But if you claim that SpaceX isn't the leading Space company by a huge margin, or that their execution is somehow behind any other space company, you obviously do not know much at all about SpaceX.
The success of SpaceX has nothing to do with Musk and a lot to do with this woman: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwynne_Shotwell. That even you, who ostensibly cares quite a bit about SpaceX, don’t know this is a testament to how little execution matters.
I think your definition of execution is a little off, or at least, confused.
In a previous comment you wrote:
> But surviving for long enough and with the right folks around you means that you can turn things around.
Did Elon not hire and then promote Gwynne? Is recruiting the right people and keeping them happy and fulfilled not an important part of executing any vision?
If all you do as a CEO is hire smart people who make tons of money for your company while solving hard problems, you've succeeded as a CEO. What else does a CEO do?
If every company that a CEO touches is a tirefire until they are removed from day-to-day operations, is that good execution on their part? Just because they eventually hire the right people and those people are successful? (Ignoring of course that hiring is not a 1 person job.)
Even when they are a liability to the company through their actions, lying to shareholders and customers? I'm not so sure. If Elon had ever lead a company to success of his own volition then I could say different. But he mostly gets credit for other people's work -- that's how his inclusion into the list of founders of Paypal came about in the first place, how he came to be head of Tesla, and also now how folks mistakenly give him credit for the success of SpaceX.
> If every company that a CEO touches is a tirefire until they are removed from day-to-day operations, is that good execution on their part?
Maybe? I think it'd be silly to claim that Tesla and SpaceX are so successful that they were able to become world class companies even under hostile leadership. They are successful in part because of their leadership, such as Gwynne as you mentioned (god bless her).
> Even when they are a liability to the company through their actions, lying to shareholders and customers?
One might argue this is even the primary purpose of a CEO, to lie and lie and keep the illusion going until the engineers have enough time to actually deliver. Tim Cook had a similar bout with Apple Maps, AirPower, and the infamous car project, but he doesn't seem to be cast in the same light as Elon with FSD.
> If Elon had ever lead a company to success of his own volition
If I may, I don't think anyone has ever lead a company to success of their own volition, so this is a false premise. You're saying that tons of other people helped make these companies succeed, but this is true for every company, even the ones that eventually fail.
Elon is a complicated character and he's certainly not a saint, but he is at the very least involved in these companies, and while they are doing well he deserves at least some credit for selling a vision that excites investors and customers and keeps the lights on. As I learn more about the business world, I'm beginning to see that a lot of tech CEOs have a similar social function to rockstars: they get crowds to feel ecstasy and hope and headbang to the music while skilled operators in the background sell merch, records, and deals.
I can read the JavaScript I wrote months or years ago with very little effort. The language is fairly trivial, and the big gotchas have been mostly addressed by es6 and avoiding type coercion. I have limited time to dick around on personal projects and I mostly wrote Python and JS for a living, so having a familiar syntax means the difference between spending my time building cool stuff versus spending my time trying to remember how to read paren soup.
The other factors are cultural - so much of the clojure ecosystem is badly documented, or not at all. Sure, I can go and read your code to figure out what it does. But that comes back to the limited time argument, unless I'm paid for it, I'd rather write stuff in a language with a culture of proper documentation. For a recent example that does an outstanding job, see Elixir.
Finally, the ecosystem just feels... abandoned? Like walking through a ghost town. A lot of things on GitHub look incredible, but if there's no commits in the past 3 years I'm not inclined to invest time in it. I know the common argument about them being finished, and I don't buy it - non-trivial code rarely is.
You are right but Amazon has invested almost $1b into Rivian and Amazon has almost as much cash ($42b) as Tesla's market cap ($50b). With GM jumping in too these two companies combined could flex and crush Tesla. Not saying this will happen (I don't think it will) but it could.
Amazon no doubt wants in on the self driving electric vehicle market to compete with Tesla, Apple and Google and heavily investing in the best EV startup other than Tesla is the easiest way into this field. But because of this I would put Rivian as only slightly behind Tesla.
Now you are right, forcing your way into a field by throwing money at the problem doesn't always ensure success, just as Windows Phone. But as with Windows Phone it does usually ensure a decent product gets to market. And that is all I am saying will happen. The likelihood of a Rivian product getting to market is just as likely as a Model Y getting to market. Both extremely high.
