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by Arrath 1290 days ago
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!
2 comments
jrnichols 1290 days ago
Thing is, this is the way that many companies go about it and they have done so for years.

"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.

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Arrath 1290 days ago
That seems like such a terrible way to do it, rife to breed resentment and malicious compliance, and let things fall through the cracks.

When I was involved in a bus problem situation, management came to me and said they were concerned about my workload, the hours I was putting in, and the lack of redundancy my position.

What followed was a 6-month process where I was heavily involved in each step, from scoping out the initial additions to the org chart, writing up job descriptions and expectations, application review and interviews, down to onboarding and training of my new team members. In essence we stood up a new division of what had previously been my one-man show, and I now managed two engineers and an admin assistant to get all the work done. It was, all in all, a marvelous process and I am proud of the team I trained. I got my saturdays back, too.

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q1w2 1290 days ago
> This is probably only making any news because it's SpaceX.

Agreed - This is just getting upvoted for the anti-Musk trendiness.

It's also important to note that we're only getting one side of the story here. It's entirely possible that they directly asked him to train other people on what he's doing and that he was uncooperative. Who knows - one-sided stories are one-sided.

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bottlepalm 1290 days ago
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.
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