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I will always remember what one of my previous bosses told me. I had built this whole E-Commerce platform for him and his company (I single-handedly did all th

by atonse 2y ago

I will always remember what one of my previous bosses told me. I had built this whole E-Commerce platform for him and his company (I single-handedly did all the coding, infrastructure, etc. Not taking any credit for their incredible sales team.) that was running in multiple countries, bringing in millions in sales. But I started getting pretty bored once it was stable enough and just running and started seeking greener pastures. And he said (I'm paraphrasing) most people are either builders or maintainers, and rarely both. And he said I was a builder at heart. So I hate maintaining things. Which is why, when I helped hire my replacement, he was VERY much a maintainer, and he flourished in that second phase since it had reached maturity. Using that framework, I think that the ratio of builders to maintainers at Tesla is not healthy right now. It seems VERY healthy at SpaceX, for example. They're innovating on new technology AND on efficiencies of the existing tech and logistics. The builders got them to where they are (I'm still a generally happy Model 3 owner), but the maintainers are the ones who make the maintenance and service experience great, incrementally improve manufacturing, parts availability, all those unsexy things that have more to do with logistics, building superchargers etc. Because they are too lopsided with builders, they keep inventing new stuff instead of continuing to innovate with EVs. For a while there were enough builder type challenges with manufacturing but even those challenges seem to be exhausted. I'm surprised to see that they've gutted the supercharger team because it seems like the ultimate "services" sector where they're in better shape than anyone else to make basically free "services" type money from ALL EVs in coming years with NACS.

cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
One person’s maintaining is another person’s building. There are definitely many many very competent people with a “builder” mindset that would get a kick out of building a good maintenance / service experience. It’s simply that these things aren’t respected by…someone…or someones, and don’t get the attention they deserve from the people that could provide it.
- atonse 2y ago
  For the record I wasn’t disparaging the maintainers. In Tesla’s situation, they need more people with a maintenance mindset to sustain their company. SpaceX has a nice mix of both.
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  Yes, maintainer deserve respect. However, This is just wordplay redefining the concept building. If the purpose is maintenance, it is maintaining.
- JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
  > One person’s maintaining is another person’s building IMHO, if you have a shitty harassing manager, you can switch from maintaining to being anti-work in a few months. And having a good manager can lift you from being a maintainer to being a tech lead at any company. This is a simple psychological trick that most companies have not figured out yet and it's very sad.
  - s1artibartfast 2y ago
    Management is hard and ICs often underestimate the difficulty. Employees are diverse, and what works for one, doesn't work for another. Similarly, what ICs say will work and what actually works are usually very different.
    - cm11 2y ago
      To be fair, I think everyone underestimates the difficulty—including managers, the people that hire them, and the people who org companies to "require" a large number of people with these scarce skills. While I agree ICs underestimate the difficulty, I think what ICs are usually responding to is that the managing isn't good. Whether that's because managing is difficult or because their manager is bad is in some sense not what matters. Those problem are the managers' job or the managers' managers' job.
ed_blackburn 2y ago
If you haven't seen it before, you may find this interesting: https://medium.com/building-the-agile-business/a-structure-for-continuous-innovation-pioneers-settlers-town-planners-2f33be932179 https://medium.com/building-the-agile-business/a-structure-f...
- Ductapemaster 2y ago
  Thank you for sharing this! I read this a long time ago and promptly lost the link, despite me coming back to the principles often.
- dlivingston 2y ago
  Wow, great read. I'm 100% a Settler. What should I be doing career-wise to maximize this? Joining startups?
josephg 2y ago
Yeah I absolutely agree. The way it was told to me, there are 3 types of people: Commandos, soldiers and police. Commandos like cutting their own path through the jungle and going behind enemy lines to do something nobody thought possible. Soldiers work as a team to make a stable foothold. And after the area is secure, police keep the peace and deal with problems that come up. The world will always ask commandos to stay around as soldiers and soldiers to stay around as police. But that’s not their role. They’re needed elsewhere. I saw this with my own eyes back in college. A friend started a computing facility newsletter. Every Sunday he was up until dawn finishing the copy in it, and then Monday he would find a working printer and print copies. I think he was funding it himself for the first few months. One of the computing staff (the “student liaison”) fought him every step of the way. He was constantly being trouble, making it hard to distribute the newsletter. Telling him he couldn’t use the printer. Random stuff like that. Well. My friend was reliable and 6 months passed. Every week the newsletter came out and it became part of life on campus. My friend moved on and guess who put up their hand to keep running it? It was the liaison. The same guy who had made it so hard to start in the first place. He’s just a born police man. I think deep down he loves maintaining the status quo. Once the newsletter was part of the status quo, he naturally took it on himself to keep it going.
- atonse 2y ago
  Oh I love this analogy, thank you!
ivan_gammel 2y ago
I have heard another version of this classification: people are either builders, or scalers, or optimizers, but rarely combine the traits. They are good for different stages of the company growth. Builders are good at the most risky and innovative stage from founding the company to getting first customers. Scalers know how to become big and profitable. Optimizers squeeze the juice and keep moats deep.
- jeffwask 2y ago
  About 5 years ago, I had a conversation with my CTO that amounted to this. He told me paraphrasing, "I'm a one trick pony. I take companies from this size to this size and when I'm done, I move on to the next. I'm very good at this and I'm happy doing it." Plus he made a lot of money doing so. I'd worked with him at two companies and it clicked that he had a playbook and he ran that playbook at each new company. He refined the art of going from this stage a to stage b. I really took it to heart and changed what I thought about career progression. I'm probably a builder/scaler I def get bored in the maintenance phase.
  - ivan_gammel 2y ago
    Maintenance/optimization is an interesting stage: on one side, there you mostly need to execute by playbooks rather than be creative. Is it boring? On the other side, it is the stage where you need the most skill and expertise: you actually need to know all those playbooks, and standards, and regulations, and best practices, and war stories. There you stand on the shoulders of giants and establish connection between today and many centuries of others experience. You do need to innovate still, but that is now an intricate art of balance between not wrecking the ship and still being relevant. Is _that_ boring? I don’t know. I want to try it closer to my retirement.
    - lancesells 2y ago
      I've been a builder for a lot of my life but the last 10 years I've worked as an optimizer. The interesting thing about that is the work and playbook I used in the past is more of just a standard industry practice now. I used to do an audit and find a ton of low-hanging fruit and go from there. Nowadays, there's a lot less to correct and I have to think in different ways to provide true value.
AtlasBarfed 2y ago
That is not good, because what Tesla needs is a much larger range of models. Minivans. Delivery trucks. A real pickup. Work trucks. The Semi. What really disturbs me about recent Tesla communication is that the Semi is just not being mentioned. Tesla is basically a battery packager at its core business. The Tesla Semi represents a massive amount of demand for packaged batteries, and Tesla's model has the best prototype-demonstrated abilities. That is what the next ten years of the company is about at the core. Elon needs to go. Give him the 56 billion, and then send him off his way to ruin Twitter which isn't important. Tesla is one of the most important companies in the world in terms of keeping the EV transition on the cutting edge and keeping the feet to the fire on the old ICE companies. Maybe the Chinese companies will take that up, but there is so much uncertainty in China now. Tesla is taking too long to release models. It is NOT good at building. Their battery leadership is gone, CATL and other chinese companies raced past them. The future of EVs is LFP and Sodium Ion, and then probably Li-S or Na-S. Tesla has no leadership in those, it's all China.
- AlexandrB 2y ago
  > What really disturbs me about recent Tesla communication is that the Semi is just not being mentioned. There's a pretty compelling argument out there that an electric semi is currently not economically viable because the weight of the battery cuts into the weight the semi can haul without exceeding the gross vehicle weight limit on public roads. In this regard, it may be telling that Tesla's first customer was a company that sells potato chips - one of the lightest weight per volume products you can transport.
  - rootusrootus 2y ago
    It may not completely offset the battery weight, but electric class 8 trucks have an additional 2000 pounds of GVWR allowed. I would say the biggest headache for Tesla in the semi space is that they were not first to market and there are multiple competitors shipping trucks now. And while Tesla has decent battery production, CATL makes way more and is evolving the technology much faster. Everyone else will just use those batteries. Maybe Tesla will too, if they keep trying to make the Semi a viable product.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
dylan604 2y ago
> I'm surprised to see that they've gutted the supercharger team because it seems like the ultimate "services" sector where they're in better shape than anyone else to make basically free "services" type money from ALL EVs in coming years with NACS. Yeah, this did seem surprising to me as well. This is one of those mailbox money type of systems. However, I'm guessing they've realized that maintaining the infrastructure is something they do not want to do. So instead of running the network, they should just make the chargers, or license them for others to build. Tesla is pretty much the quintessential example of a rent-seeking company, so these ideas seem right up their alley
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  > Tesla is pretty much the quintessential example of a rent-seeking company This seems impossible. How is it doing rent-seeking?
  - dylan604 2y ago
    My understanding is they were offering subscription services. I could have misremembered that. I know other makers were considering the same type of thing.
    - Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
      There are only two subscriptions that Tesla offers: FSD and Premium Connectivity. And since you still have the option to purchase FSD outright, I don't consider the subscription option as rent-seeking. With Premium Connectivity, the way I see it, it's necessary to actually cover the costs associated with it. For those unaware, Premium Connectivity, you don't get any video/audio streaming services in the car, and the navigation can only use bare maps rather than satellite imagery. Note that these limitations don't apply if you instead tether to a mobile WiFi AP, such as your phone. The $10/month pays for the extra data your car uses on the mobile network, which could be a LOT of data if you watch video streaming while supercharging frequently. Unless Tesla is getting a sweetheart unlimited data deal from some carrier, there are probably some people that actually cost Tesla money from streaming a ton of video. But someone like me, who drives only ~5 hours/month, I'm probably not using much data from the audio streaming.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Sammi 2y ago
This is the PAEI model which is from the 1970s. People are either Producer, Administrator, Entrepreneur, or Integrator. It's a scale from E to P to I to A in order of early to late in the company lifecycle. There are even personality tests for this online.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
oars 2y ago
This is a very valuable observation ("builders" vs "maintainers") along with the comments below this.
lostlogin 2y ago
> he said (I'm paraphrasing) most people are either builders or maintainers, and rarely both. What a great comment, and it applies to so many things and situations I’ve been in.
GrooveSAN 2y ago
Assuming that framework is true - which I’m not challenging at all -, why would you need to _fire_ the builders, instead of pivoting them to new greenfields projects - as I assume Tesla has many. Unless your CEO isn’t a maintainer/optimizer himself?
bravetraveler 2y ago
[dead]
bamboozled 2y ago
I used to be like this but I think it's more like...why build something if you don't reap some of the benefits? I've build several products for several companies / individual, some of them were hugely, hugely successful, and then I'd leave and build the next thing. I just got tired of it after a while. Now I hang around for a bit more maintenance and more often than not something cool comes along.
berniedurfee 2y ago
This is 100% true in my experience. Founders are good at founding, which is generally a very shortsighted and aggressive activity. At some point, the business needs stability. Founders that stick around too long often cannot make that transition and end up making long term success untenable. I’ve heard it called “Founder’s Syndrome” when a founder can’t bring themselves to step away and hand their creation off to a better caretaker.
- Joey2121 2y ago
  A company like Tesla needs stability if they want me to buy an expensive product like a car - whether it be $25K or $50K. Right now I'm shopping used EVs. Won't pick a Tesla b/c I keep my cars for 15+ years and I can't be sure that a Tesla will be affordable to own during that ownership. They may not even exist in 15 years. I'm pretty sure most of the other mainstream brands will be.
  - berniedurfee 2y ago
    Same. In fact my biggest worry is that the software will be abandoned and as cars age, edge case bugs will appear, but there’ll be no way to fix them. There’s going to need to be a robust aftermarket for vehicle software. Though, I don’t know if I’d trust some random EBay dongle or even Dorman to patch my drive-by-wire steering that’s been pulling to the left a bit in a 15 year old Tesla.

