Engineers, raise your hand if you’ve tried to do good work despite your management’s ‘support.’ Oh, look at all the hands going up!
This is true, but when safety is on the line it actually goes further than that. As an engineer you have an ethical duty to say no to making a product unsafe for end users or the general public.
It doesn’t matter if you get fired, if your boss goes to the media to bitch about you, if your boss threatens to sue you, you as an engineer hold a position of public trust to keep the people that use your product safe. If you don’t respect that and take it seriously, well we see where oceangate ended up.
Yeah my boss has been going back and forth with me on this for months. Wanting to release unsecured products to the general public. I’m getting exhausted with him. I hold the keys and frequently I’ve told him no, and threatened to quit. Each time they just retreat back and hold a meeting how it will “stay on dev for now”. The features aren’t even feasible to release in the near future but I know they will force the issue. My resignation letter is on the table.
I’ve been there, my boss once interrupted me to ask me to turn our product into a quadcopter
This is the most management-ass “feature” request
“Sir, with all due respect, I don’t believe turning a commercial diesel filling station into a quad copter doesn’t seem feasible.”
It tracks with the zoomers. Make it happen.
You just need to think outside the box. like these lads did: https://youtu.be/ReAa2WFm8Vc?t=16
The number of times I’ve rejected something because of security flaws (usually database injection), only to see other engineers later approve and merge the pull request is infuriating. There seems to always be an engineer who is willing to make an unsafe product.
Yep, it’s a damn shame, but we’re gonna let them do that because we don’t want to be responsible for deaths or security flaws and ultimately there’s organizations and people out there who value that if our current jobs don’t
That value is instilled in many types of engineering, but not as much in software engineering.
And the people paying the engineers are highly motivated to keep it that way
Ocean gate hasn’t faced any consequences yet
And neither have FAANG companies for the massive social consequences to ubiquitous surveillance
This moral high ground you think you’re standing on doesn’t exist, and won’t until engineers who push back get the support from society to do so. They currently are very much expected to stand up to a corporation on their own, risking their own livelihood, and that’s plain bullshit
Tale as old as time.
Engineers: “This is possible but we will need to equip every car with an expensive sensor suite”
Management: “So you’re saying we can just remove the sensors and figure it out with your engineering magic, you guys are really good at that, you got my iPhone connected to ICloud so you must be reeeally good with technology.”
Engineers: “…”
Management: “Also, anyone not up to this task is fired.”
Also, we are shipping it next week.
Also, we shipped yesterday.
Boss: Eating a snickers “Oh, you guys weren’t finished with that?”
After the meeting a few of the smart ones asked for clarification over email to get it writing.
Management ALWAYS knows what’s best! Obviously!
Hence why they constantly come running for us to fix it when shit goes as we say it will.
That’s because musk is a dumb narcissistic cocky asshole.
You can only get by on other people’s laurels for so long
According to the report, Musk overruled a significant number of Tesla engineers who warned him that switching to a visual-only system would be problematic and possibly unsafe due to its high risk of increasing the rate of accidents. His own team knew their systems weren’t up to the task, but Musk believed he knew better than the industry experts who helped propel Tesla to the forefront of autonomous technology and ploughed on with this egocentric, counterproductive plan. He even disabled sensors in older models so that pretty much the entire Tesla fleet went visual-only.
Amazing, just amazing.
He’s starting to sound like Elizabeth Holmes.
Every expert in the field insists that my idea is impossible? They’re backing their assertions with cold, hard facts?! I’ll show em!
if you look back at the history of tesla theres lots of that where musk/tesla engineers actually succeeded. it sounds like that thinking finally bit him in the ass.
These people all start to fail horribly when they stop listening. They somehow convince themselves that they are the genius when their skills stopped at having money and listening to groups of actual experts.
tl;dr: Autonomous driving uses a whole host of multiple and different kinds of sensors. Musk said “NO, WE WILL ONLY USE VISION CAMERA SENSORS.” And that doesn’t work.
Guess what? I have eyes; I can see. You know what I want an autonomous vehicle to be able to do? Receive sensory input that I can’t.
We also use way more than just our eyes to navigate. We have accelerometers (ear canals), pressure sensors (touch), Doppler sensors (ears) to augment how we get around. It was a fools errand to try and figure everything out just with cameras.
Also you can alter the vision input by moving your head, blocking the sun with your hand etc.
This seems like a classic case of ego from Musk.
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What’s worse is it will be hard to reverse this decision. Tesla is a data and AI company compiling vision and driving data from drivers around the world. If you change the sensor format or layout dramatically, all the old data and all the new data becomes hard to hybridize. You basically start from scratch at least for the new sensors, and you fail to deliver a promise to old customers.
Sounds to me like they should full steam ahead with new sensors, they will never deliver on what they’ve promised with the tech they are using today.
Old customers situation won’t change and it would only be better going forward.
If you change the sensor format or layout dramatically, all the old data and all the new data becomes hard to hybridize.