Consider what programming is, then consider the implications of the suggestion that few developers manage to organize their thoughts well enough to write them down.
That's exactly why there's so much bad code out there. I don't agree with GP that this applies to most developers, but certainly to a depressingly-high number.
"Maybe you manage to work with only people who can write down their thoughts coherently."
This is exactly what I mean with something becoming a dogma when you call it 'xyz driven' programming. You are painting a picture where taking notes while programming is a requirement of being a good programming. I am saying that it doesn't have to be.
Peter Buwalda is a Dutch writer who takes multiple showers a day. He says it helps him overcome his writers block. There is also some science behind this; it turns out your senses will be so busy with the steady flow of sound, the feeling of the water and the fact that there is no visual distraction that you can focus on your thoughts better. He isn't the first to realise this, hence the term 'shower-thoughts'.
So, one could argue, 'shower driven programming' is something we should all do. Installing showers in offices for this purpose or expecting people who work at home to take multiple showers a day in order to focus would be nonsense, but then I could also counter by saying "Well maybe you manage to work with people who can focus without taking constant showers, but that is not the norm."
Ridiculous right? So why isn't it ridiculous to demand that people take notes when programming?
Some of the replies on my comment have been along the lines of 'will someone please think of the children!' with reference to junior programmers. What junior programmers don't need is yet another dogma by which they should 'drive' their development.
It would have been completely different if the 'post' would have been 'Taking notes while programming can be helpful'. That strikes a completely different chord, namely, a helpful one. The word 'driven' does what you demonstrate: it makes people feel inferior when they don't do whatever the given driver is.
Who, exactly, is demanding anything? You're way overblowing what is just a useful suggestion from someone who probably realized that would have been useful earlier in their career, and hence is trying to help others.
It's "log driven" because the logs, when read back, direct what you work on. Making that title to be some sort of mandate is inferring something that, frankly, simply isn't there.
It's surprising how much objectionable you find in what to me is simply an experienced programmer sharing a detail of his personal workflow. Naming doesn't turn something into a "dogmatic principle".
Before I begin again, I grant you that the length of my replies seem to imply that I care a lot. I don't, I just like to talk about semantics and when people raise new arguments, I like to explore the subject some more with a reply. For all I care you will write an article on 'boxer short driven programming' on how you sit around in your underwear programming and think everyone should do it.
"It's surprising how much objectionable you find in..."
It isn't much, it is just the one word that I find wrong. The comment you are responding to is an analysis of the effect of the chosen wording as demonstrated by @thachmai.
The semantics of the word 'driven' here ARE turning the given workflow into something that should be adhered to. If this weren't the case the word 'driven' would have no meaning and could thus be left out. Which would have been the better choice.
Furthermore, if you look at the article itself you can see that the whole tone is in line with my feeling about the title:
"The worst thing you can do is to interrupt what you are currently doing in order to fix the new problem. Instead just write freeMyObject() and don't care, but at the same time, open a different editor, and write:"
This doesn't come across as "Do you ever get distracted while programming by small pieces of irrelevant code? Try keeping a todo list to keep track of little cleanup so that you can come back to them later."
The author seems to think that you are a bad programmer if you don't take notes while programming and cleanup things you find along the way. @thachmai picked up on this and repeated this frame in his reply to my first comment. I got excited by this as it is exactly what I meant.
Workflows being a dime a dozen in both the software industry and all industries more generally, saying that any word makes a workflow “something that should be adhered to” seems like an overstatement. It's absolutely clear that the author thinks it is worth adhering to, however.
“-driven” doesn't imply demand, it implies the center of a given workflow. antirez is stating that this approach (which is more than just taking notes, since taking notes just means “writing stuff down” and says nothing about interruption) boosts productivity, and that it is centered around the process of stashing thoughts and observations without interrupting the present task. He also outlines why he thinks this is the case.
You are mischaracterizing the blog post by underspecifying what it says, then attacking the mischaracterization… I'm not sure that approach tracks with your claim to care about semantics. It's not just words that matter, it's also how they're collected into titles, sentences, paragraphs, documents, and how they exist in their broader context (software industry parlance, in this case).
