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Ask HN: Did the Tesla return to work happen?
There was a big splash a couple of months ago with the letter Elon sent employees saying get back to the office.
What happened?
Did people go back?
Did people quit?
- slowmotiony 4y agoMaybe it was like in my company (big investment bank). The CEO wrote a global mail asking everyone to start coming back to the office - that was 3 months ago and the office is still empty, seems like everybody just kind of ignored it. :-)
- hotcoffeebear 4y agopeople who work for tesla probably know not to listen him.
- koheripbal 4y agoFrom an organizational perspective, this impotent messaging (if it happens repeatedly) is a sign that management is making decisions without vetting them first. Even the CEO should talk to his team about the viability of decisions before just making a company wide announcement. As an investor, I'd stay away from such companies.
- phendrenad2 4y agoAs an employee, too. Can't be fun to work under such ineffectual management...
- wiltonn 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- seibelj 4y agoNo comment on Tesla but the divergence between big companies and startups on the WFH issue is the first new tangible benefit to working at a startup over a bigco in a while. They never reformed the ridiculous tax treatment of ISOs and AMT. The bull market made RSUs and 500k yearly pay realistic at bigcos even for middling employees. But bigcos don’t trust their own employees and have to justify their massive capital investments in office space. So there is a real, tangible benefit to startup life over cushy bigco.
- brightball 4y agoISO?
- occz 4y agoIncentive Stock Options, I assume.
- seibelj 4y agoIncentive Stock Options. The US government makes you pay taxes on the full paper gain the moment you exercise even though a real exit at that price is still a long ways off or likely still low probability. It makes average employees either bound to an employer (and never get favorable capital gains), or they have to be wealthy enough to pay the full tax hit the year of exercise and not be destitute if it never pays off later. In reality the rich get richer etc. etc.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago> or they have to be wealthy enough to pay the full tax hit the year of exercise Or they could take an 83(b) election when granted the options. Or they could exercise some fraction of their options. Or they could sell some of the shares in the multibillion-dollar secondary market when they exercise to pay for the taxes. Your broader point stands. But there are more choices than “eat it.”
- seibelj 4y ago
- taf2 4y agoOur company (~70 people) has gone to a 3 days in the office Tuesday through Thursday and wfh Monday and Friday . Initially we did pick your 2 wfh days but then I realized what makes being in the office good is being together. So orienting the in office days to be the same for everyone means we have a few days in the middle that people can be together and collaborate and on the edges Monday and Friday remote. It works pretty good - we make some exceptions for people far from the office and of course we have fully remote but I like it it’s created a good balance….
- user_named 4y agoDid you care to ask your employees what they think? Why not?
- randomh3r0 4y agoIs the assumption here being that all employees would prefer 100% WFH?
- user_named 4y ago
- PragmaticPulp 4y agoFor what it’s worth: I’m at a company that did survey employees on this question. The results actually leaned toward return to office for a lot of the non-engineering parts of the company. Within engineering, the more junior people really wanted to return to office. The people with 10 years of experience and 2 kids at home really wanted to stay home. Not surprising, really. Our engineering team remained remote, but not everyone is happy about it. I get emails every other week asking engineers to not come into the office very often because we don’t have enough extra desks for remote employees to be in the office very frequently. > Did you care to ask your employees what they think? Why not? While I do think it’s very important to keep employee’s desires and career goals in consideration, questions like these aren’t necessarily aligned with what’s best for the company or getting work done. If you survey employees about how many hours they’d prefer to work each week or how big they want their next raise to be, you’re not going to get answers that reflect what’s best or even realistic from a business perspective. That doesn’t mean you can ignore your employees desires, of course! But you do have to keep in mind that most employees will default to responding with what’s best for them personally, and for a lot of people from the general population that can mean something very different than what’s best for their team or the company.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- abledon 4y agoThere are alot of videos on youtube by ex-tesla agile consultant/teacher/lead 'joe justice' which go into how Tesla factories operate. Its all in the factory... an example he gave was for most people writing software, they are in the factory in a chair w/ a laptop beside the cars. Edit: as someone pointed out, he was a consultant who worked for a short period. nonetheless, I still think the videos are quite eye opening to how they operate day-to-day (while navigating around NDA in explanations).
- SketchySeaBeast 4y agoI understand dogfooding and ensuring your developers feel the users pain, but this ain't that. I don't know what this, but it doesn't seem conducive to being able to write quality code.
- sschueller 4y agoThis guy was at Tesla for less than 2 months (according to his linked-in profile) yet he starts every video that he is an ex-Tesla employee. Where I live you generally have a 3 month probation period and I don't think anyone who leaves within that period would even write this in their CV.
