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Elon Musk on Remote Work

• codechicago277 4y ago
  Tesla seems to get a lot of work out of its employees because of how appealing the company’s mission is, but this seems like a recipe for burnout. Every employee must work 40 hours per week in a main Tesla office, unless Elon Musk himself personally approves the exception. Factory workers apparently have even more required of them.
  • Bhilai 4y ago
    From what I have heard from friends at Tesla, 40 hours is literally the minimum. A particular friend told me that they put 60-70 hours easily every week and so do their teammates.
    • nix23 4y ago
      As a European i am astonished that this is even legal, especially in factories where dangerous machines are in every corner.
      • ericmay 4y ago
        The same culture that embraces this is the same culture that will take risks to start a new electric automobile company. It's give and take. If the workers at the factory are hourly they're also being paid overtime to do this work. My parents worked at Honda in Ohio and often worked more than 40 hours/week because they would get paid overtime. Safety incidents happen because that's just life, but most issues are attributable to drugs/alcohol, and people being scumbags. Instead of banning something, I think we need to make sure we're allowing people to seek employment options that work best for them with sensible safety practices of course. Being able to work overtime, for example, afforded my parents a great life and a reasonable "retirement" age. You might say, well they could get paid more and join a union, etc. and while I don't care too much about unions one way or another, Honda employees routinely reject unionization because they're really happy with their employment arrangement. I bet Tesla is similar. Speaking for Honda, many people go straight from high school to work on the factory floor. They work overtime, and they have to do a good job, but if you go and ask the employees or the town of Marysville everyone is pretty happy with the arrangement. Again, I'm not sure why Tesla would be dissimilar except that it's popular so it makes the headlines. In the case of office workers, software engineers, or others who are salaried, well they're professionals and they're paid a lot of money. The first reaction to seeing something like "xyz is happening at Tesla" shouldn't be to ban something that you don't understand.
        • nix23 4y ago
          I was not talking about tesla, i was talking about working 60 hours in a risky environment, but hey why not work 120? Or better, sleep in the factory eat there and pay for it? >My parents worked at Honda in Ohio and often worked more than 40 hours/week because they would get paid overtime. Yes that's normal, sometimes you have to do overtime, but 60 hours at a regular basis is something else.
          • camjohnson26 4y ago
            You’re now accidentally describing the Shanghai factory
            • nix23 4y ago
              "accidentally" ;)
      • jamiequint 4y ago
        This general attitude is why Europe has barely produced any great new companies in decades.
        • cdelsolar 4y ago
          HSBC, Airbus, Deutsche Telekom, AXA, Shell, Nestle, Barclays, Metro, L'Oreal, BP, Michelin, AstraZeneca, Air France, Christian Dior, Philips, Anheuser-Busch, Vodafone, Lufthansa, Volkswagen, Siemens, Allianz, Bosch, Unilever, Maersk, Renault, Saint-Gobain, Bayer, Nokia, Ericsson, BT Group, Accenture, Madrigal Elektromotoren GmbH
          • MockObject 4y ago
            You do realize that by including companies from the 19th and early 20th century, you're agreeing with him?
          • nix23 4y ago
            They are all older then a decade (some more then 100 years), he's not wrong that europe has massive problems making "big new company's", however the conclusion that it has something todo with the ~absence of exploitation is probably wrong ;)
            • sdze 4y ago
              Europes business landscape is distinctively different. In Europe you have many small global champions (mostly specialized in something that only they can produce well) and only few Mega-Corporations compared to US or Asia. I think this is a better diversification than concentrating all GDP into a few big player.
          • badwolf 4y ago
            "but europe didn't make facebook!"
          • fbkr 4y ago
            > Madrigal Elektromotoren GmbH Wait, isn't this a fictitious company from breaking bad?
      • masklinn 4y ago
        FLSA exemptions are great! And if an employee is not exempt you can just misclassify them, they probably have no way to know they're not exempt, and if they complain you can completely coincidentally not-at-all-in-retaliation fire them because at-will employment bebe.
