[andyjohnson0]

I'm not the person you replied to, but I'm struck by two things about that Reddit post. First, all but one of the quoted people who are engineers [1], are also Musk's subordinates. And second, there are suspiciously few (as in zero) dissenters listed.

I've no doubt Musk can talk convincingly about engines or whatever, and maybe even about physics, but I don't think he could function as a professional engineer. I'm just not getting the impression that he has much depth.

[1] discounting Carmack who is brilliant but is a different kind of engineer

[darawk]

Carmack is widely considered one of the greatest software engineers ever, and knows Musk well. Either he's outright lying to make his friend look good, or I'll take his opinion over basically anyone. He certainly isn't Musk's "subordinate" in any meaningful sense.

Even when Carmack was Zuckerberg's "subordinate" he was independently wealthy and could do whatever the fuck he wanted, and has been for a long time. You didn't see him going around, even then, talking up Zuckerberg's engineering chops. Despite the fact that we know Zuck did in fact write a lot of the early code for FB.

Carmack is also not a "different kind of engineer". Guy is primarily famous for his software, but he had a rocket company of his own, ran Meta's VR labs which involved quite a bit of hardware, etc.

[Zetice]

All due respect to John, but what the hell qualifies him to classify Elon as an engineer of rockets?

I trust John Carmack in his wheelhouse, but without knowing him better I wouldn’t trust him to fix my car or recommend a beer, just because he’s prolifically qualified at building and shipping software.

I would even argue his recent work on VR for Facebook makes me question if he’s still “got it”, considering how wildly that seems to have flopped.

I’m excited to see what he does with his new AI startup, but let’s not canonize the man.

[AlchemistCamp]

Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace landed rockets vertically, years before SpaceX did (albeit much smaller ones). He built the company as a hobbyist labor of love and it won NASA's Lunar Lander Challenge in 2008.

Carmack is absolutely qualified to talk about aerospace engineering. He also knows quite a bit about cars, FWIW.

[tomjakubowski]

At risk of creating a circular discussion, how much rocket engineering was Carmack doing at Armadillo?

[darawk]

I think the point is: There is a long list of legendary engineers in various domains who've worked with Elon and attest to his engineering talent and technical contributions to the companies he's founded.

Where is the list of legendary engineers who've worked with him who say the opposite? Seriously, even one example would be interesting to me. I'm not aware of any.

[Zetice]

A) it's not a long list and B) it can be career limiting to speak poorly of anyone, so I don't think "no engineer has said bad things about him" is a fair assessment.

I dunno how many rooms with people like Elon you've been in, but people heap praise on people like that; it's free for them to do, and makes the Elon-type feel good about themselves, which materially impacts how much money those praisers have access to.

Once you get into the rank and file engineers, where the folks have a lot less to lose by speaking their mind, the praise has been much harder to come by, and you have incidents like at Twitter, where engineers called out Musk's apparent inability to comprehend Twitter's architecture, resulting in at least one heated exchange during a Twitter spaces chat.

I trust the celebrity engineers less than I trust the nameless engineers, at least when it comes to matters of PR.

Also, not for nothing, but if you haven't seen any negative comments about Elon from "celeb" engineers, you should probably look up the stuff Woz has said about Elon, it's not all positive, at all.

[Zetice]

Did not know that! Maybe you're right about Carmack, but I'm still skeptical of Elon.

[darawk]

As other commenters have pointed out, Carmack founded a rocket company before Elon did. So he has plenty right to speak to Elon's credibility on the question of rockets. But let's not forget that Tom Mueller at JPL was also on the list that praised Elon's engineering abilities, and I'm not sure how much more rocket credibility you can get. And more to the point, I didn't say Carmack was some kind of absolute arbiter of truth here. The baseline isn't God.

The baseline is the median HN commenter. And Carmack's opinion carries infinitely more weight than that. I would argue it carries substantially more weight than the 99th percentile HN commenter.

The point is: All of the people who have worked directly with him and are also famous for their engineering talent in various domains respect him. I'm literally not aware of a single example in the opposite category. And I'll take the opinion of widely respected engineers who've worked with the guy over the commentariat on an internet forum any day.

[deburo]

You're basing this opinion on nothing but gut feeling.

[andyjohnson0]

We all are. Like everyone else here, I haven't met the guy. Have you?