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Tesla loses three vice presidents in a week
- radicalbyte 7y agoNow that Tesla have broken ground there are a lot of electric car startups. So these people are in demand.
- steve76 7y agoThat's good! I'm routing for Mr. Elon Musk. There's plenty for everyone. It's not a zero sum game.
- staticautomatic 7y agoI think you mean "rooting"
- nick_kline 7y agoOne good thing about Tesla is they always said their goal is to kickstart the ev transition, and Musk even specifically said it's okay if tesla loses out as long as society moves that way. So that's a noble thing. They actually have a goal. In the mean time they've made a fantastic vehicle that should improve the world. Separately from that, by all apparent news Tesla is a gosh dang hard working place, and people can't take it forever.
- p1mrx 7y agoI will believe that Tesla has society's interests in mind when they sell vehicles with standard J1772 connectors, and deploy CCS connectors at their supercharger sites. Until then, they're just emulating Apple's vendor lock-in.
- c0nfused 7y agoI own a Tesla it comes with an adapter. There exists adapters to go the other way, admittedly for 250$ but its a niche thing. This does not get you into the supercharger network but I think that is part of the whole trying to sell cars thing they are doing.
- ostbahnhof 7y agoThey already do exactly this in Europe. Model 3 ships with CCS, and the super chargers have now 2 cables, one of them is CCS.
- xur17 7y agoCan non-tesla cars use their superchargers (I thought payment was done through the car, so I wasn't sure how that would work)?
- natch 7y agoOnly if the non-Tesla car manufacture accepts Tesla's offer to enable it, which means just making their cars capable by following Tesla's specs, and paying a fair share of supporting the supercharger network, proportional to usage. So far no manufacturer has accepted this offer.
- de_watcher 7y agoSomehow dozens of other EV charging networks don't need to talk to the car manufacturers. Can that supercharger myth finally die?
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- MegaButts 7y agoTo be fair, it has the word 'fucked' in the url, so that's not an unreasonable result from a simple spam filter.
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- RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago>All three execs that left this week seem to be significant losses for Tesla, but it might be for the best if Tesla’s fast-paced, startup-like business environment wasn’t for them. But is a fast-paced, startup-like business environment the best environment for producing thousands of expensive, multi-ton, high speed vehicles that can seriously maim or kill their occupants or bystanders if something goes wrong?
- sawmurai 7y agoWell, Boeing on the other hand is having trouble building reliable planes.
- SilasX 7y agoTrouble building one of their new models to be reliable. They have several very mature lines that they have no trouble making reliable.
- calyth2018 7y agoIn terms of quality issues... https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/boeing-air-canada-jet-fuel-leak-1.5193550 https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/boeing-air-canada-jet-fuel-... https://phys.org/news/2019-04-pentagon-boeing-tanker-deliveries-quality.html https://phys.org/news/2019-04-pentagon-boeing-tanker-deliver...
- Breza 7y agoThis is worth emphasizing. Tesla's detractors would likely give them the benefit of the doubt if Tesla had a track record like Boeing's.
- api 7y agoThe underlying cause of both companies' issues is the same, and it's not organizational size and style. It's complexity. Bugs and edge cases grow exponentially, not linearly, with complexity, and both Tesla's cars and the 737 MAX are far more complex than previous products. It's similar to the "featureitis" that causes complex software products and platforms to crumble and die over time. Part of why we keep rewriting the universe in software is the need to repeatedly start over to escape a mountain of accreted complexity in some old system. At some point the cost of rewriting the parts we need is lower than the cost of just maintaining the bloat.
- jedberg 7y ago> I would assume that Tesla’s pace clashes with what people are used to in the auto industry, and it might be hard for them to adapt. Or that Tesla is playing fast and loose with the rules and compromising safety, and they felt ethically compelled to leave. It's sort of hard to make either assumption from the outside. But it definitely says something about Tesla. Edit: My point here is that three VP departures implies nothing in particular, only that something is changing, and it's quite a logical leap the author is making assuming it is their "fast paced environment".
- thebluehawk 7y agoDo you have sources to back up the claim that these people left because of safety or ethical concerns? From what I've heard, it's a grueling job working long hours and that people get burned out pretty quickly, which is a different issue from saying there are legal, safety, or ethical concerns.