    • mnsc 4y ago
      But they get to build cars! Very expensive cars! That fundamentally alter which limited resource we start wars over!
      • nix23 4y ago
        >That fundamentally alter which limited resource we start wars over! Sodium? https://www.unige.ch/communication/communiques/en/2022/un-nouvel-electrolyte-pour-des-piles-plus-vertes-et-plus-sures https://www.unige.ch/communication/communiques/en/2022/un-no...
      • shiftpgdn 4y ago
        It's getting very tiresome to see big oil/right wing talking points repeated on HN constantly. You can go read the Tesla impact report here: https://www.tesla.com/impact https://www.tesla.com/impact and see that they're doing their best to eliminate conflict minerals in their battery chemistry.
        • matthewmacleod 4y ago
          I mean, you can also hit up the Shell website and read all about how good they are for the environment, driving the transition to clean energy etc.
          • shiftpgdn 4y ago
            I know you're taking the piss but I worked for a Shell subsidiary for 2 years very recently and they actually take all the "green" stuff very seriously despite the fact their core business accounts for 2% of global co2 emissions. It's very bizarre and much of the internal "greenwashing" dialog reads like a catholic confessional. With that out of the way there is a difference between corporate PR greenwashing and literally changing battery chemistries to not contain as many rare earth minerals.
    • longtimegoogler 4y ago
      It's the same at SpaceX. Everyone I know who has worked there said the pay sucks and the hours are long and the only reason to do it is a passion for the industry. Musk seems to be modeling his companies on the video gaming industry.
      • somenameforme 4y ago
        I wouldn't say it's the industry, but the mission. You can earn more and work less at practically any other major aerospace company, and also get hired more easily. But instead of working on a goal of getting humans living on Mars, you're working on a goal of maximizing quarterly gains for shareholders.
        • notfromhere 4y ago
          You're still maximizing value for shareholders, it's just wrapped in baloney about a Mars mission.
  • ramesh31 4y ago
    >Tesla seems to get a lot of work out of its employees because of how appealing the company’s mission is, but this seems like a recipe for burnout. Even moreso it was Musk's personal brand that made his companies so desirable to work for. A brand that he has spent the last few years torching to the ground on Twitter. He'll still be able to pay senior folks enough to stick around for a while. But the new grad pipeline is most likely drying up at this point.
    • turtledove 4y ago
      He's gone from "building cool shit, but holy crap the hours are long" to "long hours for a toxic edgelord who has consistently over promised and under delivered" in the span of a decade.
  • optimiz3 4y ago
    What is eggregious about a 40hr work week at the office?
    • ra7 4y ago
      Minimum 40hr work week.
      • optimiz3 4y ago
        Thats how it is in most salaried jobs in FAANMG.
        • ra7 4y ago
          I don't recall any FAANMG CEOs writing threatening emails to employees mandating them to work more than 40 hours. Do you have any examples?
          • optimiz3 4y ago
            Who's mandating more than 40 hours?
            • ra7 4y ago
              Did you read his emails? > Anyone who wishes to do remote work must be in the office for a minimum (and I mean *minimum*) of 40 hours per week or depart Tesla. This is less than we ask of factory workers.
              • optimiz3 4y ago
                40 hours minimum means you only need to be there 40 hours, like most salaried full time jobs.
                • ra7 4y ago
                  You're just sticking to semantics. It's well known all his companies require you to work more than 40 hours. Combine that with these emails, it's easy to understand what the expectations are.
• toomuchtodo 4y ago
  Musk is free to make these demands, Tesla employees are free to seek remote work at a more progressive (operating model, not political) org. (personal opinion: remote work is the future except on the factory floor or Dojo datacenter in Tesla's case, Elon's belief systems are...erratic)
  • dgb23 4y ago
    I think the interesting part here seems to be the tragicomical delivery of the message.
    • ramesh31 4y ago
      It reads like a person drunk on their own kool-aid. I can imagine "richest person ever" being a title that goes to your head. He's unhinged, and going full Howard Hughes.
