This is disgusting behavior from SpaceX. It must be even worse for the majority of older people who are more likely to have well established families and "only" want to spend 40 hours of their lives a week working.
The fact they had an expert working 10 hours a day 7 days a week apparently was not enough. They have to be in their twenties to get the real "techbro" badge.
I have a strong belief that technical skills aren't as important as the ability to be a suck-up in most mega-corps. You can easily buy a suck-up offering graduates a six-figure salary. It's like VPs are building their own personal armies not to get ousted by the other feudal lords.
Having a single point of failure is a terrible idea for the health of the company. It is often unavoidable early on in a product, but if the product is successful, there is a strong need to eliminate the single point of failure.
This can be very hard on engineers that were previous the go-to person for a key area. The person and product was successful so the ask to delegate and dilute ownership seems completely illogical. Some ICs don't want to give this up and so they switch from IC to management for the wrong reasons, leading to a manager that isn't really interested in management and is reluctant to delegate and enable the team.
I've seen this occur many times and it's always painful. Starlink is now large enough that it's a huge risk to have a single key person responsible for optics.
It sounds like the author was never given the chance to build organizational redundancy. It was done around and without them in a strangely secretive way.
>I have a strong belief that technical skills aren't as important as the ability to be a suck-up in most mega-corps.
Hasn't it always been this way at organizations, tech or not? Not even suck ups but people that don't cause a stir, keep their heads down, yes men to whatever the manager asks, etc.
Personally, I've seen it in action in a workplace where everyone "loves" so and so. That person would put on a good face and tell them how "amazing" everything was in every interaction. Behind their backs, that definitely wouldn't be the dialogue.
>You can easily buy a suck-up offering graduates a six-figure salary.
Or less. A name brand, prestige title, or industry. When I worked in visual effects, it's enough to get your name at the end of a movie to justify working 80-90 hour weeks. Video game peeps had it worse and you don't even see their names on a big screen.
>It's like VPs are building their own personal armies not to get ousted by the other feudal lords.
This is pretty visible in transitions right? New manager comes in, people loyal to old ones start melting away to different groups or leave to either join old manager or go somewhere else. The new manager brings in people they know and trust.
Sucking up to some degree is team work. You need to know how to work with people to get what you need and move the company forward. Each person is different and part of working at a large company is learning how to interact with a multitude of personalities, many that you would not get along with outside of work.
It is like high school, it is like politics, it is like any group of humans interacting. You skills are part of the equation, but your people skills are as well.
It's the people who can go with the flow that stick around long term and actually have a meaningful impact on the success of the company. It's very easy to get caught up and think everyone is against you and burn out.
They don't also (I believe) take work away from younger workers because they are more likely to change jobs frequently—which is much more common. Pretty clearly ageism.
Karoshi is a real thing, and something that gets exponentially more likely as people grow older. There's nothing unethical about setting adequate boundaries so that even the most committed and hard-working employee does not inadvertently burn out, or worse. Work smarter, not just harder.
From reading the article he would have been fine if they assigned him as the manager to train them. But they took over his roles, required training and didn't report to him in any way.
SpaceX sends real people on rockets into space. If they dont do the job right, people could die. Ive had a back injury, I actually had an artificial disc placed at my L4/L5 (which by the way is a life-saver and my back is 100% now). But there is no way in hell I could do a demanding job or any job at all when I was going through that. Creating redundancy for his position is a no-brainer in this situation.
Its OK for people to take time off for things like back surgury, and people should be able to expect they get their job back when they recuperate. The business processes' should be setup such that the business can accomidate this kind of thing, its the cost of doing business. Anything less is just lazy and cheap management and leadership.
Yes, redundancy is a good thing. On the other hand, addressing it for an older employee after an injury makes their motivations sound suspect. Would they have treated a younger employee in similar circumstances the same way (because, yes, younger people do get injured)? For that matter, why didn't they have redundancy built into an important role from the outset (making it policy would reduce the likelihood of ageist behaviour)?
If that was all they'd done, it would've been fine. However, according to this story, that was just the turning point and even his manager didn't know what was happening.
