Perhaps they were looking for at least 10 years of Swift experience and were disappointed to learn he only had 7.

It’s funny because it’s true

Well, his time at Tesla was basically (publicly, IIRC) determined to be a bad fit between him and the company, so can't really fault him there. So since his long tenure at Apple he had a misstep at Tesla and a shortish, but certainly reasonable, length at Google. Would definitely not call that job hopping.

> determined to be a bad fit between him and the company

How so?

Edit: Jesus it was a legitimate question, why the downvotes?

He's a talented computer language architect but really had no place leading a machine learning heavy team, huge waste of everyone's time and money.

This was a Tesla hiring mistake. You get an expert in a field, you can't just shove a guy whos good at one thing and expect him to excel in another.

Andrej Karpathy basically threw everything out once he replaced Latner.

You seem to have the impression that a machine learning model is all you need to drive the car: this isn't true. There is a lot of real-time system programming and overall architecture.

> Andrej Karpathy basically threw everything out once he replaced Latner.

What are you basing this on? I don't believe there is any truth to this. First Chris was not replaced by Andrej but by Jim Keller and then Stuart Bowers. Andrej is amazing in his field and has done impressive things at Tesla, but he is managing the ML part of the org, which was a relatively small portion of the Autopilot Software group overall.

Lattner initially elaborated on his departure from Tesla on his website but later removed many of the details.

IIRC, he and Elon had some disagreements on software things.

"Never write software for a hardware company."

Is there link to archive of the original post ?

It looks like Chris understandably removed that version of Resume.html from web.archive.org.

Do a DuckDuckGo search for "lattner elon musk" and you'll find the info you are looking for. There was significant media coverage at the time.

That doesn’t really answer the question. “Not a good fit” is a bit of a euphemism in the industry - it typically is a polite way of saying “I didn’t get along with the CEO/CTO/leadership because X, Y, and Z” - and that’s what GP (and myself) are looking for. I doubt we’ll get an answer anytime soon - he’s a classy guy and probably still under NDA with Tesla.

With the benefit of hindsight, I'm really happy both that I joined Tesla and also that I left it. I have no regrets at all.

I learned a lot while I was there, but Elon and I had different opinions about some things. It was clear that he wasn't going to bend or change, and those points were important to me.

I have some principles that are extremely important to me, and if they aren't aligning, then it is best to acknowledge that and do something about it, than deny it and be frustrated or unhappy.

E is a force of nature -- for better and worse :-). I'm glad we have someone like him in the world, but that doesn't mean I want to be directly involved.

Any lessons on sticking to principles and how to make sure they align going into a project/role? I imagine it's hard to so preemptively rather than when push comes to shove.

It doesn’t really matter - he’s no longer there and I’m sure much happier because of it. There are a lot of irrational things management can come up with. Sometimes the manager in particular is a sociopath or narcissist. Or maybe you unknowingly offended them in some way. At that point there’s no reason to stay, regardless of the reason.

His credentials put him in high demand. Due to this, he has the luxury of changing jobs in order to find his fit. Jumping can dampen the demand at some point, but it hasn't for now.

I wouldn't read anything else into it.

2.5 years is short now? Pretty sure that’s longer than Google’s median tenure.

I don't think it's the absolute length of time, but rather the fact that the projects he was spearheading (Swift for Tensorflow/MLIR) are nowhere near production-ready (or at least they weren't the last time I checked).

2.5 years seems a very short amount of time to develop, launch and push adoption for low-level PL tooling (in an ecosystem that's not mature, but at least is reasonably developed). I would expect 5 years at a minimum.

I'm assuming they'll just die on the vine now?

MLIR has moved to the LLVM Foundation. Really solid project with a huge amount of momentum behind it.

I would assume the Swift/Tensorflow stuff will die, it was more of a thought experiment anyway…

Ah, I wasn't aware that MLIR was now under LLVM. I'm not heavily involved with the LLVM Foundation but the whole project seems to be stable and well run, so that makes me feel more comfortable about the future of MLIR.

Not true. My experience is that no body respects a developer staying in a company(excluding faang) over 5 years max. It is looked as incompetent.

Well, I mean Lattner was at the G in FAANG :)

For that level, I would consider it short - no?

For startups no, for classical jobs, at least here in Europe, yeah.

Depends what skills you have and how hot your market is. I know some people in big metro areas like London or Bucharest switching every year without problem as their skills are in high demand.

In German speaking countries that kind of job hoping isn't well seen, at all.

Anyone switching after an year means they barely made it after the six months probation time, so many employers will think twice about hiring them, unless they are in pressure to hire someone.

German speaking countries(apart from Switzerland) also don't pay their developers particularly well either as unlike US/UK/Eastern Europe they artificially cap salaries instead of letting the market dictate so of course they don't like people switching jobs as they have to pay more to stay competitive, even managing to convince their developers that €80k is a top salary while their counterparts in Warsaw and Bucharest make that or even more. German/Austrian devs are severely underpaid.

Also, unlike UK/US, they have this nasty habbit of not mentioning their salary range/hiring budget in job ads to low ball you during negotiations.

Well 80K can get you pretty far in Berlin, as opposed to SF. Rent is probably cheaper than Warsaw too.

Which companies in Bucharest or Warsaw pay 80.000€? Most companies in the entire EU don't pay that.

Swiss/London/NY based banks and finance companies.

80K is pocket change compared to what they would have to pay in their home markets for experienced devs.

Not many outside of finance though..

I look at it the other way around. They're probably talented enough to make it past probation, so their leaving was them deciding to leave, rather than not making it. That is, any investment you make in them, giving them slack to get up to speed in a codebase, you'll lose because they don't stick around.

He was also at Tesla for something like 6 months, I think.

I think the reason people wonder is that Lattner was at Apple for more than 10 years, so 2.5 years DOES look short.

I interpreted him going to Google as a place to learn a few new things while figuring out what to do next. He’s done some big stuff in the past. But even people like him need time to figure out what to tackle next.

Anyone who has been following his projects knows that 2.5 years is too little a time for the problems he set out to solve and the projects he was leading (esp. with TensorFlow, MLIR, TF runtime, TPUs). So this is really a very early, abrupt and surprising exit, and several people both inside/outside know that he ran into political issues/struggles with high-level folks. Fortunately, one of the projects (MLIR) is already part of LLVM and will remain unaffected, but looks like S4TF may just die out irrespective of what's being said. Otherwise, we may not hear much on the details given his "seemingly" reasonable length stint at Google.

He seems like the kind of developer that needs a real challenge to work on. When things shift into maintenance mode, he gets bored. That’s my take anyway. He’s a brilliant programmer. I’m glad to hear that he’s working on something really interesting.

I would avoid binning people into builders or maintainers, there are many more issues that could prompt one to leave Tesla and Google, eg: Work environment or ethical issues.