      • toolz 4y ago
        Going full "Hughes"? Exactly which policy has Musk put abnormally large influence on? Maybe the <$1MM lobbying tesla does? (compared to the ~$15MM amazon does in an arguably much less regulated space) The only thing I see with Musk becoming the richest man alive doing is putting a target on his back for unjustified attacks. He is the better of the billionaires and the world would have progressed technologically many decades farther if all billionaires behaved as he does. Not that I would claim that is "better" for humanity (as that is a very hard metric to define), but I don't think it's hard to imagine that being more optimal.
        • phillipcarter 4y ago
          I think OP is referring to how Musk acts like a drug addict. Because he does.
          • toolz 4y ago
            If we're not talking about hughes conquest to control the government then I'm at even more of a loss to how there's any comparison to Musk. Exactly how is Musk anything like the extremely OCD recluse? Musk who is notorious for sleeping in factories isn't anything like that so the only conclusion I can draw is that people just thought of the first "rich bad guy" that came to mind and drew a (weak) comparison.
• djohnston 4y ago
  We can criticise the on premise policy but at least Elon walks the walk, I find it inspiring. He lives in the factories!
  • invalidusernam3 4y ago
    He spends a lot of time posting memes on twitter for someone who supposedly lives in the factory.
  • dangrossman 4y ago
    He's getting paid $18 million dollars per day to pretend he lives in the factories, doing none of the dangerous and backbreaking manual work most of the people in the building are doing for under $18/hour. I'm sure they're super inspired.
    • pionar 4y ago
      Yeah, exactly. When I worked in a factory, the execs "working with us" were just in the way to get their monthly photo ops.
    • oneoff786 4y ago
      It probably would be relatively inspiring to have your CEO in the factory and not in his top floor c suite in a fancy suit using the only clean toilets that the whole building has to offer.
      • dangrossman 4y ago
        According to the factory workers, it's terrifying. He's known for walking around the factory rage firing employees at random. I think they'd prefer he be anywhere else. > "Employees knew about such rampages. Sometimes Musk would terminate people; other times he would simply intimidate them. One manager had a name for these outbursts—Elon’s rage firings—and had forbidden subordinates from walking too close to Musk’s desk at the Gigafactory out of concern that a chance encounter, an unexpected question answered incorrectly, might endanger a career." https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-tesla-life-inside-gigafactory/ https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-tesla-life-inside-giga... https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-reportedly-terrified-tesla-staff-with-his-firing-sprees-2018-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-reportedly-terrifi...
• baggachipz 4y ago
  Beatings will continue until morale improves!
• bodge5000 4y ago
  He also said in a tweet about it that employees who don't like it can "pretend to work somewhere else". I guess he can pretend he has any senior engineers left as well. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1531867103854317568 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1531867103854317568 That being said, as much as I'm not a fan of this at all, it is good to see that the execs are included (or at least the email was sent to them, so I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt). Often the people at the top who are pushing for these policies don't apply the same to themselves.
  • subsubzero 4y ago
    The problem I have with forcing execs to the same policy as workers when it comes to return to office is that most tech offices are located in extremely expensive cities where most employees now can not afford a decent house to raise a family. The execs can live anywhere in the world and lavishly on their salaries but in the bay area a average house runs about $1.6M, try to buy that on a 100-200k a year salary.(note tesla office is in palo alto where the avg. price of a house is $4M dollars, I don't know how much the TX office home prices are)
    • bodge5000 4y ago
      Oh no I agree, I don't like the policy at all, but if he's going to enforce the policy anyway, at least enforce it equally. Don't get me wrong though, I'd be handing in my notice either way
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    • api 4y ago
      Housing costs are the elephant in the living with this issue and a ton of others. It's IMHO a domestic crisis in the US. Unfortunately the people running the country are benefiting from it, including the older members of the middle and upper middle class sitting on gigantic amounts of home equity.
  • 4y ago
• pulse7 4y ago
  I love working for "companies that don't require this" and shipping (in Elon's view) non-"great new products"... and being able to spend time with my family every afternoon/evening...