- jsty 4y ago> I don't think anyone who leaves within that period would even write this in their CV Oh that's interesting, I'd have taken the opposite view - that having a 2 month gap on your CV would be interpreted by most HR depts as worse than explaining a 2-month job as "not a good fit" Edit: I guess I should clarify that I don't see gaps in CVs as a bad thing, but from personal experience I know some HR depts have an irrational fear of them.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoIf you think having a 2-month gap in employment on your resume is “bad”, you have not been in the workforce very long.
- iamwil 4y agoYes. At least partially.
- dinkledunk 4y ago"Did A, B, or C happen?" "Yes. At least partially." So, which of these did happen?
- mitchdoogle 4y agoThe main question is the title. "Did the Tesla return to work happen?"
- iamwil 4y agoThings can happen in degrees. Don't be snarky. Not everyone that works at Tesla returned to work-in-person. Some have.
- dinkledunk 4y agoNot being snarky. It's legitimately unclear what the poster meant and the answer is vague enough that it could be true for anything. > Did people go back? Yes. At least partially. > Did people quit? Yes. At least partially. See? It's confusing.
- loco5niner 4y agoActually, your questions were: Did A Happen? did b? did c? did d?
- mattzito 4y agoMy team at google, we originally told everyone to come and go as they pleased back in February. That seemed the most flexible and the most employee friendly, but when we surveyed the team they didn’t like having no guidance on when they should be in the office. So we labeled three days “preferred in-office” and made it clear you could still work from home on those days if you wanted. People much prefer this system.
- opminion 4y agoNational holidays have the same coordination role: even if one had the same total days of vacation per year (as paid by employer), having some of them fixed by societal convention is an advantage for those who want to go to their village and meet their friends and relatives.
- smugma 4y agoThis is why Christmas shutdowns (and Thanksgiving) are the best holidays. Whenever we have a new person, we tell them how seriously we take the shutdown and to not send the team any emails until after. In 2020, we had a manager join from a different FANG and she sent two emails the first Monday of break. Apparently another manager immediately texted her and told her to stop!
- BrandoElFollito 4y agoWhy are people reading emails during these breaks? By not reacting everyone would quickly understand that off means off.
- Cerium 4y agoRight? On a break like that I don't even have my laptop with me.
- BrandoElFollito 4y agoMaybe it's because I am French but all these stories about people working during breaks is insane. In all honesty, I have several work pals who do read their emails when on break (their choice) - I prefer coming back to 500 to 800 emails, quickly go though the important ones and realize that 8/9th of the problems solved themselves without my intervention.
- amelius 4y agoMusk forgot about it because he was too busy with Twitter.
- 93po 4y ago...there's tons of comments here explaining that it's in full effect?
- foobarbecue 4y agoCareful with your wording! "Return to work" annoys the heck out of people who worked hard all pandemic. You probably mean "return to on-site work."
- solarkraft 4y agoReturn to the company provided office. It's ludicrous to imply people weren't working before.
- jxf 4y agoI just say "return to office". As you say, the work was always happening.
- koheripbal 4y agoPeople who spend a lot of time at work arguing about corporate announcement word selection are probably also easily distracted from their job by other drama. Maybe it's useful to highlight them?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- sp332 4y agoAre you speaking for yourself?
- foobarbecue 4y agoI do find it annoying, probably because I know people who think remote work isn't work. I've caught myself accidentally using "return to work" as well and I appreciate when people catch me.
- mrguyorama 4y agoPeople gave me so much grief before the pandemic for working from home all the time. Not a soul has said anything to the extent "Oh that must be nice" since. Working from home has downsides that people refused to understand before they experienced it for themselves. Still better than a freaking "Open" office. I don't get deafened by HVAC noise at home, or have to pretend to be able to focus while two managers with nothing better to do blabber on about non-work things right next to my desk. And then those self same managers will have the gall to critique my work ethic.
- jpgvm 4y agoBy and large yes, people returned to the office however a lot are disgruntled and exceptions to work remotely largely depend on your manager and their ability to push that up the chain as Elon is meant to approve each exception personally. (in practice most of the full-time remote employees already had such exceptions but some newer hires during the pandemic weren't hired under that regime). However a lot of folks quit but it has less to do with the remote work policy and more to do with a massive options cliff that occurred recently. Once the golden handcuffs came off a lot of folk figured it was time to move on, which is fair given the hell they went through to deliver 3 and Y + the 10x appreciation in their options.
- april_22 4y agoI know some German engineers who quit Tesla and went back to the traditional German car manufacturers. Working for Tesla was hell and you aren't even paid that well.
- rhexs 4y ago
- dinkledunk 4y ago
- freemint 4y agoNot racist. Nationalist. American Exceptionalism, maybe.
- dinkledunk 4y agoEnglish is not my main language and I do not know the right word. But yes, that. Phobic of other cultures maybe.
- 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]