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.