  • zionic 4y ago
    On the one hand I _know_ Elon is right (even if I don't like admitting it). On the other I know that there's a social/societal benefit to keeping remote work normalized and I'm beginning to think it's worth the economic cost. Edit: I can’t reply because of the stupid rate limit soft-ban. I think there are definitely ICs that are equally (or more) productive at home. I don’t think this is true for the general population, or even the general population of tech workers. From what I’ve seen industries that require above-average collaboration have suffered the most.
    • cdelsolar 4y ago
      he's not right. i'm more productive at home.
      • zionic 4y ago
        I’m sure many are. Unfortunately I don’t believe this is true for the majority of people.
    • phphphphp 4y ago
      Right about what? There’s great economic value in collocated work, absolutely, and I personally much prefer it… but there’s also great economic value in remote work. The premise that the last 2 years (in which remote work was forced because of a disruptive global event) is representative of remote work’s economic value doesn’t hold up. A more accurate take is, many companies are unable to realise the economic value of remote work because they’re still operating as companies that only know how to realise the economic value of collocated work. Musk is one of them. He’s right… about his own deficiencies.
      • 4y ago
• jklinger410 4y ago
  If the owner of the company I worked for, who invested well over 40 hour weeks so he could become insanely rich, wrote an email that referred to 40 hours minimum in such a flippant way, I would 100% find a new company to work for. This idea that Musk famously risked it all to make Tesla so he could come out as a billionaire does not scale down to an individual level for employees. Musk slept on the floor so he could become insanely wealthy, not to get a $10k/year raise. This type of manipulation is constantly abused by rich oligarchs. They start these endeavors usually with huge parachutes, and then expect their hourly employees to risk nearly as much as they did, with no parachutes, and without the world changing profits that come with it. Citing hard work the entire way, knowing full well that it is the hard work of their employees that they depend on to keep the gears moving, but that those hard workers will not become the next Musk or Gates, regardless of how many hours they put in. If I'm wrong, I want a list of millionaires that Musk has created. Bonus points if they still work at Tesla and didn't have to spin their experience off into another project, so the work-to-profit transfer can be 1:1.
  • exo762 4y ago
    > oligarchs Can Musk be considered such, considering his antagonistic relationship with current establishment? His acquisition of Twitter could be seen as his first move into politics realm.
    • matthewdgreen 4y ago
      The "current establishment" of the US comprises two major political parties that switch control back and forth (and sometimes control different parts of the US government simultaneously, as seems likely will occur in 2023.) I see no evidence that Musk is picking a fight with both parties, just the one that is currently disfavored to retain control in the next Congressional elections.
    • turtledove 4y ago
      His first move into politics? His platform (even when he wasn't an antagonistic asshole) was political - climate change, species survival, deregulation.
• eric4smith 4y ago
  Finally someone said it. There was a reason for the office. As an employer I can tell you most (not all) workers are not able to properly contribute remotely. Some jobs further require people to be together to properly collaborate. Communication is already very hard already, and “Out of sight, out of mind” is a real thing. I hope more companies insist workers come back to the office and end the madness of everyone demanding remote work. In principle remote is doable but in practice most humans are easily distracted and we will be distracted.
  • and0 4y ago
    I was significantly more distracted and less productive in an office. It's the same with everyone I've spoken to, in tech or not. And with all the side effects, particularly the crazy energy use to move people around needlessly, it's such a net positive for society to just embrace remote work. I'm going to guess that, as an employer, you're doing something massively wrong to not be able to to trade 2 extra hours saved by the commute into at least equal productivity. Unless the work requires in-person & physical collaboration for a very specific reason, you're doing something wrong.