This may be unpopular to some here, but it is dangerous to let one man run a substantial part of the company's operations. There is a reason why the notion of "bus factor" exists and if you are senior enough, it is expected of you to mentor new recruits that ultimately will take your job.
That being said, they way he has been treated is absolutely infuriating and probably illegal in numerous countries which are not the USA.
Certainly, redundancy and spreading of responsibilities is a reasonable way to run important divisions like this.
They way SpaceX went about this as outlined in TFA is absolutely not the way to do it. This guy had no input in the process at all, even from the outset or the hiring, and they didn't even report to him!
Probably because principal engineer is an independent contributor type role. Also sounds like he wasn't part of the hiring team to begin with - which is a lot of overhead if you're already a busy engineer.
>> I hadn’t even been told that people were being hired, nor was I invited to sit in on interviews—though I was the most qualified to discern candidates’ qualifications and experience.
This has become one of my favorite things to do with my experience, and I've helped hire some great people. To keep him out of this process was a terrible decision.
I don't think it was age discrimination so much as politics and empire building.
There is also a tech-bro factor at play here. I saw this while working at a supplier to another Elon company. They get these 23 year-olds that think they can do anything (them getting hired by XYZ Corp is proof right?) and then they do silly things or don't understand the basics. Hey but when they eventually figure stuff out they can claim a few miles range improvement on that car as their own fabulous innovation!
I too don't understand it. Even reading just his side of the story it seems obvious that he got caught in a power struggle between SpaceX and Starlink. A struggle he lost and apparently a struggle he never knew he was in.
I also don't think he has the right attitude for a principle engineer. Junior engineers don't "take over" your roles. They take on the easy parts of projects so that you can focus on the hard stuff. Part of being a senior engineer is training and enabling more junior engineers. A huge part of his job is to eliminate the "bus factor".
That was my original thought as well. But as the article went on, it was made clear that he wasn't part of the process of creating a team where he can delegate. He was later told he wasn't in a management-track position, which seems at odds with the idea that they wanted him to be leading a team of junior engineers.
He has a right attitude. Top management is clearly failing at the job of being respectful and reasonable manager for him, so he should fire that management. And let them fail.
> probably illegal in numerous countries which are not the USA.
As described, it’s probably illegal in the US too. Hence mentioning the notifications to HR.
There is a difference between increasing your bus factor (which is a thing) and age discrimination. Yes, you mentor new recruits, but you’re also part of hiring them. You’re running the team, not getting parts of your job reassigned until there is nothing left.
Yes, this could have happened ultimately been a person caught between a warring Starlink vs SpaceX — but from an employment point of view, I’m not sure it matters.
The right solution is to hire some more people, with input from the critical employee, and have them gradually learn the ropes. And keep the key employees!
One of the most un-intuitive rules of leadership is that you have to make yourself replaceable.
My bosses all know because I always tell them, “if I get hit by a bus, put A in charge of X, promote B to Y, give C to Z”.
On every major project you need at least one ambitious junior engineer who’s been identified as having leadership potential shadowing you and learning the business inside out, who aspires to your job.
If you’re doing cool work these assignments are more valuable than gold to the young people, and they earn you a lifetime of friendship, loyalty and appreciation from them and their managers.
This is how you get to retire in old age as a beloved, valued individual contributor.
If you ignore the leadership part of being a principal engineer and don’t do this, others will do it for you at the worst possible time and you will get fucked.
I think the sticky wicket here is that the author did not feel like they were part of the succession planning and were somewhat blindsided by it.
I agree he probably should have been proactive in making sure someone can step in his role. But also his management should have kept him in the loop and, ideally, playing a fundamental role in selecting his successors. None of that seemed to happen, so it seemed like bad leadership all around.
Maybe. I always take these stories with a grain of salt. The author demonstrates a lot of emotion in his post, so it's hard to know the truth with only one side of the story.
My long-time mentor had a spin on the idea: "The day you start a new role/job/position, look for and start training your replacement".