You are, in turn, oversimplifying what I am saying. 'Language matters' might be closer to what I should have said and in that sense I oversimplified my own words.
This 'article' explains the trivial task of keeping track of todos and separating main and sub tasks. Something that I most people know how to do. 'Centralising' what we do around the written word is what separates us from animals and you find it everywhere.
I find coming up with a name with the word 'driven' in it for such a common thing somewhat grandiose. That is my critique.
Language matters indeed. I guess that if you'd said "I find coming up with a name with the word 'driven' in it for such a common thing somewhat grandiose." you'd not have provoked such a strong reaction, but you didn't. You said note-taking is "frivolous" (which to me suggested you think it's a bad idea!). You don't acknowledge the difference to "just taking notes", which might make it a not-so-common thing.
It's incredible how you trivialize SpaceX achievements. I get it that you probably hate Elon Musk for whatever reason. But you should really calibrate your bias filter.
Tesla makes cars. We've known how to make cars for a while now - even electric cars. What was critical for Tesla was the vision: to see that we were approaching a tipping point where battery technology and cost would make a fully- (and only-) electric car feasible, and the strength of mind and purpose to ignore and/or out-think peoples' legacy objections and misgivings - e.g. with the Supercharger network. There are some Musk-ian details that are advances, such as the single integrated computer system, but that's a relatively small part of the whole.
In contrast, yes, SpaceX (just!) makes rockets, and yes, we've known how to make rockets for a long time. But they have done some things that the rest of the rocket industry haven't even got close to. Firstly, they've revolutionised the process and cost of producing a rocket in this class, by insourcing so much of it, and rethinking the necessary components and technology. Secondly, they've taken the concept of re-use and made it orders of magnitude cheaper (versus, what, the Shuttle?) than before, to the extent that it has/will completely turn the industry on its head. And the techniques and technology they've pioneered to facilitate this --not least the ability to land a 70m rocket upright on a robot barge floating out at sea-- are genuinely, truly revolutionary.
You are totally wrong about SpaceX. SpaceX is totally revolutionary and they have already achieved a huge amount of remarkable stuff that most people did not think was possible.
Lots of stuff has been test or tried before, but bringing things from idea to production ready with the efficiency required and cheap production is fantastically impressive.
You can claim 'it is not basic research' or whatever, but the reality is that they are pushing the envelop on so many topics at the same time that they are leafing all competition in the dust.
Statistically, I move every three year so far. I do have a lot of stuff though, last time it took half a shipping container for everything. If I extend your logics for my case, I should be driving a container truck every day.
We shouldn't optimize for the exceptional cases. It's far cheaper and easier to think of the main usage first and deal with the exceptions when the time comes. Renting a shipping container once every few years is not that expensive.
I agree with you. I didn't give any logical argument, I just presented how people seem to behave, for better or worse. I don't own a car and when I need one it's usually one of the two scenarios I outline -- in which case I rent one.
> able to roll up and understand project status and progress across a large and sprawling organization working on goals
The major problem with that is we are incredibly good at gaming the system. I've seen mediocre, at best, team became a glowing beacon under the velocity game; they managed to close 2000+ stories in one year! (a developer closed well over 1 story per day on average).
Software estimation is a really hard problem. We can attempt to establish order by pretending that burning down/velocity charts actually say something useful. How do they work when all the methods we know fail? No idea. But have faith, because we have plenty of anecdotes of its success!
If there is only one thing I can complain about vim/vi, it's the esc key. The key is too far away to reach easily. It is most accessible with the little finger, which is our weakness finger. Coupled with the fact that it's likely the most important key in vim. I hate it.
So when I use a non-configured vim, it's the thing that I miss the most. The rest is trivial.
However, using someone else vim is completely different!
You must keep in mind that vim is much similar to a programming language. You can remap keys all over the place. You can create exotic combinations that do wonderful and/or terrible things with few key strokes. You can install plugins that argument and alter vim behaviours.
Jumping into a well tuned vim setup is not unsimilar to starting to use a new programming framework. It's hard to be productive right away.
In that case usually, I just rename .vimrc, remap <esc>, do my things and get out of the way.
But if you claim that SpaceX isn't the leading Space company by a huge margin, or that their execution is somehow behind any other space company, you obviously do not know much at all about SpaceX.