    • api 4y ago
      I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say this is very much a "your mileage may vary" situation and that there is no panacea in terms of work arrangement. It's pros and cons all the way down. Same goes for debates over what type of office layout or setup to use. There is no panacea, only tradeoffs. If you run a company it's your responsibility to decide for your company, taking into account your industry and team and such. Don't just follow trends or reactions-to-trends. All the remote work success stories I know of are in software, law, consulting, graphical or video design/editing, or finance where one is dealing almost 100% with intangible things that can be transferred just fine in digital form. Tesla makes cars. With the exception of the software team most Tesla work involves physical objects, and even with the software team it involves making software to operate a physical object. That sort of work is quite a bit harder to send remote. Factory work is basically impossible to remote and will remain so unless we get telepresence level robots that can be operated remotely. Lastly I have to keep harping on a major hidden driver of so many employees demanding remote work: fucking housing costs in major cities. Remote work has allowed a ton of people to escape high cost of living cities where they are subjected to ever-increasing rents and are permanently locked out of homeownership without a liquidity event. I've heard multiple stories of people being pushed to return to the office in Silicon Valley only to retort with a demand for a 2X raise to afford housing. Unless housing costs in these cities improve employers are going to have a hard time recruiting anyone who isn't straight out school in those places. You simply can't raise a family in e.g. San Francisco unless you are rich. The choices will be remote or to relocate the whole company to a more affordable locale. Also IMHO means nobody should be building new companies in these cities unless they are going remote-first or remote-optional or are willing to pay 2-4X salaries... but the latter will only drive local RE higher. Build where it is economically rational to build.
• KhalPanda 4y ago
  Gotta get people back to commuting ASAP, otherwise nobody will need Tesla's, right?
  • toolz 4y ago
    For a man that has been investigated by the SEC for tanking his own companies stock price with a few tweets, it's hard to imaging someone accusing him of having ulterior motives for the sole purpose of increasing his wealth. I certainly don't know him personally, but outward evidence would suggest to me that your comments implications are without merit.
    • rurp 4y ago
      It was only a handful of weeks ago that Elon saved himself 140+ million dollars by flagrantly violating securities laws. This has been discussed endlessly as part of the Twitter news.
  • kylecordes 4y ago
    This is clever, but it is unlikely his motivation is to microscopically increase demand for Teslas by having Tesla's white-collar workforce commute more. It is much more likely that he earnestly believes that the trade-offs for Tesla organization favor a fully on-site office workforce, knowing that will drive away some excellent team members. (It's hard to argue with Tesla's success; but it seems to me the future more broadly is away from on-site office workforces... even and especially at companies doing well.)
    • PestoDiRucola 4y ago
      Of course he does not believe that making Tesla workers work in-office will increase demand for Tesla, but Elon Musk dunking on remote work is bound to have some effect on other tech CEOs which might create a ripple effect and cause even more people to start commuting again.
• T0pH4t 4y ago
  He is not exactly wrong... email could be a bit better phrased and mandating X hrs may be a bit extreme. Overall though his main point about a great product not being built over the phone IMO is correct. At the very least you stand a substantially smaller chance of doing so...
  • rob74 4y ago
    I think the part that people most take issue with is the "you have to spend 40 hours in the office (the other 40 hours you are expected to work per week you can do from home)" part...
  • tamaharbor 4y ago
    Executive level e-mails are often curt and to the point.
• exabrial 4y ago
  I'll be the odd man out and say he's right. Communication is hard enough to do effectively, let alone over remote work. The only formula that seems to work: relationships were developed in person then moved to remote. But unfortunately this makes it impossible to onboard anyone. Furthermore getting this to work at scale still seems to be a challenge. His presentation style... definitely cold and brusk. Wouldn't be my approach
  • eric4smith 4y ago
    I’m another odd man out joining you.
  • turtledove 4y ago
    We just went through over two years of fully remote work and our productivity has never been higher. We've onboarded many people during that time. It's not even been particularly difficult.
    • LosWochosWeek 4y ago
      I was onboarded with 3 other colleagues, while the company was fully remote. I'm fully integrated into the work and company culture. I love my colleagues and get along great with them. I don't undertand this "you can't build relationships over Teams" sentiment. Have people forgot about online gaming? There are millions -- I'd wager a billion -- close friendships that started (and maybe stayed) fully online. The bar for colleague-level acquaintances is much lower.
    • nunez 4y ago
      Slight counterpoint: Productivity is really high, but having basically zero relationships with my co-workers is isolating, and I work best when I have a commute and a dedicated working space.