- jedberg 7y ago> Do you have sources to back up the claim that these people left because of safety or ethical concerns? No, none at all, that was my point. The departure of three execs in a week does not imply that it is a fast paced work environment nor does it imply safety issues.
- zaroth 7y agoExcept that we don’t need innuendo to imply Tesla is a fast-paced work environment. You can take Elon and every employees’ word for it. It’s an extremely fast paced work environment, and if auto executives from elsewhere in the industry were lasting for longer than the average tenure, you could argue it would be a cause for concern. If you’re going to make a claim like Tesla is “playing fast and loose with the rules and compromising safety, and they felt ethically compelled to leave,” its beholden upon you to provide evidence. If your claim is you have no idea, then you can certainly make that claim which requires no evidence at all.
- sprafa 7y agoI think the biggest worry looming is the financials. Everybody is freaking out on their burn rate.
- WhompingWindows 7y agoWho is freaking out about their burn rate? Do you know their burn rate for Q2? Q1 had logistical problems which reduced deliveries made, Q2 is going to look good in comparison.
- threeseed 7y agoEveryone. Their stock price plummeted last month. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-stocks-tesla/tesla-stock-and-bonds-tumble-as-investors-fret-about-costs-and-safety-idUSKCN1SQ1WY https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-stocks-tesla/tesla-st...
- x2f10 7y agoIt did? Google is reporting a 26.93% gain. $178.97 on Jun 3 to $227.17 on July 1. That's not much of a "plummet".
- new_realist 7y agoCherry pick.
- sprafa 7y agoThe economist had a good article on how out of control their financials are.
- nolok 7y ago> Q1 had logistical problems which reduced deliveries made, Q2 is going to look good in comparison. You make it sounds like Q1 was a one time exception when "problem on the manufacturing lines, deliveries far below planned number" has been the norm for years now.
- izzydata 7y agoI'll gladly do whatever their job was for half the salary. Unless there is some kind of illegal activity involved that I could be implicated for later.
- magduf 7y agoWatch out with statements like this; a lot of corporate executives don't make as much salary as you're thinking. You might be better off with whatever you're doing now than getting half of some executive job that only pays $200-250k.
- Balgair 7y agoI've seen structures where they pay ~$50k in cash and then you get ~$150k in stock. But the stock is restricted such that you only can sell it in ~3 years time. Good incentive to keep the stock price up, as you 'bought' it at ~150k but could sell it in 3 years for much more than 150k.
- magduf 7y agoYeah, but the OP only offered to work for half their salary; he didn't say anything about the golden handcuffs.
- davidw 7y agoHave they checked behind the couch cushions?
- refurb 7y agoI'm trying to remain relatively unbiased in my assessment of Telsa, but can anyone come up with a reason for all these executives leaving other than poor business prospects? Maybe Elon's management style? Maybe I answered my own question.
- noodle 7y agoThere are a lot more EV companies cropping up now. So, a bigger paycheck might be a major draw for many. Probably compounded by other issues as well, but still. If you're a new EV startup and you know you can't buy out Elon, who else will you try and poach? High level leadership.
- new_realist 7y agoWhy would you leave after a quarter of record sales?
- nabla9 7y agoI think Tesla's finances combined with the scaling problems are the reason. All these VP's had traditional auto industry background. What traditional auto-industry does well is manufacturing profitably in large scale. Tesla is just learning to do that. Startup mentality works for luxury cars. It does not work when you have to design for maintainability and big recalls or errors can break the company.
- BinaryIdiot 7y agoThe few folks I knew who worked at Tesla told me it's basically 60 hours a week at a minimum. It's not uncommon to find someone sleeping in the office or folks going out to dinner and coming right back to work. The last person I talked to was looking for a new job. He loved what he was working on and felt proud of his work but was also feeling extremely burned out and wanted to stop working every weekend and evening. He also told me they use _literally every_ technical stack. He had worked on a Ruby app, a Python app, a .Net app, a .Net Core app, and many of them are supposed to work together they were just written that way because whoever started it was more familiar with a specific language. It doesn't sound like a great place to work for to me. I talked to someone at SpaceX who told me similar things but it sounded like their usage of random tech stacks was at least lower than Tesla's.
- darkpuma 7y agoI don't know if all smoke indicates a fire, but there has been a lot of smoke coming out of Tesla.
- mandeepj 7y agoThe average tenure for an executive in the USA is around 2 years. So, it's alright
- killerdhmo 7y agoCitation needed?