Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:
Earlier this month, Swift creator Chris Lattner announced he will be stepping down as director of Apple’s Development Tools department to lead Tesla’s Autopilot engineering team as VP of Autopilot Software.
Joe got these two quotes from Chris:
I’ve been writing code for more than 30 years, and 16 of those years have been in the developer tools space. I love it, but I am ready to move on to something else. Autopilot is clearly incredibly important to the world because of its ability to save people’s lives (and increase convenience). It is also a very, very hard technology problem and my experience building large scale software and team building is useful. Of course, I’ve also been a huge Tesla fan for some time.
And:
This was a very difficult decision, because I care deeply about the technology and people at Apple and because I could see myself staying there for many more years. In the end though, the opportunity to dive into a completely new area and work with the amazing Tesla Autopilot team was irresistible.
Class statements, both. Tesla is lucky to have him.
Total class act.
What does Lattner’s decision say about Apple’s rumored transportation project? I might have missed it in the various interviews I’ve read and listened to, but no one has asked why he didn’t move departments within Apple rather than defect.
“Apple creator Chris Lattner on why he left Apple for Tesla”
Swift creator? Typo?
Thanks, Brad. Good catch. Fixed.
ATP has Chris Lattner on this week. They cover LLVM and Clang, ARC and GC, and the history of Swift at Apple. There are some personal items but it’s technically focused, not “new job” focused.
http://atp.fm
What would be better than self-driving autos would be self-paying autos. Write software for that.