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Quoting from the article: Btw, here are a few productivity recommendations: – Excessive meetings are the blight of big companies and almost always get wor

• bagacrap 9y ago
  The part about nonsense words is great (one of my pet peeves) but how do you accomplish that in practice? Everything has to have a name. For example, when you're developing Windows 8 what would you call Metro Mode? "Alternate touch optimized desktop UI" is a bit of a mouthful.
  • whatshisface 9y ago
    I'd call it the Touch UI, the others could be Windowed and Mobile.
  • xarball 9y ago
    Metro's branding was a failure of imagination and a failure to properly capture and convey intent. There are many other options out there: | "Touch UI" | "Mobile UI" | "Everywhere UI" | "Fisher-Price UI" | ... or my personal favorite... | "Mega-Bloks" |
  • simplicio 9y ago
    I think pretty much every industry and field quickly develops it's own stock of acronyms, nicknames, jargon etc. This can feel alienating to "outsiders", which is why people don't like it, but I think its pretty necessary (and inevitable). If you're working with a set of concepts, processes, software everyday, developing a shorthand way of talking (and thinking) about them is a big timesaver both in terms of communication and mental effort.
    • gregknicholson 9y ago
      > If you're working with a set of concepts, processes, software everyday, developing a shorthand way of talking (and thinking) about them is a big timesaver both in terms of communication and mental effort. For internal processes, this is fair enough. But anything that will be exposed to an end-user should be simple without shorthand.
  • ScottBurson 9y ago
    Maybe just try really hard to maintain a centralized glossary, that people actually use and keep up to date.
  • manigandham 9y ago
    As usual, common sense applies. The issue is regarding unnecessary names. If it's really a product name or industry wide then use it, but many companies tend to come up with acronyms that are only used internally or within a single team and this hurts communication. For your example, just call it touchscreen mode.
  • notatoad 9y ago
    how many new UIs was the windows team developing at the time? shouldn't "the new UI" suffice?
    • maltalex 9y ago
      “New” is a bad way to refer to something. It loses meaning once the new thing isn’t so new or has been replaced by something newer. Say a document talks about “the new windows UI” and there were like 5 different versions of “new ui” during the lifetime of the project. Which version is the document talking about?
• Judgmentality 9y ago
  Some of these I really like, and some of them are well-intentioned but seem disconnected from reality. - Communication should travel via the shortest path necessary to get the job done This sounds like a great idea, however it can lead to things like the CEO pinging engineers to fix problems he doesn't fully understand. I've seen this happen often, and it's really annoying how often we have to tell the CEO he can't do this (extremely important people have already quit because of it). I love the idea about walking out of meetings though, and just minimizing them as much as possible.
  • slededit 9y ago
    I think he was speaking more from the Individual Contributor level here.
    • mieseratte 9y ago
      That was my impression as well. No better way to GSD than talk to your counterpart on the other side of the aisle and figure out a solution. For a CEO, VP, or other "executive" type, practicing seagull management is time inefficient for them in any regards. They should be delegating tasks, and trusting their reports to handle the issue. Of course, sometimes one must become the executive who gets in the weeds as Musk is doing, but that is because the reports have failed in some crucial aspects and one must unfuck the situation.
  • antris 9y ago
    > it's really annoying how often we have to tell the CEO he can't do this Isn't it just another part of the job? Obviously a person doing the actual work is supposed to explain what is and isn't possible, no?
    • Merad 9y ago
      How many average workers are willing to push back when the CEO tells them to do something? How many CEOs will respond well when an employee does push back against their directions? There are good reasons that most companies don’t operate this way.
• mieseratte 9y ago
  Having worked at companies with a 6+ hour long retrospective, planning meeting that was almost entirely useless - I would love the idea. However, at my current job we frequently have little meetings here and there post-standup for clarification, discussions, analysis, of issues, etc. Frequently they do not apply, but I do not find myself willing to leave despite explicitly being told I do not have to be there. It's hard to walk out of a meeting, when you know how it looks, because your manager is the one to handle everything from vacation requests to promotions. Building up "social credit" greases the wheels later on when you are the one who needs something. Unless your manager is a proponent of the policy, you're fighting the tide.
  • Consultant32452 9y ago
    I feel like you have cause and effect backwards. Being in the meeting is not what gives you social credit, having social credit is what causes people to want to keep you in the meetings. There are generally three main types of problems: social, political, and technical. Once you're known as a person who solves those three, you won't be able to escape the meetings.
    • mieseratte 9y ago
      You're not wrong, I end up becoming "the guy" at most places I've worked because I not only have the technical wherewithal, but can put blend in and socialize, and have no qualms about engaging in a political dog-fight when there is a need for it. Thusly, I end up being volunteered or asked to be in most meetings, social committees, etc. because my team trusts me to handle whatever happens and my manager knows I will handle it competently. Maybe I'm not picking a good term / elucidating properly, but the second type of "social credit" is the fostering of a favorable view, building good rapport with your manager. Your manager does not put you in a meeting for shits-and-giggles, either because there is a real need or as some impotent display of power. For the latter, when you walk out you're making some strife and come salary review time, vacation request time, etc. it can bite you in the ass. This can and will have a chilling effect on the efficacy of the "Fuck Meetings" rule. However, it does make clear the culture and expectations of the organization, so hopefully those managers would eventually shape up or ship out.
• corey_moncure 9y ago
  This is the exact opposite of the last corporate workplace I was in. Ceaseless meetings (programmers often spending the whole day away from their desk), pointless meetings, jargon, all decisions must be approved by the manager, all communication flows through the manager.