      • neoromantique 4y ago
        I worked remotely for over six years now so my 2pence: >I work best when I have a commute and a dedicated working space. I sometimes have this urge too, thankfully renting out an office space is fairly cheap and can be done quite flexibly for when you need, and most importantly -- WHERE you need it. Otherwise having a dedicated home office is great, but I understand that it might not be so if your family/living situation is different. >having basically zero relationships with my co-workers is isolating It doesn't have to be this way, you absolutely can make long lasting and very meaningful bonds without ever seeing a person. And productivity wise, it is all about processes and culture, both office and remote can work wonderfully or be a disaster.
• PaulKeeble 4y ago
  Elon Musk a few months from now "There is a labour shortage and nobody wants to work".
• axg11 4y ago
  Whichever side of the remote vs. in-person debate you fall on, I think this is a net positive for the industry. More companies are starting to become strongly opinionated on the topic and that leads to a wider spectrum of options when searching for a job. There are many people out there who hate fully-remote and are suffering as a result of the isolation. There are also people out there who are thriving due to remote work. Both can co-exist at different companies. Of course, springing this on already remote workers is problematic. Tesla is no stranger to low employee retention. In the short term they will have an exodus but perhaps in the longer term they'll have a workforce more aligned to their culture.
  • tannerc 4y ago
    This is an excellent take. I personally never want to work in an office again, but I know many—many, many—people who never want to work remotely again after the past two years of pandemic. We need both: companies that want to support fully remote staff and those that want everyone in-office every day. Having companies with strong stances is a good shift for everyone because enables workers to easily figure out where they do (or do not) want to work.
  • barnabee 4y ago
    Agree 100%. The decision is far more about the culture leaders want to create in their organisations than about the “right” or “best” way to do things.
    • falcolas 4y ago
      > The decision is far more about the culture leaders want to create in their organisations than about the “right” or “best” way to do things. Given the distain in Elon Musk's messages on this topic, he is very much opining on what is "right" and "best", and not about the culture he wants to build.
      • barnabee 4y ago
        To quote Matt Levine[1], who I think was making the same point more eloquently: > Elon Musk does not like remote work, which, you know, fine, but this strikes me as being less about remote work and more about a general culture of being ostentatiously intense [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-06-01/crypto-clearing-and-credit https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-06-01/crypto... | https://archive.ph/bouPL https://archive.ph/bouPL
• malwarebytess 4y ago
  So based on this clarification, then, it was targeted to executives. If that is the case I really don't see the problem.
  • Matthias247 4y ago
    It isn't. It's just asking them to enforce it further.
  • camjohnson26 4y ago
    2 emails, one to executives one to the whole company.
• ar_lan 4y ago
  I guess I'll be waiting to apply to Twitter until after all this Elon drama is over :)
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• whatever1 4y ago
  Work harder slaves! Twitter’s acquisition will not pay itself!
• jefflombardjr 4y ago
  Well hardly surprising that a large manufacturer of "commuting devices" is against remote work.
  • gnulinux 4y ago
    Right, if people never commute to work, they'd never use cars. It's not like our entire country is built with the assumption that you'll need to use a car for going literally anywhere (unless you live in few select big cities with great public transportation). This argument is so weak.
    • cableshaft 4y ago
      The number of miles I put on my car per year has gone down to about 40% or less what I was doing pre-pandemic. I got the standard lease of 12k miles per year for my new car and I'm on track to do about 6k miles this year. Pre-pandemic I think I was doing 14-16k per year. For this past year I'm driving about what I used to outside of work, so working from home has been the only major change (2020 was different, I barely used my car and had to put fuel stabilizer in it a couple times).
• martindbp 4y ago
  I don't understand the outrage. I also like WFH, don't want to work more than 40 hrs a week etc, but Tesla is a pressure cooker of a company, aiming for the sky, what do you expect? It's not a lifestyle business kind of company. I like Tesla but would never want to work there myself, that's for a specific type of extremely ambitious, smart people without many obligations to family etc.
  • taylodl 4y ago
    In other words, it's not sustainable. Any business plan requiring all employees to be superheroes is a business plan destined for failure.
