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Theory floating around Tesla spaces right now is that they weren't executing well enough or fast enough, so Elon is going to start a new team from scratch. Give

Theory floating around Tesla spaces right now is that they weren't executing well enough or fast enough, so Elon is going to start a new team from scratch. Given the remarkably slow rollout compared to most things Tesla does, wouldn't shock me at all. Elon generally does not fall victim to the sunk cost fallacy.

andix 2y ago
Especially in Europe there are many locations that don't make a lot of progress. Some locations are in construction for over a year now, others just got announced and never started. It's mostly a problem with getting permits and connections to the power grid, but still it's not a great performance. I don't know if they could do better.
paxys 2y ago
This phenomenon is well known in tech. "The product doesn't work as well as expected. We can painstakingly investigate all the different issues one by one, root cause them, and put in the effort to fix them. Or we could just throw out the whole codebase and start again from scratch. That's sure to be more effective right?" Spoiler – it isn't. Musk just threw out a thousand+ years of combined experience in the area, and the new team is going to come in and repeat years' worth of the same mistakes in order to realize why things are the way they are.
- IshKebab 2y ago
  People aren't code. Sometimes teams get a culture that you want to change and it's generally extremely difficult, if not impossible to change team cultures incrementally because a) they always hire people that have the same culture as them, b) they're used to the existing culture, and c) people hate being told they have to change. So I think it may not be as crazy as you make out. On the other hand were they really underperforming? Isn't Tesla's charging network still world leading?
  - paxys 2y ago
    If there is a bad culture then work to fix it. If there are underperforming employees then root them out. Like you said, it's not like 500 totally incompetent people built out the largest and most powerful EV charging infrastructure on the planet in a matter of a decade.
    - s1artibartfast 2y ago
      Not all processes are reversible, and not all problems are fixable. When there are solutions, that doesn't mean the ROI is there.
    - IshKebab 2y ago
      That's my point. Sometimes the best way to fix bad culture is to start from scratch.
  - AlotOfReading 2y ago
    How much of that is the result of the individuals on the team themselves and how much is that the result of the organizational pressures, constraints, and expectations they're working under? I suspect that just replacing the individual people would result in more or less the same unhealthy culture unless you also took steps to change the rest of the organizational context.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- user90131313 2y ago
  you mean how twitter was gonna break after so many fires but it didnt? yeah he probably knows a thing or two
  - throw4847285 2y ago
    P U S S Y I N B I O But seriously, how can you not go to Twitter and see that it has become totally enshittified. The real lesson learned there is that large tech infrastructures are actually stable enough to survive a lot of BS without collapsing. Doesn't make the products pleasant to use, though.
  - LordKeren 2y ago
    The Twitter acquisition is like paying 500k for a house that’s worth 300k, turning around and gutting it so it’s only worth 175k, then claiming victory because “hey at least it didn’t burn down”. I think it’s hard to see what has happened to Twitter as anything but utterly breaking the business.
  - andix 2y ago
    I wouldn't call X-Elon-Twitter a success. It was more like not a complete failure.
    - meepmorp 2y ago
      The point is, there isn't literally a smoking crater where Twitter HQ used to be, therefore all criticism of the acquisition is invalid.
- andix 2y ago
  Throw out and rewrite can work. If you know that the old code base is beyond repair, you know how to rewrite it and are able to estimate it correctly. What often happens is a rewrite that keeps the same mistakes as the original product (either organizational, specification wise or technical). I have no idea about management, I just constantly see restructurings of departments going wrong.
