7 ms·

Moreover, from what I've seen, this is an isolated manufacturing escape. Given the perspective of the rapid growth in capacity, with 3 factories coming online i

Moreover, from what I've seen, this is an isolated manufacturing escape. Given the perspective of the rapid growth in capacity, with 3 factories coming online in 5 years and 2 million+ total capacity, wouldn't we expect to see more escapes, even from a top performing auto company?

JohnFen 3y ago
If rapid expansion is resulting in an increase in defects, whatever the cause, then the expansion itself is far too rapid and needs to be considered a fault.
- ChuckMcM 3y ago
  I'd agree with this. I was at Intel early on and as they expanded they were very careful about exactly replicating fabs because they didn't want an increase in defects. For most (all?) manufacturers bringing a new factory online that didn't produce exactly the same level of quality would be red flag to re-evaluate how they brought on new capacity.
- valianteffort 3y ago
  Defects are inherent to anything involving human labor. You can't expect workers on 12hr shifts to have consistent high quality of throughput. It has nothing to do with expansion and more to do with people just getting lazy or negligent throughout the day.
  - FiberBundle 3y ago
    Maybe not let people work 12 hour shifts? This isn't the 19th century.
    - jajko 3y ago
      But we talk about Musk, who is absolutely clear how he views workers and at this point we know how he treats them too (and himself, which is a textbook example of unhealthy obsessive behavior among other unhealthy stuff coming from high performing broken mind). He makes it trivial to have a love/hate 'relationship' with him, for better or worse. Fun to watch from the distance, just not grokking all those early adopters. I have small kids, there are risks I take also with them but they are always calculated and control is on our side. This is just blindly trusting some startup mentality scales well into giga factories level.
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      Some people like 12 hour shifts? You make more money and your commuting expense per hour of work goes down. The alternative is that someone who wants to make more money takes a second job somewhere else. Then they're working 16 hours a day and have two commutes. What does 16 hours of work and 6 hours of sleep do for quality?
      - pixiemaster 3y ago
        how about 7hour shifts and enough pay to sustain a family with that?
        AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        How about two hour shifts that pay a million dollars an hour? You can't change the market rate for that kind of labor by magic; employers are operating in a competitive market. You can get more money by working more hours.
        jjav 3y ago
        > employers are operating in a competitive market Let's see; Musk is demanding that the board give him a 56B pay package. Tesla seems to have about 130K employees. They could afford to give every employee a 400K raise and Musk still gets a fortune from the left over money. So money doesn't seem to be very tight there, it's just that greed demands that a single person gets it all.
        FiberBundle 3y ago
        The shareholders would pay for Musk's pay package by having their shares diluted. It's not as if Tesla has to provide any money for that, so it's not really comparable to giving employees a raise.
        AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        Money is money. In theory they could dilute the shareholders by issuing new shares into the market and use the money to pay employees more. But this fails to identify what magic is to be used to cause them to want to do that. Employers (and employees) generally have a pretty good idea what the market price is for a particular job. If they have to fill 100 positions and offering $25/hour causes them to get 100 qualified applicants who accept the position, they could offer $35/hour, but this is like saying that the employees could accept $15/hour when another employer is offering $25. Some explanation is required for why they would.
    - sonicanatidae 3y ago
      That's gonna be tougher when they just fired 10% of the work force.
  - Libcat99 3y ago
    Those lazy employees and their 12 hour shifts... If long shifts impact production quality (and they do) run shorter shifts.
    - Freedom2 3y ago
      YC startup founders work longer than 12 hour shifts all the time...
      - stonogo 3y ago
        YC startup founders do not work shifts.
        gopher_space 3y ago
        Startup founders spend a lot of time on their project and it can be hard to do, but I don’t think I’d label the effort “work” for the same reasons I don’t think of home improvements as a duty or chore.
      - llamaimperative 3y ago
        1. They talk about doing this a whole lot more than they actually do it 2. "I worked twelve hours today [not including unlimited bathroom breaks, social breaks, snack breaks, drink breaks, YouTube breaks, going on a walk to clear my head breaks]" 3. To the extent that anyone actually does this with any consistency, it's a laughable example of poor self-management and company leadership 4. It's an example of poor self-management and leadership for the same reason it's bad on assembly lines: it produces bad work 5. They're not building safety-critical devices they're putting out onto public roads
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - littlestymaar 3y ago
        Haven't done YC but did Techstars a while back when they were still in the same league, and except on the week before demo day there was pretty much never anyone at the place after 6pm (except for the handful of foreign teams who didn't have anything do to in their life in the US).
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    True, but I was talking about a change in the rate of defects. If rapid expansion is causing a greater number of defects than is normal, then something about that expansion is likely the root cause. In the big picture, of course, everything has defects.
  - Draiken 3y ago
    > You can't expect workers on 12hr shifts to have consistent high quality of throughput. Nor should we. We should expect the company to prioritize safety and hire more people to avoid such mistakes. Or even if you want to keep that awful 12h shift practice, at the very least have good procedures and quality control to ensure failures from those "lazy" workers don't leave the factory.
    - FloatArtifact 3y ago
      Umm manufacturing, think of healthcare. It's not uncommon for inpatient nursing to do 12-hour shifts and doctors do seven of days/nights of 12-hour shifts.