The core notion is similar: it's not good for you OR your team/company/client, if you are a single-point-of-failure, irreplaceable contributor. And my mentor's spin puts a "selfish" take on it which allows some people to ingest it better - you'll never be able to take the next opportunity, if you have not left behind a working system for your current role.
note: none of this is to say that ageism doesn't exist or that toxic / misguided work cultures don't exist. By all accounts, I would not personally want to work in an Elon Musk company, though I understand those that do. But if I have a super-high performer who is THE ONLY person who can move the needle on a number of high-value projects and is working 70hrs a week to accomplish that... that is a MASSIVE risk to the team and company, and needs to be addressed somehow.
John is a crazy good optical engineer if even 10% of what he says is true. You want a 10x optical engineer, you've found him.
Getting a full metrology lab up and running from scratch in under 7 years would make most R1 professors proud. To do so in under 2 years at a commercial lab is actually amazing.
To then build the relationships up with Thorlabs/Edmunds/Ziess is also pretty amazing. I've tried working with all three of their sales reps before. It's like pulling teeth! And that's with bio-optics. Let alone all the crazy regs and laws that would go along with space-based optics at scale. This is very seriously very impressive!
The bit about having a 20-something shadow him for 2 weeks to 'learn metrology' actually made me laugh out loud. To give the SWEs here an idea, it would be like having an 8 year old try to 'learn Linux' in 2 weeks. Whoever told the kid to try to do that is also so out of their depth that they should be fired too. Metrology, especially optical metrology, is a lifetime of learning and work. Even then, you're still mostly winging it into your 60s.
Optics is Captial-H Hard. It's one of the three domains of physics that smart people never touch, and only fools try to make a living out of (the other two being acoustics and fluids). You can spend a lifetime trying to get alignment on a set of elements or you can get lucky and do it in a few hours. I cannot stress enough how difficult non-theoreticl optics is.
Also, take a note here. By the end, SpaceX is trying to get 5-6 people to do the job of just one somewhat older person. Like, even they think the guy is at least a 5x engineer.
This is a reminder to always figure out the game in an organization and play that game. Don't blindly assume that if you do a good job, you will be safe. You might not like politics, but politics is, unfortunately, a natural part of any organization.
This is a good way to build a questionable reputation.
I’d rather be known as a person who sticks to my principles and strives to do good work than someone who molds myself into whatever shape is necessary to succeed.
This isn’t to say that one should be blind to political realities, but to actively participate is to perpetuate the problems at best, and to destroy one’s reputation at worst.
These environments need people who challenge the bullshit. And in tech, we’re pretty privileged in that it’s generally going to be possible to find something else if necessary.
As someone who has stuck to their principles and had their reputation destroyed by someone else more willing to mold themselves into whatever shape is necessary to succeed, I would submit that yours is a losing proposition. Integrity is not a virtue anybody respects these days.
The parent had it right. Times change. Values change. Adapt or die. Don't end up like me.
I used to feel the same way, but I don't think the idea is to abandon all your values in pursuit of success. Instead it's to figure out the system you're entering into and how to operate within it, what values of your may have to change or at least be suspended, and what new values you might have to adopt to function. You have to figure out the motivations that move the organization forward, what shadow power structures exist (because trust me, they do), and how to accomplish your job within the political and interpersonal "game" that's already in motion by the time you join. And from someone who has worked in orgs as small as 5 people up to Apple's 80k+ behemoth, one has to do this no matter the organization size.
Of course, if doing so requires you to abandon some of your core values, then perhaps that organization or job isn't a good fit for you anyhow. :)
Having a junior engineer show up to "shadow" you and you've got them filing an HR complaint minutes later is not a commendable trait.
It's a total dick move to rope them into your problem. They (presumably) have nothing to do with any of the politics or age discrimination that might be going on. They're just some young engineer that got something like their dream job and (presumably) want to learn from a principal engineer with decades of experience. Teach them what you know and don't make your problem their problem.
More importantly, it's just unwise. They received a very important piece of information and reacted instead of taking some time to think about the best course of action. Reacting in a way that causes the junior engineer to report it to HR sets off a chain of events that may not be in your interest.
Because drum roll.... HR is not your friend. Their role in this scenario is to protect the company. And the easiest way to protect the company is to root out the malcontent in a way that doesn't get them sued. Especially in this sort of scenario where someone with political capital in the organization is gunning for you. Reaching out to the CEO just sealed his fate.