  - TheCoelacanth 2y ago
    The likelihood of doing that successfully goes up the more you know about the problems with the old thing and the more people who were involved with creating the old thing are still around. Just firing everyone and starting over from scratch is never going to result in an improvement. Even if the problems were because the original team was just incompetent (which it rarely is), you aren't going to get a better team the next time because if you knew how to hire a competent team you wouldn't have hired an incompetent team the first time.
- Aerbil313 2y ago
  I disagree. Rewrites can often get rid of more debt than they generate. They are always scary for psychological reasons, nevertheless.
  - Tommah 2y ago
    I'll add my two cents here. A lot of the work that goes into a codebase doesn't necessarily appear in the final product. Sometimes code is hastily written to get the system working, and then it has to be rewritten to be faster or more stable or what have you. A rewrite can just reimplement the final code. Sometimes the company changes direction (think of the stereotypical aimless startup that pivots every Tuesday) and the code solves a problem that the company is no longer interested in. A rewrite can just ignore that code. Some of this has to do with technical debt, but it's also due to the fact that it's easier to do something when you know exactly what you're trying to do. It's like the difference between between reproducing a proof from a math textbook and actually proving a new theorem yourself. The latter takes a lot more time and effort, even though the amount of work in both cases looks the same from the outside.
  - gf3 2y ago
    [dead]
- nebula8804 2y ago
  Do you realize who you are talking about? This is a guy that has done this multiple times in the past and somehow always has an endless number of bodies to burn through to accomplish the task. He did this with Starlink. One day he wasn't happy with how fast Starlink was progressing and so he went up to Seattle, fired the entire team and started over. That led to the Starlink we have now. I have spoken directly with employees there and they totally believe in the mission more than anything and they want to only work with other A players. Again, I am amazed that Musk manages to keep attracting top tier people to kill themselves over his vision but i'm not an A player so what do I know.
jprete 2y ago
The sunk cost fallacy means that you should compare future costs to future costs, not that you should automatically discount all past efforts to a value of zero. You still have to consider the cost of reacquiring institutional knowledge and rebuilding the team and project from scratch. That particular "sunk cost" needs to be considered in the calculation.
stetrain 2y ago
"Tesla spaces" tend to be dominated by Tesla stockholders who care more about share price than cars and customers. They have a way of turning every bit of Tesla news into actually being a good thing for the stock because <reason>. Supercharger rollout wasn't slow. They have been averaging more than one new station opened per day in the US alone. If a new gas station brand were opening 30+ new gas stations per month in the US I think we'd find that impressive.
- cactusplant7374 2y ago
  I think in the future we're going to see a stock price that mirrors traditional auto manufacturers. It will take some time to get there and when it does it will destroy the retirements of those Tesla stockholders most active on Twitter. It's going to be interesting to say the least. Probably a lot of lag time built into the outrage because the Tesla folks are a patient bunch.
  - greedo 2y ago
    I never understood how any investors really thought this wouldn't be the case. They seemed to think that Tesla was going to devour all the traditional carmakers in a borg-like fashion. The evaluations have always been unsustainable.
    - throwaway5959 2y ago
      Right? Even if they did somehow take over all traditional carmakers, the margins on those businesses suck. It’d just scale a shitty business (making cars).
      - greedo 2y ago
        It's a deceptively seductive industry. How hard could it be, especially with EVs? I think it's relatively easy to design a single car with some cool batteries and engines. It's another thing to build them in quantity, maintain quality, sell them, support them with spare parts so that repairs don't take forever.
onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
> Given the remarkably slow rollout compared to most things Tesla does Oh, yes, that 1M strong self-driving taxi network promised to be delivered in 2019 is rolling out really well. As is the Cybertruck, robots, and AI. The supercharger network is arguably the most successful Tesla product.
jszymborski 2y ago
> Elon generally does not fall victim to the sunk cost fallacy. That, or he erratically makes decisions on a whim. Depends on how charitable your reading is.
- rpmisms 2y ago
  What you said is compatible with what I said.
  - jszymborski 2y ago
    Fair enough!
s1artibartfast 2y ago
Musk said the rollout will be slower but continue on Twitter. Maybe he meant in the short term, but I would expect a different kind of bluster if what you said was true.
spixy 2y ago
He has done similar thing in SpaceX and it worked: https://twitter.com/FoMaHun/status/1785333618157527081 https://twitter.com/FoMaHun/status/1785333618157527081
- Dunedan 2y ago
  Replacing a few executives is something quite different than laying the whole team off.
jjav 2y ago
> Elon is going to start a new team from scratch I wonder where they'll find people at this point that haven't heard the news that the entire organization can be fired on a whim? What experienced capable person would want to go to that new team? Unless the pay is far far above market, it's not attractive.
- nebula8804 2y ago
  https://www.businessinsider.com/employers-engineering-students-most-want-to-work-for-universum-2022-8#2-tesla-2181-of-engineering-students-chose-the-electric-car-company-as-one-of-their-top-ideal-employers-19 https://www.businessinsider.com/employers-engineering-studen...
  - jjav 2y ago
    I mentioned experienced people, not students. Once you have experience and maturity you also have more obligations (family) so taking a job where entire teams can be wiped out whenever a late-night twitter rage goes bad, becomes ever less interesting.
    - nebula8804 2y ago
      Well they have a history of repeating the entire history of mistakes that the rest of the auto industry has gone through over the last several decades. For example, GM went through the same attempts to automating everything in the factory that Tesla did in 2018/19....but in the 1970s/80s GM ended up ripping out all their robots and you would see a sea of them in the parking lot flying over the factories. At the same time the thinking of experienced engineers has calcified in a way that prevents the attempt of risky behavior that could lead to long term success. For example, the mega castings were something proposed to automakers since the 90s but no one wanted to take the risk to try it because of politics. You risk shutting down your entire tool and die factory and dealing with the fall out of that and if it didn't work out you were hosed. The result of plowing through the top engineering students every year is that they repeat these mistakes on speed run but they also seem to extract nuggets of gold that the "experienced" engineers don't see or have been beaten down into not seeing. Since there seems to be an infinite amount of top students that still want to work at his companies I don't know if he will have trouble with personnel any time soon.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
demondemidi 2y ago
Yeah that's totally a good idea. Take the team that invented the product and made it so successful that other companies switched to the standard. Then fire all of that expertise and start from scratch. 5-D chess all the way. > Elon generally does not fall victim to the sunk cost fallacy. Did you see the news a few years ago when he bought a media company for $44 B and drove its profits into the ground? What amazes me the most is that absolutely loyal cult following this guy has built. For decades Apple fans were mocked relentlessly for the adoration of Jobs. Now that cult has moved on over to Musk. Different people but same worship.
- rpmisms 2y ago
  Steve Jobs also completely broke every convention and built one of the most amazing companies to ever exist. You can hate Jobs and Musk, but they both work(ed) outside the normal paradigms and forced massive progress to happen.
  - demondemidi 2y ago
    [flagged]