JohnFen 3y ago

If rapid expansion is resulting in an increase in defects, whatever the cause, then the expansion itself is far too rapid and needs to be considered a fault.

ChuckMcM 3y ago
I'd agree with this. I was at Intel early on and as they expanded they were very careful about exactly replicating fabs because they didn't want an increase in defects. For most (all?) manufacturers bringing a new factory online that didn't produce exactly the same level of quality would be red flag to re-evaluate how they brought on new capacity.
valianteffort 3y ago
Defects are inherent to anything involving human labor. You can't expect workers on 12hr shifts to have consistent high quality of throughput. It has nothing to do with expansion and more to do with people just getting lazy or negligent throughout the day.
- FiberBundle 3y ago
  Maybe not let people work 12 hour shifts? This isn't the 19th century.
  - jajko 3y ago
    But we talk about Musk, who is absolutely clear how he views workers and at this point we know how he treats them too (and himself, which is a textbook example of unhealthy obsessive behavior among other unhealthy stuff coming from high performing broken mind). He makes it trivial to have a love/hate 'relationship' with him, for better or worse. Fun to watch from the distance, just not grokking all those early adopters. I have small kids, there are risks I take also with them but they are always calculated and control is on our side. This is just blindly trusting some startup mentality scales well into giga factories level.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    Some people like 12 hour shifts? You make more money and your commuting expense per hour of work goes down. The alternative is that someone who wants to make more money takes a second job somewhere else. Then they're working 16 hours a day and have two commutes. What does 16 hours of work and 6 hours of sleep do for quality?
    - pixiemaster 3y ago
      how about 7hour shifts and enough pay to sustain a family with that?
      - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        How about two hour shifts that pay a million dollars an hour? You can't change the market rate for that kind of labor by magic; employers are operating in a competitive market. You can get more money by working more hours.
        jjav 3y ago
        > employers are operating in a competitive market Let's see; Musk is demanding that the board give him a 56B pay package. Tesla seems to have about 130K employees. They could afford to give every employee a 400K raise and Musk still gets a fortune from the left over money. So money doesn't seem to be very tight there, it's just that greed demands that a single person gets it all.
        FiberBundle 3y ago
        The shareholders would pay for Musk's pay package by having their shares diluted. It's not as if Tesla has to provide any money for that, so it's not really comparable to giving employees a raise.
        AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        Money is money. In theory they could dilute the shareholders by issuing new shares into the market and use the money to pay employees more. But this fails to identify what magic is to be used to cause them to want to do that. Employers (and employees) generally have a pretty good idea what the market price is for a particular job. If they have to fill 100 positions and offering $25/hour causes them to get 100 qualified applicants who accept the position, they could offer $35/hour, but this is like saying that the employees could accept $15/hour when another employer is offering $25. Some explanation is required for why they would.
  - sonicanatidae 3y ago
    That's gonna be tougher when they just fired 10% of the work force.
- Libcat99 3y ago
  Those lazy employees and their 12 hour shifts... If long shifts impact production quality (and they do) run shorter shifts.
  - Freedom2 3y ago
    YC startup founders work longer than 12 hour shifts all the time...
    - stonogo 3y ago
      YC startup founders do not work shifts.
      - gopher_space 3y ago
        Startup founders spend a lot of time on their project and it can be hard to do, but I don’t think I’d label the effort “work” for the same reasons I don’t think of home improvements as a duty or chore.
    - llamaimperative 3y ago
      1. They talk about doing this a whole lot more than they actually do it 2. "I worked twelve hours today [not including unlimited bathroom breaks, social breaks, snack breaks, drink breaks, YouTube breaks, going on a walk to clear my head breaks]" 3. To the extent that anyone actually does this with any consistency, it's a laughable example of poor self-management and company leadership 4. It's an example of poor self-management and leadership for the same reason it's bad on assembly lines: it produces bad work 5. They're not building safety-critical devices they're putting out onto public roads
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - littlestymaar 3y ago
      Haven't done YC but did Techstars a while back when they were still in the same league, and except on the week before demo day there was pretty much never anyone at the place after 6pm (except for the handful of foreign teams who didn't have anything do to in their life in the US).
- JohnFen 3y ago
  True, but I was talking about a change in the rate of defects. If rapid expansion is causing a greater number of defects than is normal, then something about that expansion is likely the root cause. In the big picture, of course, everything has defects.
- Draiken 3y ago
  > You can't expect workers on 12hr shifts to have consistent high quality of throughput. Nor should we. We should expect the company to prioritize safety and hire more people to avoid such mistakes. Or even if you want to keep that awful 12h shift practice, at the very least have good procedures and quality control to ensure failures from those "lazy" workers don't leave the factory.
  - FloatArtifact 3y ago
    Umm manufacturing, think of healthcare. It's not uncommon for inpatient nursing to do 12-hour shifts and doctors do seven of days/nights of 12-hour shifts.