Gems from Ashlee Vance

Musk has taken industries like aerospace and automotive that America seemed to have given up on and recast them as something new and fantastic. At the heart of this transformation are Musk's skills as a software maker and his ability to apply them to machines. He's merged atoms and bits in ways that few people thought possible, and the results have been spectacular.

Okay, I thought that was good, until I read :

(oh, thanks to Omkar Pawaskar, you can read for free without Vance getting richer :) :

While Musk had exceled as a self-taught coder, his skills weren’tnearly as polished as those of the new hires. They took one look atZip2’s code and began rewriting the vast majority of the software.Musk bristled at some of their changes, but the computer scientistsneeded just a fraction of the lines of code that Musk used to get their jobs done. They had a knack for dividing software projects intochunks that could be altered and refined whereas Musk fell into theclassic self-taught coder trap of writing what developers callhairballs—big, monolithic hunks of code that could go berserk formysterious reasons.