Quote:
Originally Posted by unterhausen
I saw a description of a lot of development efforts, including FSD: "we didn't start working on this because we knew how to do it, we started working on it because we thought it was easy." That's also why there have been so many failed startups that thought they could make a bicycle power meter.
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I don't know where that description came from but there is a balance in high tech R&D.
You need a certain amount of that "it's easy" attitude to actually have the audacity to attack problems and have a chance of success. People with that attitude tend to have success in early stage startups.
But IME later on as a product matures and gets more complex that has to moderate, because the "it's easy" attitude often leads to oversimplified designs/approaches that break down or don't scale as time goes on.
But you can go too far the other way, and you see this with overly conservative attitudes as companies get bigger and more entrenched. Then you get people who are constantly telling management everything is "hard" and inflating estimates and over engineering everything. It leads to paralysis by analysis instead of "just do it".
But Tesla really does seem to be going off the rails at this point. Something is really weird, and it seems Musk is way too motivated to get his gigantic compensation package even if he damages the company. In the past he seemed to throw himself in and sacrifice himself, now it seems it's all about him.
You see some of the jumps other manufacturers are making and Tesla really seems to be losing it's early lead. And as soon as they lose that, their other quirks start to be less forgiveable (e.x build quality, difficulty getting repairs, weird UI, FSD issues.)
Some of this "it's easy" arrogance is vaguely similar to mental traits elite athletes need to have.