JRE Clips
1 HN recommender · recommended in 7 months, 2020–2023
11:57 · 5.6M views · Feb 7, 2020
A 12-minute clip from Joe Rogan's podcast in which former NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman describes working for Elon Musk at SpaceX. He discusses Musk's engineering breadth, his Mars-focused decision making and the stress of the job.
HN uses it as a firsthand account from an astronaut who worked with Musk, cited in arguments about Musk's engineering ability and SpaceX culture.
7 comments from Hacker News
He does not like the Howard Hughes comparison. He wants his inventions to actually change the way thins are done in everyday live. Watch this interview with a former Astronaut who worked with SpaceX for Crew Dragon. He made this comparison on TV and talked about it with Musk: this video Quite a funny story.
Admittedly, no. But, in addition to that, he has a Physics degree from UPenn and was accepted to a PhD program in MechE at Stanford, was co-founder of X.com, is Chief Engineer at SpaceX, and has some of the most respected people in their respective fields (some of whom have worked closely with him) vouch for his engineering chops (Andrej Karpathy[0], John Karmack[1], Gareth Reisman[2], an astronaut and Professor of Astronautics Practice at USC, Jim Keller[3]). Unless you present your engineering qualifications that are of equivalent credibility as that of the aforementioned people, as well as present evidence that you've worked with him as closely with Elon Musk as some of these folks have, I'll stick with my conclusion that, yes, he's indubitably an engineer. [0]: [LINK] [1]: [LINK] [2]: this video , [LINK] [3] [LINK]
Astronaut Garrett Reisman worked for 7 years there and is on record stating that is all the stress he could handle.[1]: Jim Keller has a history of joining a company to start a project and then leaving once it is complete. He did this multiple times in his career and was with Tesla until they completed the self driving computer. He has also left behind a team of stellar well known people. I am not too sure about Andrej Karpathy. I dont know if we have enough of a history to know when he chooses to join and leave companies. There must be a lot of lower level engineers who have to be developing all these amazing subsystems in the car and other products. Wonder what the turn over is for the really skilled people. Maybe the truly burnt out people or just stragglers are the ones you are encountering. [1]: this video
You’re referring to the interview by Joe Rogan w/ Garrett Reisman [1], and what you wrote was not what was said. What was said was that every major decision taken at SpaceX was gauged by whether or not it brought humanity closer to self-sustainable life on Mars. Besides, why presume to know better? Don’t you think he already knows it’s added responsibility? Of course he does. Musk knows how to properly allocate his time, and how to delegate the task of handling Twitter to someone else. His involvement in ventures like OpenAI and Neuralink never stopped Tesla or SpaceX from accomplishing anything, so why start worrying now? [1] this video
That remembers me Joe Rogan's "What is it Like to Work for Elon Musk?" [1] When Garrett Reisman who previously worked with Elon says: He's a very that BROAD engineer and can talk at the same table with their top engineer employees. So totally discrediting the blog post. I think it's actually the last refuge of the "title" mindset. Engineers solve problems using engineering principles; period. If you have a Engineer's degree, PhD or you build pyramids it doesn't matter. [1]: this video