It's not a matter of principles or doing good work. It's having a basic understanding of how an organization works and acting in a way that will maximize your and/or the companies well being.
> sticks to my principles and strives to do good work
There is a line between challenging bullshit and baseless obstinacy. Every firm is replete with brilliant engineers with whom nobody wants to work, or nobody hears about, and thus who go nowhere, and whose ideas go nowhere. You shouldn’t do anything immoral. But disregarding how a firm communicates aims and values, the essence of politics, is debilitating at best.
I get the feeling reading this that it wasnt exclusively about age - there was probably an additional political component that happened behind his back.
Maybe he didn't kiss the right ring or he inadvertently made someone powerful but incompetent look bad in a meeting or something.
This story is gross and not entirely surprising. It is unclear to me why anyone would stick around inside the other Musk co. @twitter that wasn't bound by H1B handcuffs.
The upside in that company is really not there...at least at SpaceX you get to build the future.
It's the US, there are no worker rights but there is this dumb ubiquitous storytelling about billionaires who became rich only because they are smarter and more virtuous than everyone else.
Unfortunately some people will need to suffer a depression or something before they realize they need to focus on their own needs and their own life rather than work 10-12 hours a day seven days a week (my god!) to satisfy someone else's ego.
Could be the changing job market, Musk knows it. If this was the job market like a year or six months ago, Musk would had kept his mouth shut. Elon comes across extremely opportunistic, which is not surprising but he comes across opportunistic in a cruel way. Something that wider group of people should realize and take appropriate steps
I recently worked for a startup where I consistently out-performed software engineers who were decades younger than me. I was often asked to finish other engineer’s assignments when they got stuck, and to find and fix difficult bugs from other teams. After several years working there, during a favorable performance review, I suggested to the director of software that I could help the company more if he would give me more authority. His response : “You are too old for me to promote”. I quit shortly after. A couple of months after I left my boss was fired, because he didn’t accomplish one task after I left.
I read the article and it's clear to me that he was mistreated. The last example you reference, however, is still true.
> This may be unpopular to some here, but it is dangerous to let one man run a substantial part of the company's operations.
A company can't have so much knowledge critical to operations tied up in the mind of one individual. The "retire or die" comment was crass but it applies regardless of age.
It's irresponsible to allow a situation to continue in which the departure of a single individual would completely derail a project for months.
Readit News
The fact they had an expert working 10 hours a day 7 days a week apparently was not enough. They have to be in their twenties to get the real "techbro" badge.
I have a strong belief that technical skills aren't as important as the ability to be a suck-up in most mega-corps. You can easily buy a suck-up offering graduates a six-figure salary. It's like VPs are building their own personal armies not to get ousted by the other feudal lords.
This can be very hard on engineers that were previous the go-to person for a key area. The person and product was successful so the ask to delegate and dilute ownership seems completely illogical. Some ICs don't want to give this up and so they switch from IC to management for the wrong reasons, leading to a manager that isn't really interested in management and is reluctant to delegate and enable the team.
I've seen this occur many times and it's always painful. Starlink is now large enough that it's a huge risk to have a single key person responsible for optics.
Hasn't it always been this way at organizations, tech or not? Not even suck ups but people that don't cause a stir, keep their heads down, yes men to whatever the manager asks, etc.
Personally, I've seen it in action in a workplace where everyone "loves" so and so. That person would put on a good face and tell them how "amazing" everything was in every interaction. Behind their backs, that definitely wouldn't be the dialogue.
>You can easily buy a suck-up offering graduates a six-figure salary.
Or less. A name brand, prestige title, or industry. When I worked in visual effects, it's enough to get your name at the end of a movie to justify working 80-90 hour weeks. Video game peeps had it worse and you don't even see their names on a big screen.
>It's like VPs are building their own personal armies not to get ousted by the other feudal lords.
This is pretty visible in transitions right? New manager comes in, people loyal to old ones start melting away to different groups or leave to either join old manager or go somewhere else. The new manager brings in people they know and trust.
It's how we all benefit from weak ties.
It is like high school, it is like politics, it is like any group of humans interacting. You skills are part of the equation, but your people skills are as well.
