4 ms·

Why do people still work at Tesla, or does this toxic behavior attract toxic employees? I guess that seems to be the case, if you read about Uber under Kalanick

Why do people still work at Tesla, or does this toxic behavior attract toxic employees? I guess that seems to be the case, if you read about Uber under Kalanick, or employees crying in bathrooms at Amazon. Before that tweet the thread is talking about an email Musk sent: > Scoop: Elon Musk just sent an email to all staff outlining "Twitter 2.0", writing it will"need to be extremely hardcore". Long hours, high intensity. > People need to click "yes" to confirm being part of this by 5pm ET tomorrow, else they get 3 months severance. [...] Hah, "Click here to agree to a toxic workplace, or be fired"...

jmeister 4y ago
Do you know what it's like in military organizations around the world and in history? Most men don't have a problem with authoritarian hierarchies as long as the hierarchy is justified in their view. Tech people are extremely coddled and clueless about how the rest of the world works and the moral intuitions of normal people. "The authoritarian relation between the one who commands and the one who obeys rests neither on common reason nor on the power of the one who commands; what they have in common is the hierarchy itself, whose rightness and legitimacy both recognize and where both have their predetermined stable place." https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/uprising1313/files/2017/09/arendt_what-is-authority.pdf https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/uprising1313/files/2017/09/ar...
- ben_w 4y ago
  We may have it easy compared to the military, but then, we didn't join the military. Also, militaries do have to care about what the lowest ranks think. Not only to maintain recruiting in places without conscription, but also to avoid fragging in places that do have conscription: """Fragging is the deliberate or attempted killing by a soldier of a fellow soldier, usually a superior. U.S. military personnel coined the word during the Vietnam War, when such killings were most often attempted with a fragmentation grenade,[2] … The high number of fragging incidents in the latter years of the Vietnam War was symptomatic of the unpopularity of the war with the American public and the breakdown of discipline in the U.S. Armed Forces. Documented and suspected fragging incidents totalled nearly nine hundred from 1969 to 1972.[5]""" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragging While I am confident that Musk's behaviour is merely close to average USA industrial employment norms and this is just us techies being shocked by what that looks like (for example, while there are stories about Amazon running out of people interested in working there, I've not heard that about Tesla, SpaceX, TBC, or Neuralink), this latter scenario is one of the possible failure modes I foresee with actually trying to colonise Mars with Starship, as there just isn't an easy way out if/when things go wrong 40 million miles from alternative employment/governance.
- 988747 4y ago
  It changes with age. Men in their teens/twenties are followers, by your mid-thirties you start to question things.
  - themaninthedark 4y ago
    Pretty sure that the rebellion starts in the teens, source: myself, all my friends and now my friends children.
    - jmeister 4y ago
      These days the rebellion starts from kindergarten apparently. There needs to be balance between understanding and respecting tradition, and questioning it. On one end you have Iran/Taliban, on the other you have modern USA. Galileo was right, and his persecutors were right too.
    - 988747 4y ago
      Yes, but this rebellion is against the PARENTS. Teenage kids typically seek for the new meaning and purpose in their lives, that's why so many college students join charities, or civil rights groups, or cults... And they do not join those groups as leaders, they start at the bottom.
  - mooner 4y ago
    I'm past 40 and I see this in my workplace. All my colleagues who work long hours are in their 20s, particularly the fresh graduates who just joined. I try to gently tell them that they can just work their 7.5 hours per day and go home like us old guys, but they seem determined to burn the candle at both ends. Ah well, they'll learn - when they burn out.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  The military is a rather specialized scenario. "At-will employment", it's not.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- _djo_ 4y ago
  Militaries that rely on volunteers rather than conscription absolutely don't get away with being completely authoritarian and treating regular soldiers terribly. They have to form a social contract of sorts, where people put up with some loss of autonomy in specific areas in return for other benefits like education or training, autonomy in other areas they might value more (like small team leadership), and decent service conditions. No service members tolerate regular and capricious abuse, and leaders found to do that seldom remain in post long. It's not a perfect system of course, but abusive behaviour by leadership is definitely the exception. Issues around service conditions regularly go all the way to Congress and get resolved quickly and sometimes expensively, because the alternative is being unable to recruit or retain personnel, and that would be disastrous for a military that's already having a tough time doing both. Let's not justify abusive leadership. There's never a need for it.
- pjc50 4y ago
  We're _aware_ of that, but the past forty or so years of software development have been extremely anti-hierarchical - or the "hierarchy of one" / "benevolent dictator for life" flat structure. Hierarchy has its own failure modes. Into the valley of death rode the six hundred ..