andix 2y ago

Especially in Europe there are many locations that don't make a lot of progress. Some locations are in construction for over a year now, others just got announced and never started. It's mostly a problem with getting permits and connections to the power grid, but still it's not a great performance. I don't know if they could do better.

paxys 2y ago

This phenomenon is well known in tech. "The product doesn't work as well as expected. We can painstakingly investigate all the different issues one by one, root cause them, and put in the effort to fix them. Or we could just throw out the whole codebase and start again from scratch. That's sure to be more effective right?" Spoiler – it isn't. Musk just threw out a thousand+ years of combined experience in the area, and the new team is going to come in and repeat years' worth of the same mistakes in order to realize why things are the way they are.

IshKebab 2y ago
People aren't code. Sometimes teams get a culture that you want to change and it's generally extremely difficult, if not impossible to change team cultures incrementally because a) they always hire people that have the same culture as them, b) they're used to the existing culture, and c) people hate being told they have to change. So I think it may not be as crazy as you make out. On the other hand were they really underperforming? Isn't Tesla's charging network still world leading?
- paxys 2y ago
  If there is a bad culture then work to fix it. If there are underperforming employees then root them out. Like you said, it's not like 500 totally incompetent people built out the largest and most powerful EV charging infrastructure on the planet in a matter of a decade.
  - s1artibartfast 2y ago
    Not all processes are reversible, and not all problems are fixable. When there are solutions, that doesn't mean the ROI is there.
  - IshKebab 2y ago
    That's my point. Sometimes the best way to fix bad culture is to start from scratch.
- AlotOfReading 2y ago
  How much of that is the result of the individuals on the team themselves and how much is that the result of the organizational pressures, constraints, and expectations they're working under? I suspect that just replacing the individual people would result in more or less the same unhealthy culture unless you also took steps to change the rest of the organizational context.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
user90131313 2y ago
you mean how twitter was gonna break after so many fires but it didnt? yeah he probably knows a thing or two
- throw4847285 2y ago
  P U S S Y I N B I O But seriously, how can you not go to Twitter and see that it has become totally enshittified. The real lesson learned there is that large tech infrastructures are actually stable enough to survive a lot of BS without collapsing. Doesn't make the products pleasant to use, though.
- LordKeren 2y ago
  The Twitter acquisition is like paying 500k for a house that’s worth 300k, turning around and gutting it so it’s only worth 175k, then claiming victory because “hey at least it didn’t burn down”. I think it’s hard to see what has happened to Twitter as anything but utterly breaking the business.
- andix 2y ago
  I wouldn't call X-Elon-Twitter a success. It was more like not a complete failure.
  - meepmorp 2y ago
    The point is, there isn't literally a smoking crater where Twitter HQ used to be, therefore all criticism of the acquisition is invalid.
andix 2y ago
Throw out and rewrite can work. If you know that the old code base is beyond repair, you know how to rewrite it and are able to estimate it correctly. What often happens is a rewrite that keeps the same mistakes as the original product (either organizational, specification wise or technical). I have no idea about management, I just constantly see restructurings of departments going wrong.
- TheCoelacanth 2y ago
  The likelihood of doing that successfully goes up the more you know about the problems with the old thing and the more people who were involved with creating the old thing are still around. Just firing everyone and starting over from scratch is never going to result in an improvement. Even if the problems were because the original team was just incompetent (which it rarely is), you aren't going to get a better team the next time because if you knew how to hire a competent team you wouldn't have hired an incompetent team the first time.
Aerbil313 2y ago
I disagree. Rewrites can often get rid of more debt than they generate. They are always scary for psychological reasons, nevertheless.
- Tommah 2y ago
  I'll add my two cents here. A lot of the work that goes into a codebase doesn't necessarily appear in the final product. Sometimes code is hastily written to get the system working, and then it has to be rewritten to be faster or more stable or what have you. A rewrite can just reimplement the final code. Sometimes the company changes direction (think of the stereotypical aimless startup that pivots every Tuesday) and the code solves a problem that the company is no longer interested in. A rewrite can just ignore that code. Some of this has to do with technical debt, but it's also due to the fact that it's easier to do something when you know exactly what you're trying to do. It's like the difference between between reproducing a proof from a math textbook and actually proving a new theorem yourself. The latter takes a lot more time and effort, even though the amount of work in both cases looks the same from the outside.
- gf3 2y ago
  [dead]
nebula8804 2y ago
Do you realize who you are talking about? This is a guy that has done this multiple times in the past and somehow always has an endless number of bodies to burn through to accomplish the task. He did this with Starlink. One day he wasn't happy with how fast Starlink was progressing and so he went up to Seattle, fired the entire team and started over. That led to the Starlink we have now. I have spoken directly with employees there and they totally believe in the mission more than anything and they want to only work with other A players. Again, I am amazed that Musk manages to keep attracting top tier people to kill themselves over his vision but i'm not an A player so what do I know.

jprete 2y ago

The sunk cost fallacy means that you should compare future costs to future costs, not that you should automatically discount all past efforts to a value of zero. You still have to consider the cost of reacquiring institutional knowledge and rebuilding the team and project from scratch. That particular "sunk cost" needs to be considered in the calculation.

stetrain 2y ago

"Tesla spaces" tend to be dominated by Tesla stockholders who care more about share price than cars and customers. They have a way of turning every bit of Tesla news into actually being a good thing for the stock because <reason>. Supercharger rollout wasn't slow. They have been averaging more than one new station opened per day in the US alone. If a new gas station brand were opening 30+ new gas stations per month in the US I think we'd find that impressive.

