He's an extraordinarily bright guy. He can get a lot more done in two years than most people, and he can get up to speed with a new organization and a new task and be productive much faster than most people.

My impression with no inside knowledge, but understanding what Elon companies are like, is that he was assigned essentially an impossible task at Tesla and tried his very best, but it could not be done, and he semi-burned out. It makes sense for him to be getting back on the horse now.

The Elon approach to management as I see it is to assign what normally would be totally unreasonable goals to a small group of extremely bright people, and they work their asses off and somehow find a way. Sometimes this works, and sometimes it doesn't. If it works and the impossible was in fact, just barely possible, you dominate the market, everyone gets rich, and the people see it as the most exciting, intense, and rewarding part of their career. If it doesn't, they get depressed, divorced, and looking for other work. The Elon magic is threading the needle closely enough that a lot of the seemingly impossible things are in fact possible with enough hard work and brainpower, but although Elon is extremely good at this, the nature of the thing is that you can't predict which side you'll wind up on fully accurately.

That seems like the opposite. Why would someone with high market value stay in one place? 2 years is basically optimal - you vest 50%, maybe collect a promotion, do some good work and learn a lot, and then get to move on for another solid bump/ promotion and a new set of stocks.

I expect the people with low market value to be the ones sticking around labs for long periods of time, they don't have the option to move and they aren't getting poached.

> And 2 years is probably pretty average for the whole tech industry.

Yes, and it is a problem

> maybe for a fungible CRUD engineer

And there's the cause.

We're in a meat grinder, and there is no $100M payout in sight for most of us

I mean just because OP wanted to "ignore" that he was at Tesla for 5 years, he was... still at Tesla for 5 years.

2-3 years is pretty average tenure inside the EU tech sector for the past few years [1], but regardless I don't know what that tells us, given that nothing else about this is average. The sample size of Andrej-sized talent in an ongoing tech revolution of epic proportions is just very small.

[1] https://ravio.com/blog/employee-tenure-trends

While I absolutely confirm that everything you said is true, it’s interesting that that call would be illegal in many European countries. And in many more you would at best get a „I can confirm this person worked on this position in this timeframe“

Europe is not a monolith. Lots of short stints is not unusual in London.

And we have the stock market to show for it.

Andrej Karpathy is from Europe (Slovakia).

Europe’s labor market is sadly still mostly out of touch with how startups work. It’s stuck in the last century. I’m not sure if this is due to tradition, or due to the fact that startups are much harder to start in Europe in general, so people on both sides of the hiring process have less experience with it.

Two years is more than long enough to join a startup, build 3 things, and see that your equity is never going to be worth anything, and find a new job. This isn’t anomalous or weird.

If you're really in Europe then I'm sure you know that calling previous employers is completely pointless, the best you'll get is "yes this person has worked here before".

And I work in games and 2-3 years at each company is pretty normal, with some exceptions people just finish a project and then move(or are let go, unfortunately). YMMV of course.

I think it happens on both ends of the spectrum, the folks you described, and also the ones with a good reputation and network who get recruited into new opportunities.