mensetmanusman 4y ago
Identifying leaks is toxic? Overuse of the word is probably diluting its meaning.
- aniforprez 4y ago
  The toxicity is the forced requirement to agree to work long crappy hours or be fired
- adrr 4y ago
  Leaking documents is indicative of a a toxic environment where the trust has broken down in all directions.
  - mensetmanusman 4y ago
    If 0.00001% of the workforce leaks? Or does the % matter?
  - shapefrog 4y ago
    Its like when they slip a note into your sneakers in the sweat shop factory begging for help. 12 year olds can be such piece of shit sometimes, cant they just be grateful they get paid 2c and got selected for the special 36 hour shift to make shoes for us?
  - xeromal 4y ago
    I mean leaking could just be someone wanting to make a quick buck and selling secrets to a competitor.
  - dmix 4y ago
    That’s a strange take. There’s tons of reasons why people leak things to the press besides: political/ideological concerns, employees who felt jilted, people who like the attention, reporters hitting up employees for information, etc etc. It’s also far more likely to happen at a company that is a media darling where everything it does gets documented in papers around the world. So naturally there’s tons of outside pressure for information to leak compared to typical orgs.
ezconnect 4y ago
Information is very valuable and companies goes to great lengths to protect them.
sidibe 4y ago
> Why do people still work at Tesla, or does this toxic behavior attract toxic employees? It attracts Elon devotees. It remains to be seen if they can be as good as regular SWEs. I highly doubt it
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
  Needing to be able to silently patch your vehicle's software without consumer consent or even knowledge is a tactic admission that you can't meet automotive industry software 'standards'. Tesla has pushed the "we do it to bring amazing things to your car!"...quietly distracting people from the "...we fuck things up so often we're constantly having to patch your car" man behind the curtain.
  - mynameisvlad 4y ago
    As someone who drives a Tesla, by all means, fuck it up. Because it means it’s at least actually being worked on. Once you’re several years into owning a car, the outdated software really starts to show. Especially on mid-2010s cars where CarPlay and Android Auto weren’t a thing, you’re held back by really old shitty software that will never be updated. That is one thing that Tesla has, without a doubt, got right. And you can tell because most major manufacturers are also going to an OTA update system, even though it obviously costs far more in infrastructure and completely re-engineering their existing systems to support it.
chimen 4y ago
I have a special affinity for people using the term "toxic" in each of their arguments.
gaius_baltar 4y ago
> Why do people still work at Tesla, or does this toxic behavior attract toxic employees? A lot of money, perhaps? I'm not familiar with Tesla compensation levels, but this is the only reason I can think people may have to cope with this guy.
- hello639 4y ago
  >> Why do people still work at Tesla > A lot of money, perhaps? They work there for the mission, not the money. Tesla pays 100-150K USD for new grad SWE including stock options/RSU. For AI, it’s about 150-200K. Or you can drive 15 minutes to Google and a SWE gets 200K and AI gets 200-250K. Or “sell out” and work in quant finance for 400-500K new grad SWE as a 22 year old. So no, people do not work at Tesla/SpaceX for the money. I have many friends at Tesla, Neuralink, SpaceX, and they complain how little they are paid, how they have no free time, and how they hope the name brand on their resume gets them a higher paying job some day. Looks like they bought Elon’s bullshit.
EricDeb 4y ago
Tesla stock has made unreal gains the past 10 years probably people are motivated by money
memish 4y ago
"Click here to agree to an ambitious workplace". Like SpaceX, only the motivated will agree. That's a requirement for turning Twitter into a SpaceX or Tesla scale success.
- giantrobot 4y ago
  - memish 4y ago
    - netsharc 4y ago
      - memish 4y ago
        I never said to leave him alone or that he's a hero or that he's the only one driving humanity forward or that he's perfect. Sometimes he's an asshole. Sometimes he's an idiot. He's flawed like every human. Your childish cult-like "spaceman bad" programming and angry projection of your daddy issues says more about you than anyone.
        netsharc 4y ago
        Hey you think I'm a brainwashed cult member, and I think you're one, also with the projection issue. So... is this a Mexican stand-off?
    - giantrobot 4y ago
      > The comments I respond to are not cogent critiques. They are kneejerk mob hate bandwagoning that are anti-success, anti-progress and anti-humanity. It's sad. What's sad is seeing every critique of Musk as "anti-success, anti-progress and anti-humanity" or some sort of derangement against him. That is just absurd.
Firmwarrior 4y ago
Man, that sounds pretty sweet 3 months of severance, after a good 6+ month run of lame duck employment where the whole company didn't really do anything. I could take my time and buy a nice house out in the Midwest, then pick up an easy remote job for $100-150k I guess it's a different story if you dumped your life savings into a down payment and now you have to keep up with an $8000 Bay Area mortgage though
- jjav 4y ago
  > I could take my time and buy a nice house out in the Midwest You're not buying a house of any kind (let alone nice) with 3 months severance after taxes and day to day living expenses.
mzs 4y ago
Some are probably trapped by their visa.

