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

maybe for a fungible CRUD engineer. I think Karpathy is in a different league and I'm certainly surprised to hear this fact. I would expect someone like him to sit within a certain lab for a long time

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.