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Emad Dlala out

hmp10 said:
And saying you are leaving an organization to which you have been highly dedicated because you want to spend more time with your family is about as frequent a cliche as any that you will find in exit statements.

It's interesting that it's the same reason his mentor Peter Rawlinson gave for leaving Tesla . . . and we all know what Rawlinson thought about Elon Musk.
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We're way past the point of the Steve Jobs era of abandoning your personal life for a company. We're not robots. We're humans.

If someone wants to be with their family, they want to be with their family. Simple as that.

If someone wants to do something new, then they want to do something new. It doesn't have to be all doom and gloom every time.
 
Need4Sleep said:
We're way past the point of the Steve Jobs era of abandoning your personal life for a company. We're not robots. We're humans.
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This may be true for mid- and lower-tier employees, but I know from personal experience what major companies demand of their senior players even today. And I know what people striving to reach those positions still put themselves through to get them.

A few years ago the CEO of ABB (formerly ASEA Brown Boveri), a Swiss technology firm, was asked what he thought about work-life balance. His response was that if you wanted to be a mid-level player at ABB, work predictable hours, and have a rich personal life, then ABB had a place for you, and you could have a very nice life and satisfying career working there. BUT . . . if you wanted to be one of the top 200 people he depended on to run the company, then you had to be prepared to pay the price in work-life balance.

Even today, there is no shortage of employees willing -- even eager -- to pay that price. They may be a smaller percentage of the workforce than they once were, but the lines to get into the C-suite are as long as they've ever been.
 
I have been fortunate enough to spend a bit of time with Emad on a few occasions and did not seem like a guy that was suffering from burnout. He seemed to enjoy waking up early and scanning his email for anything that he may be able to help with. Put me down in the camp that thinks there is more to his departure than just working to many hours.
 
If you work somewhere for ten years and are passionate and dedicated, you don't leave with no notice. Period. If he "wanted to spend more time with family" he would've either taken a diminished role or phased himself out of the organization in steps, and both of those things take months. You can read in his farewell note how much he cared about the organization and the people in it. They're family too, in a way. It's obvious what this was.
 
Thinking about the whole thread, my simple but cynical mind wants to construct a 2x2 table.
He was forced out vs. a true desire to devote more time to his family.
Lucid flourishes vs. tanking.
Worst case scenario is he was forced out and the company going south.
No amount of ruminating here would change anything.
That said, I still wish Emad had stayed on.
 
I also spent time with Emad and met his wife. They both seemed very relaxed and comfortable. I believe it still had to do with his relationship with the new CEO. So my thinking is if this is true them the new CEO has a lot of work to do to convince me he is the right leader at this time.
 
hmp10 said:
And saying you are leaving an organization to which you have been highly dedicated because you want to spend more time with your family is about as frequent a cliche as any that you will find in exit statements.

It's interesting that it's the same reason his mentor Peter Rawlinson gave for leaving Tesla . . . and we all know what Rawlinson thought about Elon Musk.
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I quit a job at a large public tech firm, where I was a highly visible senior engineer. My public statement was all about how I was leaving because I want to spend more time with my wife, traveling, and puttering around in my workshop. Which is true. However it's also true that I was intensely frustrated with the way senior managers were running the company, and they obviously weren't going to change. My direct management was well aware, as were a couple of close work friends. Everyone else just got the anodyne farewell. Why throw bombs on your way out, burning bridges but not changing anything?
 
Solomente said:
If you work somewhere for ten years and are passionate and dedicated, you don't leave with no notice. Period. If he "wanted to spend more time with family" he would've either taken a diminished role or phased himself out of the organization in steps, and both of those things take months. You can read in his farewell note how much he cared about the organization and the people in it. They're family too, in a way. It's obvious what this was.
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I think we don't know how much notice he gave. He might have given months, he might have given none, it would probably all look the same from our outside viewpoint. I've had a job where I gave almost a year notice, and some where I gave 2 weeks, and it all looked the same from the outside. It even looked the same to most people on the inside.
 