jmeister 4y ago

Do you know what it's like in military organizations around the world and in history? Most men don't have a problem with authoritarian hierarchies as long as the hierarchy is justified in their view. Tech people are extremely coddled and clueless about how the rest of the world works and the moral intuitions of normal people. "The authoritarian relation between the one who commands and the one who obeys rests neither on common reason nor on the power of the one who commands; what they have in common is the hierarchy itself, whose rightness and legitimacy both recognize and where both have their predetermined stable place." https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/uprising1313/files/2017/09/arendt_what-is-authority.pdf https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/uprising1313/files/2017/09/ar...

ben_w 4y ago
We may have it easy compared to the military, but then, we didn't join the military. Also, militaries do have to care about what the lowest ranks think. Not only to maintain recruiting in places without conscription, but also to avoid fragging in places that do have conscription: """Fragging is the deliberate or attempted killing by a soldier of a fellow soldier, usually a superior. U.S. military personnel coined the word during the Vietnam War, when such killings were most often attempted with a fragmentation grenade,[2] … The high number of fragging incidents in the latter years of the Vietnam War was symptomatic of the unpopularity of the war with the American public and the breakdown of discipline in the U.S. Armed Forces. Documented and suspected fragging incidents totalled nearly nine hundred from 1969 to 1972.[5]""" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragging While I am confident that Musk's behaviour is merely close to average USA industrial employment norms and this is just us techies being shocked by what that looks like (for example, while there are stories about Amazon running out of people interested in working there, I've not heard that about Tesla, SpaceX, TBC, or Neuralink), this latter scenario is one of the possible failure modes I foresee with actually trying to colonise Mars with Starship, as there just isn't an easy way out if/when things go wrong 40 million miles from alternative employment/governance.
988747 4y ago
It changes with age. Men in their teens/twenties are followers, by your mid-thirties you start to question things.
- themaninthedark 4y ago
  Pretty sure that the rebellion starts in the teens, source: myself, all my friends and now my friends children.
  - jmeister 4y ago
    These days the rebellion starts from kindergarten apparently. There needs to be balance between understanding and respecting tradition, and questioning it. On one end you have Iran/Taliban, on the other you have modern USA. Galileo was right, and his persecutors were right too.
  - 988747 4y ago
    Yes, but this rebellion is against the PARENTS. Teenage kids typically seek for the new meaning and purpose in their lives, that's why so many college students join charities, or civil rights groups, or cults... And they do not join those groups as leaders, they start at the bottom.
- mooner 4y ago
  I'm past 40 and I see this in my workplace. All my colleagues who work long hours are in their 20s, particularly the fresh graduates who just joined. I try to gently tell them that they can just work their 7.5 hours per day and go home like us old guys, but they seem determined to burn the candle at both ends. Ah well, they'll learn - when they burn out.
ceejayoz 4y ago
The military is a rather specialized scenario. "At-will employment", it's not.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
_djo_ 4y ago
Militaries that rely on volunteers rather than conscription absolutely don't get away with being completely authoritarian and treating regular soldiers terribly. They have to form a social contract of sorts, where people put up with some loss of autonomy in specific areas in return for other benefits like education or training, autonomy in other areas they might value more (like small team leadership), and decent service conditions. No service members tolerate regular and capricious abuse, and leaders found to do that seldom remain in post long. It's not a perfect system of course, but abusive behaviour by leadership is definitely the exception. Issues around service conditions regularly go all the way to Congress and get resolved quickly and sometimes expensively, because the alternative is being unable to recruit or retain personnel, and that would be disastrous for a military that's already having a tough time doing both. Let's not justify abusive leadership. There's never a need for it.
pjc50 4y ago
We're _aware_ of that, but the past forty or so years of software development have been extremely anti-hierarchical - or the "hierarchy of one" / "benevolent dictator for life" flat structure. Hierarchy has its own failure modes. Into the valley of death rode the six hundred ..

mensetmanusman 4y ago

Identifying leaks is toxic? Overuse of the word is probably diluting its meaning.