• sowbug 9y ago
  This is what code-quoted non-code HN text looks like on a narrow screen: http://imgur.com/LYwZWbT http://imgur.com/LYwZWbT
  • mikevm 9y ago
    Woops. Sorry about that. Don't know if there's a proper way of quoting text on HN.
    • sowbug 9y ago
      Since we have this discussion every time a top-voted comment does this, and nobody has ever suggested a solution that I've seen, I don't think it can be done. Just throw a > or two in there and we'll figure it out.
      • tyingq 9y ago
        "nobody has ever suggested a solution that I've seen" Media queries seem straightforward enough.
        • sowbug 9y ago
          I mean for content contributors. I'm sure an HN code change could make the site smarter. * Asterisks work for italics * (remove inner spaces), but they seem to crap out for a passage longer than about a line, making them tedious for block quotes.
          • tyingq 9y ago
            Yes, makes sense. HN could use a few minor tweaks and upgrades.
    • PhasmaFelis 9y ago
      There isn't. No one knows why.
    • germinalphrase 9y ago
• tyingq 9y ago
  Great excerpts. Reposting them as more hn-mobile friendly. "Btw, here are a few productivity recommendations:" – Excessive meetings are the blight of big companies and almost always get worse over time. Please get of all large meetings, unless you’re certain they are providing value to the whole audience, in which case keep them very short. – Also get rid of frequent meetings, unless you are dealing with an extremely urgent matter. Meeting frequency should drop rapidly once the urgent matter is resolved. – Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren’t adding value. It is not rude to leave, it is rude to make someone stay and waste their time. – Don’t use acronyms or nonsense words for objects, software or processes at Tesla. In general, anything that requires an explanation inhibits communication. We don’t want people to have to memorize a glossary just to function at Tesla. – Communication should travel via the shortest path necessary to get the job done, not through the “chain of command”. Any manager who attempts to enforce chain of command communication will soon find themselves working elsewhere. – A major source of issues is poor communication between depts. The way to solve this is allow free flow of information between all levels. If, in order to get something done between depts, an individual contributor has to talk to their manager, who talks to a director, who talks to a VP, who talks to another VP, who talks to a director, who talks to a manager, who talks to someone doing the actual work, then super dumb things will happen. It must be ok for people to talk directly and just make the right thing happen. – In general, always pick common sense as your guide. If following a “company rule” is obviously ridiculous in a particular situation, such that it would make for a great Dilbert cartoon, then the rule should change. reply
  • allthenews 9y ago
    I worry that many of these well meaning deregulations may not scale indefinitely, both as the company grows and the working population evolves. I understand the premise, but many of the processes and red tape, while admittedly frustrating, probably did not arise out of desire for limitation. You have to put a lot of faith into your workforce to allow so much freedom in their operation.
    • matte_black 9y ago
      Agreed, the benefit of having some bureaucratic processes is that it makes them way more tolerant of low competency individuals within the system. There’s filters at many levels that prevent someone from fucking things up too badly. If your company is running with scissors you need every individual to be a top performer who knows exactly what they are doing at all times. That is hard to guarantee when you start scaling up your headcount.
• gregknicholson 9y ago
  > In general, always pick common sense as your guide. If following a “company rule” is obviously ridiculous in a particular situation, such that it would make for a great Dilbert cartoon, then the rule should change. I like this. Crucially, it's not “ignore the rule”; it's “fix the rule”.
• Aloha 9y ago
  I'd agree with most of this.. but.. Yes, communication should travel thru the shortest path, but it needs to go thru channels at some point, once the initial contact is made, otherwise the layers in the reporting structure are never aware of any extra hours spent reporting a problem. In this same vein, avoid manager-telephone-game when possible, but still keep everyone in the loop. Common sense is great, provided it results in process being changed, not just ignored. Sometimes jargon is a needed thing, if you have many many subsystems and objects in play, you may need jargon rather than a long form description of what the thing does "alternator" versus "alternating current power generation device". Sometimes meetings are the last resort when all other communication mediums have failed, and often in that case a long meeting is the only possible solution, while regular meetings should never be considered beneficial, putting a kibosh on all meetings will do more harm than good.
  • Shivetya 9y ago
    I am not sure how widespread it is, but I have encountered far too many manager/directors who put forth meetings in order to boost their presence if not stoke their own egos. executives holding a company hostage effectively for 90 minute meetings so they can tell their direction, strategy, and more, and witnessed development staffs with far more time in meetings the producing deliverables. is this widespread or just symptoms of top heavy companies? while I nod my head at most of what Musk relayed far too much seems to be just speaking to head nodding supporters. Many of know this, the question is how to communicate it to those who need to understand they are the issue
  • stephengillie 9y ago
    > but it needs to go thru channels at some point, once the initial contact is made, otherwise the layers in the reporting structure are never aware of any extra hours spent reporting a problem. This is where ticketing systems come in handy. They both track the work performed as well as the time spent - many (Zendesk and Service Now at least) have a timer that starts when you open the ticket in the web client, and records that time whenever you submit an update. The mantra is "if it's not in a ticket, then it didn't happen". Between a kanban/scrum planning system and the ticket system, your people managers should be drowning in data about what you're doing and how long it's taking. Zendesk has a full section of its site to analyze metrics, and at my last job individual engineers discussed their metrics daily. This eliminates the need to CC your manager while obviating that whole communication. The hard part is keeping everyone in the system, and constantly pulling people back from email to tickets. Having a pretty web interface helps a lot.
• internetman55 9y ago
  wow, i like these!