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Elon Musk hires 2 Newfoundland interns who solved problems at Tesla factory
- zerr 8y agoI guess they never got a chance to negotiate offers...
- misja111 8y agoWhy is this news? This happens in pretty much every company.
- elhudy 8y agoGetting personally hired by the CEO of a $50B company happens in pretty much every company?
- collinf 8y agoAs an intern, no less.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- sschueller 8y agoIf that CEO micromanages the company the size of the company doesn't matter.
- rurban 8y agoAFAIK he is known to fire all micromanagers, and let the engineers solve the problems in their style. On the other hand GM is known to be union infected. No certificate to turn that knob? Sorry, not me. Will have to wait.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- maxxxxx 8y agoI doubt he personally supervised and hired them. He probably never met them but someone else recommended them being hired. This is just PR.
- aerigniobio 8y agoGM is worth $50 billion. Do you really want to claim that Tesla is as big as GM? Tesla has 1/5 the employees of GM, 10% of the revenue, and has sold about 200,000 cars total compared to the 9.6 million GM shipped last year alone. The story is the same for any other big manufacturer. Tesla is a pipsqueak. It's just ludicrously overpriced.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- notyourwork 8y agoWorth doesn't always correlate against size. Worth is what someone is willing to pay for something. Tesla may be overpriced but to disregard Tesla's value based on a size comparison is ill-conceived.
- aerigniobio 8y agoWe're talking about size here. Supposedly the CEO of a $50 billion company is too busy to concern himself with a lowly intern. But that $50 billion company is actually pretty small, just with a disproportionately high market cap. But also, hell yes does worth correlate with size. It's only in postmodern Silicon Valley economics that a company with twenty employees and no revenue can be worth a billion dollars. All the standard ways of pricing a stock I know of take size into account, either directly or indirectly.
- greglindahl 8y agoYou are talking about size. The person you're replying to was obviously talking about market capitalization. It'd be nice if people talked to each other instead of talking past each other. BTW, the standard ways of pricing a stock includes growth potential, which is why Tesla has that crazy valuation. It's totally fine if that's not the valuation technique you prefer, but it exists.
- adventured 8y agoYour valuation approach would have suggested that Facebook was ludicrously over priced at its IPO and that it was a pipsqueak compared to Google. Investors were betting the Facebook business would do what it has done: grow dramatically and more than offset the valuation having been pulled forward. Your approach collapses in the face of accounting for high rates of persistent growth. Tesla is growing radically faster than GM, which hasn't increased its sales or global market share meaningfully in 15 years. Tesla, 2016 -> 2017 sales growth: 67% GM, 2016 -> 2017 sales growth: Negative That kind of growth by Tesla universally gets you a huge valuation adjustment vs a company with zero or negative growth. Investors are betting that GM's future is not particularly bright, that there is no growth in the business. It is discounted accordingly, which is why it has such a hilariously low PE ratio (six times earnings in real terms). When Amazon passed Walmart in market value, it had minimal profit profit and 1/6th the retail sales of Walmart. The market isn't primarily valuing Tesla based on what it's doing today. It's a bet that Tesla will continue to produce considerable growth for many years to come.
- mathinpens 8y agobecause they are canadians and this is a canadian newspaper
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jahaja 8y agoI think this kind of submission shows how favorably some business leaders are treated when they've passed a certain threshold. After that point anything they do or touch is considered newsworthy, no matter how trivial. Furthermore, everything under the sun is attributed to this person's personal and direct influence.
- eanzenberg 8y agoYeah exactly. Compare the self-driving fatalities from Uber and Tesla and see the immense bias.
- ceejayoz 8y agoThere are other variables at play in that disparate treatment. Uber has a much longer track record of actively malicious behavior - sabotaging competitors, stalking journalists, building tools that blacklist inspectors and law enforcement, plus the overall toxic culture that got Kalanick pushed out.
- eanzenberg 8y agoThats the bias though! I dont care about those things, I care about the safety of self driving cars.
- ceejayoz 8y agoI don't really like putting my safety in the hands of malicious actors.
- FullyFunctional 8y agoDid you actually read the fine article? This was not your average intern experience. They had guts, insight, and (probably) luck and got the personal recognition of the CEO. This is obviously different.
- deminature 8y agoTesla/Musk has incredibly good PR.
- RivieraKid 8y agoReality is catching up though.
- 1024core 8y agoAs my (Ontarian) friend said just now: "Smart Newfies is always news". (sorry)
- RivieraKid 8y agoThis story is just Elon trying to attract employees who're willing to work 60 hours for a shit salary.