TahoeMichael said:
I think we don't know how much notice he gave. He might have given months, he might have given none, it would probably all look the same from our outside viewpoint. I've had a job where I gave almost a year notice, and some where I gave 2 weeks, and it all looked the same from the outside. It even looked the same to most people on the inside.
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If this was planned and amicable, his farewell message would've been released immediately, not days later, and the announcement from Lucid wouldn't have been so terse and corporate
 
TahoeMichael said:
I think we don't know how much notice he gave. He might have given months, he might have given none, it would probably all look the same from our outside viewpoint. I've had a job where I gave almost a year notice, and some where I gave 2 weeks, and it all looked the same from the outside. It even looked the same to most people on the inside.
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As mentioned previously, I had been talking to him about possibly working together, and am certain he did not give months of notice.

That also doesn’t mean he was pushed out. Those are separate.
 
Need4Sleep said:
The burnout speculation is what I've been holding on to. And Emad's full statement on LinkedIn, I believe, further adds to my speculation that it was burnout. Especially since he stated resting and spending time with his family. If you've been flat-out for more than 10 years, that takes a toll. And the most sobering words I've ever heard was "It's either your ego or your health".

Judging by the Lucid employee responses to his LInkedIn, I don't think he was kicked out because of the positive words of support from so many different teams, rather it was his own decision he had decided for a while. But as he was closing his chapter in Lucid, I speculate that his final sendoff was to help shape the culture to be self-sustaining on its own, and he could then trust to hand over the reigns to Silvio Napoli.

I'm taking a shot in the dark with this one, but I think the 3.6 rollout was done with him being more on a supervisory role to see how the software culture he shaped can survive on its own. And once he was satisfied with the team handling the 3.6 rollout, he made his resignation official to the wider company, hence the very close timing between the rollout and his resignation.
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Maybe he got a massive bonus for turning around the software and doesn't need to work, or at least work on some next thing that is not a startup and new innovation...
 
...or, he missed the early, "create a product from nothing" research and development instead of the "corporate" and "business" part.

We'll know when we see where he lands. A guy with that much talent and engineering creativity is not going to sit around for long, I don't think...
 
Emad saw the writing on the wall (pending layoff) and decided to leave on his term.
 
From my past comment, I'd gather he was told (on saw the writing on the wall) to fire a ton of talented engineers and decided that if this is the direction things are going, you can fire them. I'll take my leave.
 
DreamTour said:
From my past comment, I'd gather he was told (on saw the writing on the wall) to fire a ton of talented engineers and decided that if this is the direction things are going, you can fire them. I'll take my leave.
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This seems to be a good guess.

tmichael said:
He might have received a severance. Not sure he was an officer of the company, so SEC reporting might not have been necessary.
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He did not.
 
Word inside the company is that Dlala left voluntarily. There is not much information circulating, though, as to what occasioned his decision to leave, and my guess is that will remain the case.

Derek Jenkins is the only one of the original heavy hitters who brought us the still-class-leading Air who remains with the company. If there is a product to come beyond the Cosmos, it may have some very different DNA.

I don't mean to imply that may necessarily be all bad. Even with the first generation, the Air drive units were designed with an eye toward manufacturability and industry-leading winding consistency, but a lot of that didn't seem to carry over into the rest of the car, which is extremely difficult and expensive to repair. Cory Steuben arrived to address those issues -- as well as reliability -- with the Cosmos. At the same time, I suspect the old guard would have gotten to that, too, as a next order of business. But their primary tasks early on were moving so many other engineering and design needles at once in things such as efficiency, power density, space utilization, charging speed, battery management, etc.

And it should never be forgotten how well they succeeded in those tasks, producing what remains the best-selling EV luxury sedan on the market, even when up against the engineering powerhouses of Porsche, Mercedes, and BMW and the EV market dominance of Tesla.
 
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