    • therealdrag0 4y ago
      How’s that? Tesla, Amazon, Apple, have operated like this successfully for some time.
      • taylodl 4y ago
        They don't require all employees to be superheroes. They've identified the key roles needing to go above and beyond and then focus on hiring high-quality employees. Superheroes not required. That's how you make it sustainable.
      • SauciestGNU 4y ago
        Apple? They might not be remote friendly but I've only heard stellar things about wlb. Amazon though, and any musk properties are notoriously run like sweatshops. Yeah maybe TSLA isn't massively overvalued and equity will continue to push that TC to the top tier, but call me a skeptic.
        • therealdrag0 4y ago
          Maybe software. I personally know multiple mechanical engineers (smart ones from Berkeley) who were worked into the ground at Apple. Like >55h work weeks. Even if tsla is massively overvalued (which I agree is likely) that doesn’t mean it’s a failed business plan, a crash of stock price back to “normal” does not mean the business plan is a failure. Aka even without high valuations tsla could have a toxic work place and still be stably producing successful cars.
• 015a 4y ago
  This is probably unpopular, and certainly a personal opinion; but the more time I've put into remote gigs (in-person gig going remote during COVID, then switching to a full-remote company) the more I agree. Everyone has different life contexts, and for some people remote is the best way for them to be productive. It's also likely that it's generally a better balance between corporate demands and peoples' lives. For me; its made work worse. The worst part is on-boarding new remote employees; especially those with less seniority in the industry. It SUCKS. It really sucks. Effective onboarding is quite fundamentally predicated on drive-by questions; and remote makes asking any drive-by question ten times less efficient, even in the most well-meaning teams, its typing, its timezones, its meetings scheduled for the next day, its screen sharing at 720p because someone doesn't know how to use Zoom, its that gut uncertainty that the "hi do you have ten minutes to meet" message from your manager could mean anything from a catch-up to a you're fired because you're blind to every nonverbal social cue anyone in-person could pick up on. Then there's the separation of work and home. Driving sucks; undoubtably. But put that aside and just look at the space. Everyone's home is different, but I'll describe the few experiences I've had. At the start: living alone. Going from constant, positive human interaction every day to nothing but pixels on a screen. The people who will clinically admit this negatively affects their mental health are oftentimes the same people pushing for more remote work; like having their cake and eating it too, except "eating it" means "destroying your brain". Then, living with a SO who was also working remote. I actually have no idea how people manage this without a 3 bedroom house in the suburbs. Most people don't have this, and I'm sure it works for those who do. She's on meetings half the day; I'm in meetings a quarter the day; the cats are zooming around at 10 miles per hour; the dog needs to be walked; we agree "we need a bigger space" and then look at real estate prices and realize that has to mean moving to the middle of nowhere and leaving our entire lives behind (don't worry; we can still play games and chat online with our old friends; thus, we've remotified our entire lives, from work to play; the only experience we enjoy in-person anymore is shopping at the suburban walmart in the strip mall. And, of course, each other, and we'll keep telling ourselves that's enough). I can't reconcile the facts that I worked in this industry for five years, in person, and never experienced the burn-out I am now, with the fact that everything should be better. The job is fantastic. Remote coworkers, unbelievably friendly, smart, knowledgable. No commute. Great technology. Pooping on my own toilet every day. Everything is great, most of it sucks. Working for Tesla would suck though. "40 hours a week at least" is insane.
• UnpossibleJim 4y ago
  The messaging is... problematic, which is nothing new to Musk's style, or lack there of. But this isn't very far fetched from what Nadella was saying in 2020 of Cook has started to say or Google has been saying of late(but with MUCH better messaging). These corporations with huge offices and large management infrastructures mean they have invested large amounts of money in both. To completely retool their management style/concept and leave their gaudy, one-off offices half empty would be a huge waste of capital and, more importantly, ego. To begin from a place of "Get your work done and we'll review that" instead of "let's see how many hours you're willing to work to show your dedication" is a giant shift in the relationship dynamic, as well. I understand that this isn't all managers and companies, but I think most people can agree that there is a prevalence in the software industry (and others, I assume... I only know a few, so I stick to software, art and cooking but only software seems relevant to this conversation).