aniforprez 4y ago
The toxicity is the forced requirement to agree to work long crappy hours or be fired
adrr 4y ago
Leaking documents is indicative of a a toxic environment where the trust has broken down in all directions.
- mensetmanusman 4y ago
  If 0.00001% of the workforce leaks? Or does the % matter?
- shapefrog 4y ago
  Its like when they slip a note into your sneakers in the sweat shop factory begging for help. 12 year olds can be such piece of shit sometimes, cant they just be grateful they get paid 2c and got selected for the special 36 hour shift to make shoes for us?
- xeromal 4y ago
  I mean leaking could just be someone wanting to make a quick buck and selling secrets to a competitor.
- dmix 4y ago
  That’s a strange take. There’s tons of reasons why people leak things to the press besides: political/ideological concerns, employees who felt jilted, people who like the attention, reporters hitting up employees for information, etc etc. It’s also far more likely to happen at a company that is a media darling where everything it does gets documented in papers around the world. So naturally there’s tons of outside pressure for information to leak compared to typical orgs.

ezconnect 4y ago

Information is very valuable and companies goes to great lengths to protect them.

sidibe 4y ago

> Why do people still work at Tesla, or does this toxic behavior attract toxic employees? It attracts Elon devotees. It remains to be seen if they can be as good as regular SWEs. I highly doubt it

KennyBlanken 4y ago
Needing to be able to silently patch your vehicle's software without consumer consent or even knowledge is a tactic admission that you can't meet automotive industry software 'standards'. Tesla has pushed the "we do it to bring amazing things to your car!"...quietly distracting people from the "...we fuck things up so often we're constantly having to patch your car" man behind the curtain.
- mynameisvlad 4y ago
  As someone who drives a Tesla, by all means, fuck it up. Because it means it’s at least actually being worked on. Once you’re several years into owning a car, the outdated software really starts to show. Especially on mid-2010s cars where CarPlay and Android Auto weren’t a thing, you’re held back by really old shitty software that will never be updated. That is one thing that Tesla has, without a doubt, got right. And you can tell because most major manufacturers are also going to an OTA update system, even though it obviously costs far more in infrastructure and completely re-engineering their existing systems to support it.

chimen 4y ago

I have a special affinity for people using the term "toxic" in each of their arguments.

gaius_baltar 4y ago

> Why do people still work at Tesla, or does this toxic behavior attract toxic employees? A lot of money, perhaps? I'm not familiar with Tesla compensation levels, but this is the only reason I can think people may have to cope with this guy.

hello639 4y ago
>> Why do people still work at Tesla > A lot of money, perhaps? They work there for the mission, not the money. Tesla pays 100-150K USD for new grad SWE including stock options/RSU. For AI, it’s about 150-200K. Or you can drive 15 minutes to Google and a SWE gets 200K and AI gets 200-250K. Or “sell out” and work in quant finance for 400-500K new grad SWE as a 22 year old. So no, people do not work at Tesla/SpaceX for the money. I have many friends at Tesla, Neuralink, SpaceX, and they complain how little they are paid, how they have no free time, and how they hope the name brand on their resume gets them a higher paying job some day. Looks like they bought Elon’s bullshit.

EricDeb 4y ago

Tesla stock has made unreal gains the past 10 years probably people are motivated by money

memish 4y ago

"Click here to agree to an ambitious workplace". Like SpaceX, only the motivated will agree. That's a requirement for turning Twitter into a SpaceX or Tesla scale success.

giantrobot 4y ago
- memish 4y ago
  - netsharc 4y ago
    - memish 4y ago
      I never said to leave him alone or that he's a hero or that he's the only one driving humanity forward or that he's perfect. Sometimes he's an asshole. Sometimes he's an idiot. He's flawed like every human. Your childish cult-like "spaceman bad" programming and angry projection of your daddy issues says more about you than anyone.
      - netsharc 4y ago
        Hey you think I'm a brainwashed cult member, and I think you're one, also with the projection issue. So... is this a Mexican stand-off?
  - giantrobot 4y ago
    > The comments I respond to are not cogent critiques. They are kneejerk mob hate bandwagoning that are anti-success, anti-progress and anti-humanity. It's sad. What's sad is seeing every critique of Musk as "anti-success, anti-progress and anti-humanity" or some sort of derangement against him. That is just absurd.

Firmwarrior 4y ago

Man, that sounds pretty sweet 3 months of severance, after a good 6+ month run of lame duck employment where the whole company didn't really do anything. I could take my time and buy a nice house out in the Midwest, then pick up an easy remote job for $100-150k I guess it's a different story if you dumped your life savings into a down payment and now you have to keep up with an $8000 Bay Area mortgage though

jjav 4y ago
> I could take my time and buy a nice house out in the Midwest You're not buying a house of any kind (let alone nice) with 3 months severance after taxes and day to day living expenses.

mzs 4y ago

Some are probably trapped by their visa.