i can only speak to the early days (joined around 11 folks), but the engineers then were top tier and hungry to build cool shit. A few years later (as an outsider) seemed innovation had slowed substantially. i still know there are great folks there, but has felt like HashiCorp’s focus lately has been packaging up all their tools into a cohesive all-in-one solution (this was actually Atlas in the early days) and figuring out their story around service lifecycle with experiments like Waypoint (Otto in the early days). IBM acquisition is likely best outcome.
Isn't that how it always is as any company matures? In a big company, you don't need just 5-star devs. You also need a 3-star devs (and even 2-star devs) that work 9 to 3:30 (and maybe do emails/slack between 3:30 - 4; bonus points if they study from 4 to 5). You need people that can take basic requirements and turn them into code that your 5-star devs are too bored to write. You need people who look at customer bugs, can do debugging and submit a patch to fix a corner case your 5-star dev didn't think about 4 years when they were hopped up on caffeine, hopes and dreams.
2. Because being a CEO of a public company comes with a lot of rules around disclosure of material public information and equal access. It takes a special kind of person to disregard general consel and just shitpost on twitter with zero review while directly responsible to shareholders. I don't know what kind of safe harbor Elon thinks Twitter offers but I doubt it applies to Github code review.
If I was to guess, he wants to write code and he started the company so he could write code. He just had to do those jobs along the way to get to the point where he could just focus on writing code and solving problems.
CEO of a publicly traded company is a vastly different job than CEO of a private startup. Your job is to make money for shareholders, not pursue a vision. It's not something everyone wants to do and is likely a lot less rewarding for someone who successfully creates a technology company.
