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Comment by ccorda | Hacker News Reader

Seems to be taking Chris Lattner's place:

https://twitter.com/clattner_llvm/status/877341760812232704

Wow! Tesla's official statement: "Chris just wasn’t the right fit for Tesla, and we’ve decided to make a change. We wish him the best." [0]

Chris's response: "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!"

I don't think I've ever seen a tech company throw an employee under the bus so publicly. I wonder what Lattner did to warrant such a public separation?

[0] https://electrek.co/2017/06/20/tesla-autopilot-chris-lattner...

Bet Chris Lattner is heading to Google.

If google were to embrace swift that would be spicy.

At this point, not really. The compiler is slow and buggy. (And to make the type system faster would take some interesting theoretical breakthroughs.)

The compiler is being worked on pretty heavily. The compiler is slow compared with what? Go? C? Generics are computationally expensive no matter what so the question boils down to generics vs not. Le_no_generics.maymay.jpig

It is not just about generics though, it is about using a constraint solver for type checking programs of a type system which is needlessly expressive.

Also, it is slow compared to almost everything, even C++. It has got better over the last 3 years, but most of that is pumping heuristics into the system.

I would think Google would already be using Swift for their iOS apps and all. As for other stuff they have lots of choice and Swift can't be ruled out. After all, they also use Typescript developed by MS.

I think many want rewrites of fine, working software to show language's worth. This is startup or single developer stuff, large professional companies rarely rewrite stuff on whim.

Ofc they do, but use it as a first class language.

> After all, they also use Typescript developed by MS.

Ofc, it's the best language for the purpose.

> This is startup or single developer stuff, large professional companies rarely rewrite stuff on whim.

That's not correct. https://martinfowler.com/bliki/SacrificialArchitecture.html#...

Don't people like it here when a company does not indulge in pc bullshit. I think Tesla statement is to the point.

You have to be careful how you let people go if you want to attract good talent. There is always a chance of a misfit, and the right thing to do is to part ways as soon either party realizes it, but you want to do this in a way that is not unnecessarily damaging to either party's reputation. Otherwise, good people with a reputation may think twice about working with you.

Reputation is for B players. Chris Lattner can go work for any company in the world that can afford him.

A players don't look at company's reputation, they look at things that actually matter.

Exactly, not everyone is interested in playing the pc game. What if they mean exactly what they say: not a good fit. That doesn't mean he is bad at his job.

You are contradicting yourself. Being an A player is your reputation. No one is going to hire your into a senior level role without you first having a good reputation.

A players don't worry about getting hired into senior level roles.

They don't worry about their reputation either.

If you worry about any of that, you're not an A player :)

More specifics from Lattner's online resume

"In the end, Elon and I agreed that he and I did not work well together and that I should leave, so I did."

This part was removed after one day

Are we sure it wasn't the other way around? Maybe Chris really didn't like the engineering culture or something else and decided to leave, but given how big a story it was when he joined they needed to both put out a statement.

Both are definitely high profile enough that it would be strange if one said something and the other didn't.

The company saying we have decided to make a change makes it brutally obvious he was pushed - Chris should have gone for a compromise agreement.

I don't know, a bad fit may be just that. Could be more to it, but maybe not.

I don't know if there's any better way to downplay a major hire leaving after less than half a year. Everything in those statements is extremely obvious from the circumstances and I can't think of a more cordial way to phrase it.

There are much better standard ways to phrase this and that's precisely why you almost never see it put that way. If for no other reason than that if hiring high-profile talent is something you need to do more than once, you don't want to be publicly suggesting it's somehow their fault when they leave.

I didn't take it this way at all. Why can't "he's not the right fit" mean exactly that? People can be brilliant but just not right fit the operating processes and culture at a company. I didn't really read anything negative into it from either side.

Sure, you didn't but as you can see in this thread, it's trivially interpretable in lots of other ways. Which is exactly why it is usually not put that way. This doesn't seem like a complicated thing at all.

it also helps avoid expensive lawsuits especially for high profile roles who have the money to sue

Not really.

You think a wealthy c level and an average engineer have the same access to legal redress?

In that case I have a bridge id like to sell to you

As another poster said, though, you're basically asking for more BS, wishy washy corporate-speak, wish is often what people on this forum rail against. Damned if you do, damned in you don't.

I'm not asking for anything. You were asking something and I tried to offer an explanation. The answer is mostly 'because lots of other people don't feel the same way as you on a (relatively minor and subjective) point of interpretation.' Applies just as well to your feelings about 'BS, wishy washy corporate-speak'.

"we’ve decided to make a change" could easily be interpreted as "we've fired him".

In any case, judging by the reactions to his tweet it looks like he can pick and choose his next job.

How did they throw him under the bus? I interpret both of their statements to be neutral and honest.

> I wonder what Lattner did to warrant such a public separation?

Or what Tesla did. Why are you assuming it's Lattner's fault?

> I wonder what Lattner did to warrant such a public separation?

Failed to make AP2 work well with cameras alone would be my guess. Tesla is hitting the glass ceiling with its sensor hardware and the future isn't going to be pretty. Expect more changes in engineering leadership until Musk realizes he needs better data (sensors) for his neural nets.

From his online resume

"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. Overall I learned a lot, worked my butt off, met a lot of great people, and had a lot of fun. I'm still a firm believer in Tesla, its mission, and the exceptional Autopilot team: I wish them well."

The first draft ended "In the end, Elon and I agreed that he and I did not work well together and that I should leave, so I did."

It was always a weird fit having a compiler and programming language designer lead an AI team.

Exactly. Chris is very smart but this is unlikely to be a good fit.

I disagree (that it was inevitable...obviously it ended up not being a good fit, ha). This comment from the original announcement has an insightful point of view on how much sense it could make to have someone concerned with correctness and reliability heading the AI/Autonomous Driving team.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13370144

The most insightful part seems to be:

"Naively one might have expected some machine learning expert to take over the reins at Tesla."

Here we are.

Chris accomplished a great deal in a short time at Tesla, but ultimately could not work with Elon Musk. He was a great fit if Elon wasn't a maniac.

If the main source of problems was related to software architecture, it may have made sense. Academic AI people may be stronger on theory and end up with unmaintainable bridges. OTOH good architecture will be responsive to the fundamental underlying problems being solved, and that requires depth.

Compilers give a good base for transferring to things like databases, operating systems and IO heavy systems with lots of transforms / filters etc. They also ingrain a way of thinking that isn't native to most devs - writing code that generates code. Monads and other approaches to dynamically composing a computation - they come easy.

I agree on that. I personally think AI (and especially topics like deep learning) only makes up for a small part of autonomous driving or driver assistance in general. The remaining parts will be lots of old-fashioned control theory, signal-processing, general good software engineering practices, having a good software and system architecture, being able to build a fully deterministic (hard-realtime capable) system. For the latter topics a highly experienced person with more of an engineering background would be a better fit than a researcher with with a mostly-algorithm background.

That's the best explanation I've yet seen of why he left.

Just saw that too. https://electrek.co/2017/06/20/tesla-autopilot-chris-lattner...

I haven't seen this mentioned yet, but in the spirit of the high-profile failures (or misuse?) of the Tesla autopilot system, could it be that Chris had a fundamental disagreement with Tesla management over the direction and technical grounding of this feature?

All rank speculation, of course, but maybe he didn't like what was "under the hood" of this feature and how it was being developed and marketed?

Just spectator curiosity, but interesting to ponder none the less.

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