> There are things in life more important than money.
Not only this, but I think even in purely self-interested financial terms your ethical approach is superior over the long term.
Over time, truth and honesty offer a compounding positive spiral.
You make better decisions because a) the inputs are free of lies and b) you make them carefully knowing you will own the consequences.
Reputationally you garner trust which makes possibilities available to you (collaboration, quid pro quo, and low-friction litigation-fee business relationships) that are not open to unethical people.
To be fair, all the other interview rounds were with more junior, low-EQ CS nerds like me, so he could still be pretty confident the candidate would get a good grilling.
This is a random place to throw this at you, but you seem like you have a) the skills and b) and the motivation.
The internet needs an “allowlist” front end for kids, especially for video platforms.
I would pay $20/month for a family subscription to a front end app for Netflix and YouTube that lets me allowlist shows and channels, and never lets Netflix or Youtube AI choose what to show my kids next.
Netflix in particular is extremely subversive. I have seen it stop a show mid-episode to suggest a new show to my 6yo - which is clearly aimed at slightly more mature audiences, and is therefore more exciting/scary for my daughter.
The AI is constantly pushing her toward more mature content even if she doesn’t choose it. And there is NO WAY to stop it other than just get rid of Netflix entirely, but they also have by far the best content for kids.
Anyway, a browser with proper kids controls, good UX for the parents, and especially the ability to filter/block the closed video platforms, would be huge.
At my old job in the UK, we always got better results hiring engineers from Imperial College (which is the UK attempt at an MIT/Caltech-type of school) than from Oxbridge.
We eventually figured out that the Imperial students had written thousands and thousands of lines of code by the time they graduated, in several different types of languages (Prolog, Haskell, C, Verilog, Java, Python, Javascript) and at all levels of the stack (they were writing drivers, theorem provers, machine learning code, games, web apps, etc.). The students had been using Linux as their daily driver for 4 years, the command line experience of ssh/git/grep and the rest of it was native for them.
The Oxbridge students had done a lot of hardcore mathematics and a lot of proofs of theoretical computer science concepts. Brutally difficult.
But the Imperial students would roll in, sit down, and within a few weeks (after we taught them about tests) would be pounding out large swaths of working code.
The Oxbridge students would start to get stuck once their programs hit 1000 lines, and would spend days refactoring little functions and making things pretty rather than just getting stuff done. They simply had never dealt with large, real-world code before.
It’s bad for your sense of self-worth, even if it’s not objectively a bad thing.
One day you might ask yourself “Where would I be if I went all-in on something exciting rather than just putting 10% effort into my work for all those years?”
Consider taking a longish holiday (like 3 weeks)? If at the end of it you don’t want to come back, quit. But that might be long enough to scratch the itch and feel refreshed.
I was a younger, inexperienced tech lead sitting in on an interview led by an engineer about 10 years older than me.
I was shocked when he spent the whole hour asking soft questions like “So describe your previous team structure. How did ideas and plans arise? Who took responsibility? How was conflict resolved? What were your impressions?”
I always went hard on technical stuff when interviewing, was always worried that an incompetent would sneak through.
I asked the senior engineer his rationale. He told me “This guy went to X school and got Y degree and worked at Z company. So I know he’s smart enough. And I can teach him to write good software. But I can never teach him not to be a prick.”
If you race a skilled Rust team against an equally skilled C++ team to build some big complicated fast software, the Rust team would likely ship first, and with less bugs.
The C++ team will eventually ship too, but it will take much longer. The software will also be of high quality, and very slightly superior performance, but there will be a couple of memory leaks, maybe a couple of exploits, and possibly a tricky segfault, somewhere down the line. Maintaining the C++ team’s software without introducing further issues will require superhuman intelligence, so it won’t happen - there will increasing issues as the team turns over and the detailed understanding of the code is lost over time.
The Rust team will mostly suffer from frustration about how bad async is, go down the rabbit hole of using it, and then rip it out and replace it with hand-rolled state machines and epoll. Down the line at some point, future programmers will decide this is legacy garbage and replace it all with async again.
There will be no segfault or memory exploits, and a similar number of logic bugs to the c++ team.
I say this having worked on large C++ projects and large Rust projects, and with no particular religious love for Rust other than a grateful appreciation for the compiler.
Those maximums in Europe are largely ignored in high-paying roles (like what Tesla engineers would certainly be).
As an example, in London when you get a high-paying finance job, on day 1 the HR person comes by your desk and has you sign a waiver to waive away any rights to overtime and to accept that you will work as and when needed regardless of national limits.
Edit: I would also like to point out that when I did that job, the builders working on the skyscraper next door were working substantially longer hours than my 50ish hours per week, and probably for substantially less pay.
> Can't he just keep it focused on the cars and the share price?
I actually agree with your sentiment, but for a different reason - I think tweeting is a massive waste of his time which I would prefer be spent either working on any of his amazing companies, or for restorative rest - but obviously I don’t get a vote where he spends his time!
For the same reason, I really hope he doesn’t buy Twitter - not because I don’t like what he’ll do, but because Twitter is a dumpster fire and I don’t want his valuable attention squandered on something so worthless as fixing discourse Twitter.
> I hope this pushes folks at Tesla to unionize.
Elon corporate culture/values seems like it’s definitely unique, and not something for everyone.
It’s probably better for everybody if those who aren’t onboard go work somewhere that aligns better with their values.
> survivorship bias, that countless projects never got the chance to be developed due to the too high of a burden of doing it properly
I would contend the cost of doing things “safely” is much higher in C++. since a human being has to mentally do all the work the compiler would do in a safe language.
The author was amused at his younger self’s naïveté and entitlement in assuming such a raise was a given and planning it on a timeline app.
So I think you are actually in agreement.