• tamaharbor 4y ago
  I am old enough to remember when everyone loved Elon Musk.
• sys_64738 4y ago
  He's the modern day Howard Hughes.
• yummybear 4y ago
  I used to be a Musk fan. Maybe I didn't know enough about working conditions. But with the recent twitter stories, and this horrible bossy statement, I'm done. He's just an asshole.
• kelseyfrog 4y ago
  Elon clearly has a Hobbesian conceptualization of power. Key phrases in his memo precipitate gracefully from the very same naturall power, instrumentall power, relative power, and ceding power that Hobbes lays out in Leviathan. Let me demonstrate. > Tesla has and will create and actually manufacture the most exciting and meaningful products of any company on Earth. Here Elon describes the consequences for working from the office. It is the use of power as the ability to secure well-being or personal advantage 'to obtain some future apparent Good'. It's to affect a change in the world - the ability to manufacture exciting and meaningful products. > If you don't show up, we will assume you have resigned. Elon directly connects presence with power in this statement. Resignation is the ultimate absence of the power to affect change within Telsa in the same way that not showing up is. Conversely, Tesla's power is the aggregation of the presence of its workforce. Instrumentall power is definitionally the aggregation of power and they buying of compliance. Tesla's buying of compliance are the wages paid in exchange for labor. > There are of course companies that don't require this, but when was the last time they shipped a great new product? It's been a while. In this passage, Elon establishes a conceptualization of relative power. He strikes a comparison between companies that require presence and those that don't. Those that do have the power to ship 'great new product's, and those that don't, don't. > The more senior you are, the more visible must be your presence. This equation constructs an equivalence between power and presence. It is under-girded by the assumption that a manager's power is the aggregation of power (compliance) ceded by their direct reports. Those with more aggregate power must show more presence. "That's why I lived at the factory so much," is evidence that Elon sees himself as having the most presence and therefore the most power. I've demonstrated how Elon has a Hobbesian account of power directly tied to Hobbes' ideas of naturall power, instrumentall power, relative power, and ceding power. Elon sees himself as the culmination of this power and consequently he see's Tesla as his Leviathan.
• renewiltord 4y ago
  I don't understand why this is a big deal. He wants to run his company like this. You guys don't want to work at a company like this. Neither of you wants the other but you're upset by this?
• chasely 4y ago
  I wonder how IC employees and middle managers will deal with the mandate. Let's assume you manage a team of six engineers and two people decide to just not come into the office but continue working. Will you fire them? It would take 6-9 months to hire, onboard, and get the new engineers to a point comparable to the ones you just fired. Meanwhile I'm guessing you're not going to get much leniency in hitting our KPIs because 33% of your team just left.
• nunez 4y ago
  Dang, I guess all of HashiCorp's products, or the handfuls of startups that have launched within the last few years, or some of Apple's newest features, are "not great" per his definition then? I love my Tesla, and I definitely prefer working from an office, but this feels like borderline 9/9/6 talk, and I can't support that.
• newshorts 4y ago
  So I wonder what happens to all those fully remote twitter jobs…
• nickm12 4y ago
  This is crazy talk from Elon. Demanding your employees spend 40 hours a week "visibly present" in an office, rather than judging them by the value they have delivered to your business is absurd. I very much enjoy working from an office and have been commuting to my office for the last year for my software job when almost none of my coworkers were. After March I was hoping more people would come back, but its really really low. I'd estimate about 5% of people are mostly working from the office, and 20% are coming in 1-2 days a week or for team events. These roughly matches what I've seen in polling of tech workers. People are voting with their feet. I wish it were different. I would like to work in the future with a primarily in-office culture, but I don't see how that happens. A company that demands 40 hours in-person from people who can work remotely is not going to be able to attract the necessary talent.
• giuliomagnifico 4y ago
  Well, if you are working from home you don’t need to buy a insert Tesla model to go to work, quite simply =]