cactusplant7374 2y ago
I think in the future we're going to see a stock price that mirrors traditional auto manufacturers. It will take some time to get there and when it does it will destroy the retirements of those Tesla stockholders most active on Twitter. It's going to be interesting to say the least. Probably a lot of lag time built into the outrage because the Tesla folks are a patient bunch.
- greedo 2y ago
  I never understood how any investors really thought this wouldn't be the case. They seemed to think that Tesla was going to devour all the traditional carmakers in a borg-like fashion. The evaluations have always been unsustainable.
  - throwaway5959 2y ago
    Right? Even if they did somehow take over all traditional carmakers, the margins on those businesses suck. It’d just scale a shitty business (making cars).
    - greedo 2y ago
      It's a deceptively seductive industry. How hard could it be, especially with EVs? I think it's relatively easy to design a single car with some cool batteries and engines. It's another thing to build them in quantity, maintain quality, sell them, support them with spare parts so that repairs don't take forever.

onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago

> Given the remarkably slow rollout compared to most things Tesla does Oh, yes, that 1M strong self-driving taxi network promised to be delivered in 2019 is rolling out really well. As is the Cybertruck, robots, and AI. The supercharger network is arguably the most successful Tesla product.

jszymborski 2y ago

> Elon generally does not fall victim to the sunk cost fallacy. That, or he erratically makes decisions on a whim. Depends on how charitable your reading is.

rpmisms 2y ago
What you said is compatible with what I said.
- jszymborski 2y ago
  Fair enough!

s1artibartfast 2y ago

Musk said the rollout will be slower but continue on Twitter. Maybe he meant in the short term, but I would expect a different kind of bluster if what you said was true.

spixy 2y ago

He has done similar thing in SpaceX and it worked: https://twitter.com/FoMaHun/status/1785333618157527081 https://twitter.com/FoMaHun/status/1785333618157527081

Dunedan 2y ago
Replacing a few executives is something quite different than laying the whole team off.

jjav 2y ago

> Elon is going to start a new team from scratch I wonder where they'll find people at this point that haven't heard the news that the entire organization can be fired on a whim? What experienced capable person would want to go to that new team? Unless the pay is far far above market, it's not attractive.

nebula8804 2y ago
https://www.businessinsider.com/employers-engineering-students-most-want-to-work-for-universum-2022-8#2-tesla-2181-of-engineering-students-chose-the-electric-car-company-as-one-of-their-top-ideal-employers-19 https://www.businessinsider.com/employers-engineering-studen...
- jjav 2y ago
  I mentioned experienced people, not students. Once you have experience and maturity you also have more obligations (family) so taking a job where entire teams can be wiped out whenever a late-night twitter rage goes bad, becomes ever less interesting.
  - nebula8804 2y ago
    Well they have a history of repeating the entire history of mistakes that the rest of the auto industry has gone through over the last several decades. For example, GM went through the same attempts to automating everything in the factory that Tesla did in 2018/19....but in the 1970s/80s GM ended up ripping out all their robots and you would see a sea of them in the parking lot flying over the factories. At the same time the thinking of experienced engineers has calcified in a way that prevents the attempt of risky behavior that could lead to long term success. For example, the mega castings were something proposed to automakers since the 90s but no one wanted to take the risk to try it because of politics. You risk shutting down your entire tool and die factory and dealing with the fall out of that and if it didn't work out you were hosed. The result of plowing through the top engineering students every year is that they repeat these mistakes on speed run but they also seem to extract nuggets of gold that the "experienced" engineers don't see or have been beaten down into not seeing. Since there seems to be an infinite amount of top students that still want to work at his companies I don't know if he will have trouble with personnel any time soon.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

demondemidi 2y ago

Yeah that's totally a good idea. Take the team that invented the product and made it so successful that other companies switched to the standard. Then fire all of that expertise and start from scratch. 5-D chess all the way. > Elon generally does not fall victim to the sunk cost fallacy. Did you see the news a few years ago when he bought a media company for $44 B and drove its profits into the ground? What amazes me the most is that absolutely loyal cult following this guy has built. For decades Apple fans were mocked relentlessly for the adoration of Jobs. Now that cult has moved on over to Musk. Different people but same worship.

rpmisms 2y ago
Steve Jobs also completely broke every convention and built one of the most amazing companies to ever exist. You can hate Jobs and Musk, but they both work(ed) outside the normal paradigms and forced massive progress to happen.
- demondemidi 2y ago
  [flagged]