It's the people who can go with the flow that stick around long term and actually have a meaningful impact on the success of the company. It's very easy to get caught up and think everyone is against you and burn out.
I design medical devices, same thing.
Its OK for people to take time off for things like back surgury, and people should be able to expect they get their job back when they recuperate. The business processes' should be setup such that the business can accomidate this kind of thing, its the cost of doing business. Anything less is just lazy and cheap management and leadership.
That being said, they way he has been treated is absolutely infuriating and probably illegal in numerous countries which are not the USA.
They way SpaceX went about this as outlined in TFA is absolutely not the way to do it. This guy had no input in the process at all, even from the outset or the hiring, and they didn't even report to him!
"Aging out" has been a huge problem in the Silicon Valley for decades, for example.
This is probably only making any news because it's SpaceX.
>> I hadn’t even been told that people were being hired, nor was I invited to sit in on interviews—though I was the most qualified to discern candidates’ qualifications and experience.
This has become one of my favorite things to do with my experience, and I've helped hire some great people. To keep him out of this process was a terrible decision.
I don't think it was age discrimination so much as politics and empire building.
There is also a tech-bro factor at play here. I saw this while working at a supplier to another Elon company. They get these 23 year-olds that think they can do anything (them getting hired by XYZ Corp is proof right?) and then they do silly things or don't understand the basics. Hey but when they eventually figure stuff out they can claim a few miles range improvement on that car as their own fabulous innovation!
I also don't think he has the right attitude for a principle engineer. Junior engineers don't "take over" your roles. They take on the easy parts of projects so that you can focus on the hard stuff. Part of being a senior engineer is training and enabling more junior engineers. A huge part of his job is to eliminate the "bus factor".
That was my take away as well - and again, not to mention the fact that we're getting a one-sided accounting of the facts.
As described, it’s probably illegal in the US too. Hence mentioning the notifications to HR.
There is a difference between increasing your bus factor (which is a thing) and age discrimination. Yes, you mentor new recruits, but you’re also part of hiring them. You’re running the team, not getting parts of your job reassigned until there is nothing left.
Yes, this could have happened ultimately been a person caught between a warring Starlink vs SpaceX — but from an employment point of view, I’m not sure it matters.
My bosses all know because I always tell them, “if I get hit by a bus, put A in charge of X, promote B to Y, give C to Z”.
On every major project you need at least one ambitious junior engineer who’s been identified as having leadership potential shadowing you and learning the business inside out, who aspires to your job.
If you’re doing cool work these assignments are more valuable than gold to the young people, and they earn you a lifetime of friendship, loyalty and appreciation from them and their managers.
This is how you get to retire in old age as a beloved, valued individual contributor.
If you ignore the leadership part of being a principal engineer and don’t do this, others will do it for you at the worst possible time and you will get fucked.
I agree he probably should have been proactive in making sure someone can step in his role. But also his management should have kept him in the loop and, ideally, playing a fundamental role in selecting his successors. None of that seemed to happen, so it seemed like bad leadership all around.
The core notion is similar: it's not good for you OR your team/company/client, if you are a single-point-of-failure, irreplaceable contributor. And my mentor's spin puts a "selfish" take on it which allows some people to ingest it better - you'll never be able to take the next opportunity, if you have not left behind a working system for your current role.
note: none of this is to say that ageism doesn't exist or that toxic / misguided work cultures don't exist. By all accounts, I would not personally want to work in an Elon Musk company, though I understand those that do. But if I have a super-high performer who is THE ONLY person who can move the needle on a number of high-value projects and is working 70hrs a week to accomplish that... that is a MASSIVE risk to the team and company, and needs to be addressed somehow.
It's called succession planning. You can't go anywhere unless you have people who can do your job when you leave.
Or when you want a 5 week holiday. It’s all very well having a nice leave allocation, but you have to be able to use it.
John is a crazy good optical engineer if even 10% of what he says is true. You want a 10x optical engineer, you've found him.
Getting a full metrology lab up and running from scratch in under 7 years would make most R1 professors proud. To do so in under 2 years at a commercial lab is actually amazing.