- eloff 8y agoBecause this is Canadian news, and you'd be surprised how little happens in a country with gun controls, Police who take protect and serve seriously regardless of your skin color, and a tenth of the population of our neighbors to the south. The bar is pretty low for news in Canada, and that's the way we like it.
- JoeAltmaier 8y agoI have great respect for Canadian law enforcement. But its not all roses. Canadian native women have a shameful unsolved murder rate - the 2nd worst in the developed world. So some room to improve.
- Kluny 8y agoWell there ain't been anything new on that front for quite some time.
- slededit 8y agoCanada's native population has suffered. But it's important to put things in perspective. In 2016 there were 142 female aboriginal homicides total in all of Canada [1]. In comparison it takes Chicago alone only 2 months to hit that number. http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/85-002-x/2017001/article/54879/tbl/tbl07-eng.htm http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/85-002-x/2017001/article/54879/...
- hackerman12345 8y agoWhat a strange comparison - apples to gang war zones.
- slededit 8y agoIf Chicago is too violent then it's equivalent to 6 months in NYC which most people consider safe these days.
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- dguaraglia 8y agoSeriously.
- rmason 8y agoI've got plenty of friends who works at the Big 3. Doubt that any of their interns solve production problems in their car factories. Then turn around and solve problems in an entirely different type of factory that is as far away from cars as you can get. Usually the interns get coffee and deliver paperwork from one floor to another.
- ajkjk 8y agoWhich Big 3? No one delivers coffee in tech.
- robotnixon 8y agoThe "Big 3" in the US usually refers to Ford, GM, and Fiat Chrysler
- slededit 8y agoI assume he meant GM, Ford, and Chrysler/Fiat
- jguimont 8y agoFord - GM - Chrysler.
- gcbw2 8y agothis is paid advertising at most. i can count 100s of companies that hire interns. that is the point of companies offering internships. flag this to oblivion.
- ct0 8y agoI wish we learned about what problem they solved.
- grecy 8y agoElon did say they were having a hackathon to fix problems on the two major bottleneck robots the other day...
- vonzeppelin 8y agoI was really hoping this was about dogs.
- sparrish 8y agoTLDR; Two engineers with marketable skills get jobs. Slow news day in Newfoundland?
- dzdt 8y ago"Local boy makes good" is still an article that sells local papers.
- walshemj 8y agoIn the tradition of The Press & Journal and Aberdeen paper "Titanic latest; NE man dead".
- r-s 8y agoI was traveling in Newfoundland last summer (Deer Lake) and someone phoned into the radio station reporting that they saw an overly large moose. This may be the biggest story of the year.
- maxxxxx 8y agoHaving to listen to CNN during lunch breaks this is refreshing. The world needs less exciting news.
- Apocryphon 8y agoAmazing that they used to be their own country.
- davebryand 8y agoI'm curious in what characteristics Elon saw in these individuals. Solving a problem once is great, but Elon clearly saw something deeper in them. I wonder if he sees what Nikola Tesla called the "finer fibers"... “But instinct is something which transcends knowledge. We have, undoubtedly, certain finer fibers that enable us to perceive truths when logical deduction, or any other willful effort of the brain, is futile.” Nikola Tesla
- jannes 8y agoWell, according to the article they solved two different problems.
- blackbagboys 8y agoThey were good problem-solvers and Tesla needed a PR win. Let's not mysticize Musk more than has already been done.
- yurishimo 8y agoI think this is a nice motivational story for local kids to get excited about finding their place in the workforce. When I started working I had no idea that the key to success was as simple as giving a crap and being consistent in your good work. I figured that it would take me decades to work on some secret skills to move up, but now I know that's not true.
- macavity23 8y agoAmen. Turn up when you say you will, deliver what you promised, on time, and generally give a minimal damn, and you’re already ahead of 95% of your co-workers. I don’t think it will ever stop amazing me.
- cjensen 8y agoInterns are awesome and smart. Never give them garbage work. Give them a challenge and see if they can handle it. Worst case scenario, you throw away their work after they leave, and they have learned some stuff.
- dnautics 8y agoSometimes it's good to give them a repetitive project where you give them one task and have them repeat it. I once trained an intern to do molecular biology from basically nothing, he made 50 mutants and tested 25 in three months. He got a publication out of that. On the other hand, I have an intern now, who I've taught go (she made a cli and learned tdd) and had her set up a tensorflow deep learning pipeline, which is not repetitive and very exploratory.
- AETackaberry 8y agoI want to be your intern!
- dnautics 8y agoYep it comes with it's perks - I arranged a one-on-one lunch with a nobel laureate for each of my interns back when I was a scientist!
