4 ms·
Disagree with Musk on this one. His follow up tweet "They should pretend to work somewhere else" implies that everyone who works remotely is merely pretending t
by twayt 4y ago
Disagree with Musk on this one. His follow up tweet "They should pretend to work somewhere else" implies that everyone who works remotely is merely pretending to work.
To make a blanket statement like this shows a lack of judgement. He further states that people who are particularly exceptional should be allowed to work remotely.
This means that a contributor who is substantially more productive at home than in office should be forced to sacrifice their gain in productivity if they don't meet the bar for "exceptional".
Furthermore, while the total number of "hours worked" might be more at the office, everyone knows that the number of fake hours worked is also higher.
Finally, the nail in the coffin to his argument is the following:
If someone can successfully pretend to work from home without any performance repercussions, there is clearly a lack of proper management in the company since performance is not measured by any proper metric of success but rather by their physical presence or hours worked. If an individual's productivity is found to be lacking due to their preference to work remotely, this should be communicated by the management chain and appropriate incentives/disincentives have to be put in place to guide the individual to perform at the level desired.
For roles that require you to be present at the location e.g. human resources or hardware roles, you can make those positions non-remote. Certain kinds of work like software development or design can absolutely be done remotely if the management is competent.
Lastly you can make an argument for innovation arising from the propagation of ideas and that this is more likely to happen if people are colocated. I think this is probably true but I also suspect that you can design a remote environment that allows this to happen even more effectively than in person. One idea that I think can work is to hold a brainstorming session with round-robin 1:1 discussions. You can form a fully connected graph of everyone's pairwise experience bouncing off each other which is more effective than the small k to many interaction that happens in meetings where an overconfident vocal minority comes up with most of the ideas.
- iqkznnft 4y ago> To make a blanket statement like this shows a lack of judgement. In other words, nothing new. If there's one thing I associate with Elon Musk it's blanket statements that show ignorance/stupidity/lack of judgement/bad character.
- 0x008 4y agoThat is totally expected. Self-serving bias, egocentric bias or survivorship bias are very common in the 0.01%. In case of Elon I guess at least egocentric bias is in play. Because he thinks people slack off at home/he would slack off at home, he assumes that is what is actually the case.
- jonathanstrange 4y agoIt's even worse than that because he silently assumes that middle management and team coordinators are unable to determine whether someone has worked or not other than by registering their presence. That attitude makes no sense, if a company cannot evaluate the results of their employees' work, then it is doomed. He knows that, of course, he's just being an a**hole. I would never work for someone like that.
- tarsinge 4y agoIn short it’s a bad manager. Another case of someone being successful at something (here investing) being deluded they are a universal genius.
- imtemplain 4y ago
- davidguetta 4y agoEh i love remote work but people saying no one is slacking at home show a clear lack of judgement themselves. I wouldn't bet people arent on average more productive at work office. And then again, working for Musk is choosing to be working super hard hours anyway.. I'm not sure how that will bother them that much.
- imustbeevil 4y ago> Eh i love remote work but people saying no one is slacking at home show a clear lack of judgement themselves. No one is saying "no one is slacking at home". Individuals who don't slack at home are saying "I don't slack at home, and I don't want to be weird tangent punished for your other incompetent employees. If they aren't doing their jobs fire them, I'm not going back, and I'm worth more to your company than you are to me."
- twayt 4y ago+1 to this. I'd go one step further and say that it doesn't matter who is actually slacking at home. The same people probably slack at the office too. In any case, if work from home increases the number of people who slack or the magnitude of slacking, it should be apparent in their performance. If this is set up correctly, you can identify those don't benefit from working from home and have a conversation with them about it.
- davidguetta 4y agoIf all competent employees are equally competent at home but some other slack more at home then WFH is a net negative for the employer. Hence the policy. Also you're assuming it's possible to control who is slacking / incompetent or not. It's not.. it's a partial information game. Hence the policy.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- twayt 4y agoPeople should be allowed to do what makes them the most productive, be given feedback and coached if they’re not productive enough and finally let go if that doesn’t work. That’s how it has always been. There are always many factors affecting one’s performance in person or remote. It is never possible to control people but you can certainly measure productivity if your management is good.
- danaris 4y ago> ...performance is not measured by any proper metric of success but rather by their physical presence or hours worked. I think that one thing that has become crystal clear over the course of this pandemic is what a large percentage of our managerial class thinks that this is the only worthwhile metric for performance—at least, the only metric for performance that is worth their time to try to measure.