To then build the relationships up with Thorlabs/Edmunds/Ziess is also pretty amazing. I've tried working with all three of their sales reps before. It's like pulling teeth! And that's with bio-optics. Let alone all the crazy regs and laws that would go along with space-based optics at scale. This is very seriously very impressive!
The bit about having a 20-something shadow him for 2 weeks to 'learn metrology' actually made me laugh out loud. To give the SWEs here an idea, it would be like having an 8 year old try to 'learn Linux' in 2 weeks. Whoever told the kid to try to do that is also so out of their depth that they should be fired too. Metrology, especially optical metrology, is a lifetime of learning and work. Even then, you're still mostly winging it into your 60s.
Optics is Captial-H Hard. It's one of the three domains of physics that smart people never touch, and only fools try to make a living out of (the other two being acoustics and fluids). You can spend a lifetime trying to get alignment on a set of elements or you can get lucky and do it in a few hours. I cannot stress enough how difficult non-theoreticl optics is.
Also, take a note here. By the end, SpaceX is trying to get 5-6 people to do the job of just one somewhat older person. Like, even they think the guy is at least a 5x engineer.
Like, this guy is amazing at optics.
Hire him
I’d rather be known as a person who sticks to my principles and strives to do good work than someone who molds myself into whatever shape is necessary to succeed.
This isn’t to say that one should be blind to political realities, but to actively participate is to perpetuate the problems at best, and to destroy one’s reputation at worst.
These environments need people who challenge the bullshit. And in tech, we’re pretty privileged in that it’s generally going to be possible to find something else if necessary.
The parent had it right. Times change. Values change. Adapt or die. Don't end up like me.
Of course, if doing so requires you to abandon some of your core values, then perhaps that organization or job isn't a good fit for you anyhow. :)
It's a total dick move to rope them into your problem. They (presumably) have nothing to do with any of the politics or age discrimination that might be going on. They're just some young engineer that got something like their dream job and (presumably) want to learn from a principal engineer with decades of experience. Teach them what you know and don't make your problem their problem.
More importantly, it's just unwise. They received a very important piece of information and reacted instead of taking some time to think about the best course of action. Reacting in a way that causes the junior engineer to report it to HR sets off a chain of events that may not be in your interest.
Because drum roll.... HR is not your friend. Their role in this scenario is to protect the company. And the easiest way to protect the company is to root out the malcontent in a way that doesn't get them sued. Especially in this sort of scenario where someone with political capital in the organization is gunning for you. Reaching out to the CEO just sealed his fate.
It's not a matter of principles or doing good work. It's having a basic understanding of how an organization works and acting in a way that will maximize your and/or the companies well being.
There is a line between challenging bullshit and baseless obstinacy. Every firm is replete with brilliant engineers with whom nobody wants to work, or nobody hears about, and thus who go nowhere, and whose ideas go nowhere. You shouldn’t do anything immoral. But disregarding how a firm communicates aims and values, the essence of politics, is debilitating at best.
Maybe he didn't kiss the right ring or he inadvertently made someone powerful but incompetent look bad in a meeting or something.
Your values may not align with another group values, or its state (good groups can rot). Always, always observe and adjust.
Deleted Comment
The upside in that company is really not there...at least at SpaceX you get to build the future.
Unfortunately some people will need to suffer a depression or something before they realize they need to focus on their own needs and their own life rather than work 10-12 hours a day seven days a week (my god!) to satisfy someone else's ego.
That work is too important to leave in one set of hands, in case their CEO dies or loses his marbles.
Edit -- case in point:
> SpaceX is one one those sink or swim places filled with type A personalities. You need to be ‘useful’
> He should of been less concerned with his position and more of a team player.
> This may be unpopular to some here, but it is dangerous to let one man run a substantial part of the company's operations.
> This may be unpopular to some here, but it is dangerous to let one man run a substantial part of the company's operations.
A company can't have so much knowledge critical to operations tied up in the mind of one individual. The "retire or die" comment was crass but it applies regardless of age.
It's irresponsible to allow a situation to continue in which the departure of a single individual would completely derail a project for months.
I might die tomorrow, i'm 35.
I might retire at the end of the week if my lottery ticket hits the jackpot. I might just leave the company.