I don’t see why that would have to be the case if the new data is a complete superset of the old data. If all the same cameras are there, then the additional sensors and the data those sensors collect can actually help train the processing of the visual-only data, right?
How do we prove we’re not robots? Fucking select the picture with traffic lights or buses, right? How was this allowed.
“Honey, the car ordered itself new tires again!”
He’s such a fucking moron
This news is months old. Honestly agree with musk on this one. We are able to drive with 2(sometimes only 1)low resolution(sometimes out of focus, sometimes closed) cameras on a pivot inside the vehicle with further blindspots all around. Much of our rear situational awareness comes from 2/3 small warped mirrors strategically placed to enhance those 2 low resolution cameras on a pivot. Tesla has already reverted to add some radar back in… The lidar option sounds like dystopia waiting to happen (just imagine all streets filled with aftermarket invisible lasers from 3rd world counties, any one of them could blind you under unlucky circumstances). The best way forward is visual, and if you watch up to date test drives on YouTube you can see they are doing quite well with what they have.
But even if these consequences don’t come to pass, this information still paints Musk’s attitude towards public health and how he views his responsibility to his customers as far from golden.
Why am I not surprised in the least?
It’s the radar, lidar, cameras only story that’s coming up every few months for the last years. A few years ago Tesla went cameras only to save money, assuming it would be good enough. Other manufacturers/cars have a higher certification for autonomous driving but they are also using more sensors than just cameras.
I am shocked and surprised.
Capitalism. Nothing worse than a CEO for a product to be honest. Being able to overrule engineers and workers is literally the problem with capitalism. A guy with ungodly money vs actual boots on the ground professionals. Disgusting
You mean one man with a sapphire spoon shoved up his ass from birth doesn’t know more than an army of folks that have studied their entire lives, experienced worlds of issues around it, and are living and breathing this stuff everyday for this exact challenge? HUH! Well today I learned! /s
And when the lay offs come, who does it affect more? The billionaire douche bag? Or the people that warned him?
Isn’t an emerald spoon more his thing?
it doesnt end at ceos. i can think of one prominent, and fairly recent, incident where a different automaker knew of a defect before the product launched, and overruled fixing it because it was cheaper to leave it be. and that directly led to people dying. yet gm cars are still sold around the world and most people have forgotten about the ignition incidents. afaik the ceo was never involved in that decision.
Hubris is having a heck of a month.
I have a Model 3 with FSD. It’s fucking useless.
Sorry about your $14k FSD purchase. Hopefully it gets better
Everyone already knew at the time that this decision was doomed to fail. They now even doubled down to actively remove sensors from older models, to avoid the inputs interfering with the new updates. When it comes to automating and especially autonomous driving in combination with safety, one should want as much input as possible. I doubt visual can compute faster than radar/lidar, I think it was just a cost saving effort. Gladly, Mercedes and BMW show the way to autonomous driving and are allowed to actually start using the first versions on European highways.
They now even doubled down to actively remove sensors from older models, to avoid the inputs interfering with the new updates.
Yes, I bought FSD a long time ago and even though I’m owed a hardware 3 upgrade, I’ve yet to get it. If I stay on hardware 2.5, my radar will be stay active and they can’t do something even dumber like disable my parking sensors. I’ve driven vision-only cars and it’s really worse at least for the roads around here. The FSD alpha is still too nerve-wracking to use for me to even consider installing it.
If it weren’t for all the deaths and other negative impacts on consumers and the general public, I’d be glad this is happening to such an arrogant prick. I hope the DoJ throws the book at him.
Honestly, Tesla should lean into their recent successes with charger standards and shift to being a company that sells/licenses EV tech to other companies, much as Intel is transitioning from making their own chips to making other people’s. Let GM and Ford and Hyundai and VW whack each other over the head until they haven’t got any margins left, and focus on the aspects of the business that are more profitable than simply making cars.
Hmm. This is too reasonable for Elly the chronic shitposter.
Musk Overruled Tesla Engineers, And Now They Are In Serious Trouble
The engineers are in serious trouble? Or Tesla?
This headline would be clearer if it followed the convention of companies being singular:
Musk overruled Tesla engineers, and now it’s in serious trouble
Dude! This is the News, you can’t just write a clear and understandable headline, no one will click on the article! Amateurs… (/s if it wasn’t clear)
Isn’t this Medium.com where anyone can write an article whether they’re qualified or not?
I really doubt you folks are members of that blog and read the story.
The reason his companies are so successful is because he does listen to his engineers and prioritizes their communication and decision making by having a relatively flat organization that keeps management interference at a minimum.
No leader makes the right call and decision every time.Interestingly enough there was another article published very recently about how Tesla’s full self-driving performed every bit as good as Waymo in San Francisco but with less hardware.
And I think it is pretty obvious which of the two is going to work better outside of San Francisco.SHlurp SHLURP yes daddy Elon I refuted those naughty lemmy users of wrongthink