- TrainedMonkey 8y agoWorst case scenario they spend 3 months banging their head against a brick wall making no headway.
- alistairSH 8y agoOnly if you don't assign a capable mentor.
- toomanybeersies 8y agoI thought this was the whole point of summer interns, the other point of summer interns being that it's a trial run before you decide to hire them full time after graduation. That's what my old company used to do (who originally hired me as an intern). The interns were tasked with a brand new project, something that wasn't business critical but would be a great new addition to the product. Then when we came on board full time were were slotted into the regular development flow. Using interns as grunts seems like a poor allocation of resources.
- vzaliva 8y agoAs somebody who has been in a similar situation, I must warn that accepting Elon's offer could be perilous to them in long term. It looks like at least one of them will be dropping out of school before graduating to start working for Tesla. Later in his career, he might regret that. It is cool to impress big company and get a job, but if he is as smart as it sounds, he will have no problem finding a job after graduation.
- DubiousPusher 8y agoSpeaking from the software side, it pretty much always seems better to take the job and leave school if you have to. Once a person has a couple years work experience I don't really even care if they went to school at all.
- walshemj 8y agoNot all employers are as broadminded I suspect I didn't get past a screen for one of the FANGS. I suspect the Spanish recruiter saw I had not got a degree. But ignored the fact my fist Job was on the campus of Cranfield at a world leading RnD organisation - Cranfield being a Masters and Phd only University at the time :-)
- vzaliva 8y agoThis may be true if you assuming that a degree is only important as a way to get a job. However, if you put a value on stuff they actually teach, getting a good foundation education in your field will make you a better specialist in a long term.
- NVRM 8y agoWhat a pile load of propaganda.
- graeham 8y agoFor Tesla or Newfies?
- ballenf 8y agoGreat for these guys. But it really makes me think that Tesla has big problems. There just shouldn't exist problems that relatively untrained eyes can spot and fix in short order. Maybe this is related to production difficulties overall? And don't get me wrong, the fact that the solution was accepted, implemented and rewarded so quickly is a testament to Musk (and his managers). My point is just that either this was lightning striking or the production line has inexcusable issues -- that is low-hanging opportunities for improvement.
- hcnews 8y ago> There just shouldn't exist problems that relatively untrained eyes can spot and fix in short order. There exists no such thing, at least in the current workplace. We give importance to speed and agility (which makes sense) and this always leads for rooms for improvement even to a bystander. A direct corollary of this is that you will also have some problems/optimizations to be done and it helps to fix your biggest problem always.
- freyir 8y ago> There just shouldn't exist problems that relatively untrained eyes can spot and fix in short order Many companies have big glaring inefficiencies that employees become blind to over time. Often times, new hires will be acutely aware of them, but won't speak up because they're new. Within a few weeks or months, they just become acclimated to the situation and work around it.
- zafka 8y agoI second this. I work in a rather large company, and believe me, there are "opportunities" everywhere. The trouble is there is usually such a level of bureaucracy, that it takes real effort to push a change.
- toss1 8y ago>There just shouldn't exist problems that relatively untrained eyes can spot and fix in short order. Where is your history that you find these uncommon? I can't think of a place I've been where there one isn't surrounded by opportunities to improve (although I've definitely been in large organizations where they just become part of the everyday cruft that never gets addressed). I'd of course expect more in an organization like Tesla that is massively scaling at the fastest possible rate. So yes, it's an example of a problem they've got probably 1000s of, but also a great example that the fixes were online so fast...
- Endama 8y agoHonest question here, it's my understanding that a bunch of states have laws that state something along the lines of: Interns can only be interns if they do work that A. Primarily benefit their learning and growth and B. Their labor would not normally be done by a full time employee. Is this understanding correct? If it is, wouldn't these two interns constitute a breach of said policy?
- patrickg_zill 8y agoIt has an undertone of humor, because in Canada people from Newfoundland are often the butt of jokes, sort of like in America we have jokes about rednecks or Fark-style "oh, Florida again!" observations. So to have 2 "Newfies" fix problems at a high tech enterprise like Tesla is both a bit of pride and a bit of tongue-in-cheek humor.
- KSS42 8y agoWoah, there! Don't use the N word. It's Newfoundlander. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-newfoundlanders-call-out-anthony-bourdains-tv-show-for-using/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-newfoundlande...
- aphextron 8y ago"Startup hires 2 interns." is A1 news. Can we say this is peak Tesla hype yet?
- swagasaurus-rex 8y agoThe hype could pull a 787
- tytytytytytytyt 8y agoWhat actual problems did they solve?