodoof
OK, I want you to program FizzBuzz on that whiteboard.

~~~
tyingq
Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction.
[https://m.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/21/ken_thompson_take_our...](https://m.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/21/ken_thompson_take_our_test/)

~~~
darren_
I doubt this anecdote. There was no such test in 2011, and I haven't heard any
tales from older timers about it either. It sounds like it's conflating some
totally optional style-guide-conformance procedures you can do, with
permission to check in code at all. And no-one gets to check in code without
review regardless of how much expertise you've demonstrated.

~~~
dpark
I'm not sure why you doubt the anecdote. It's a published quote in a published
book by a respected author, and to my knowledge Thompson hasn't refuted the
statement. The original quote doesn't have the trashy editorialization.
Thompson simply had no need to go through the approval process so he didn't.

[https://books.google.com/books?id=2kMIqdfyT8kC&pg=PA474&lpg=...](https://books.google.com/books?id=2kMIqdfyT8kC&pg=PA474&lpg=PA474&ots=MlbvncLJAI&sig=PzQLg4KadXJ0aSxiTlfbvuw2Qdk&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjM96qFmc_UAhUQ_WMKHefIDrEQ6AEIITAC)

When this was published, it was widely circulated and no one at the time
stepped forward to claim it was untrue or that the requirement didn't exist.
Given the fact that you make reference to "old timers" in this context, I
doubt you were at Google in 2011 and are merely asserting your assumption as a
fact.

------
skdotdan
Is this serious??? I don't get why he is leaving the company that soon, nor
what it announces it on Twitter before getting a new job.

~~~
coldtea
> _I don 't get why he is leaving the company that soon_

Because he doesn't like it there.

> _nor what it announces it on Twitter before getting a new job._

Because it's his Twitter and he has nothing much to hide. It's not like he
wont find employment (actually it might be not like he even needs employment
that badly -- he could easily have a couple of million in the bank).

~~~
bla2
> Because he doesn't like it there

More likely the other way round.

~~~
valuearb
You really think they'd fire a showy public hire this fast? Unless he was
committing felonies it's almost impossible. They'd be working with him to try
to salvage the situation.

Impetuous quitting over some specific issue he holds dear is only a thousand
times more likely.

~~~
dpark
I find it really odd that you assume him quitting for some petty reason is the
most likely scenario. Why do you have so little respect for Lattner?

~~~
valuearb
Since when is "specific" the same as "petty"? Why do you have so little
respect for the english language?

~~~
dpark
What do you imagine "impetuous" means?

acting or done quickly and without thought or care. "her friend was headstrong
and impetuous" synonyms: impulsive, rash, hasty, overhasty, reckless,
heedless, careless, foolhardy, bullheaded, headstrong, incautious, imprudent,
injudicious, ill-considered, unthought-out

~~~
valuearb
I didn't see "petty" in there.

If you reread my comment, it didn't say he didn't have a good reason, just
that he might have acted quickly or emotionally. Like many of us do.

~~~
dpark
So he's got a _good_ reason to leave but the decision to leave is rash,
foolhardy, reckless? These don't seem to fit together. If you leave for a
legitimate reason, I'd hardly call that an impetuous decision.

~~~
valuearb
If you work in a good place with one huge flaw, and management assures you
they will address the flaw, then you blow up one day because they haven't
addressed it yet and quit, that's an impetuous decision for a good reason.

It's not necessarily rash, foolhardy or reckless, since those are synonyms. In
this case they are similar, but not exactly the same.