by atonse 2y ago

cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago

One person’s maintaining is another person’s building. There are definitely many many very competent people with a “builder” mindset that would get a kick out of building a good maintenance / service experience. It’s simply that these things aren’t respected by…someone…or someones, and don’t get the attention they deserve from the people that could provide it.

atonse 2y ago
For the record I wasn’t disparaging the maintainers. In Tesla’s situation, they need more people with a maintenance mindset to sustain their company. SpaceX has a nice mix of both.
s1artibartfast 2y ago
Yes, maintainer deserve respect. However, This is just wordplay redefining the concept building. If the purpose is maintenance, it is maintaining.
JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
> One person’s maintaining is another person’s building IMHO, if you have a shitty harassing manager, you can switch from maintaining to being anti-work in a few months. And having a good manager can lift you from being a maintainer to being a tech lead at any company. This is a simple psychological trick that most companies have not figured out yet and it's very sad.
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  Management is hard and ICs often underestimate the difficulty. Employees are diverse, and what works for one, doesn't work for another. Similarly, what ICs say will work and what actually works are usually very different.
  - cm11 2y ago
    To be fair, I think everyone underestimates the difficulty—including managers, the people that hire them, and the people who org companies to "require" a large number of people with these scarce skills. While I agree ICs underestimate the difficulty, I think what ICs are usually responding to is that the managing isn't good. Whether that's because managing is difficult or because their manager is bad is in some sense not what matters. Those problem are the managers' job or the managers' managers' job.

ed_blackburn 2y ago

If you haven't seen it before, you may find this interesting: https://medium.com/building-the-agile-business/a-structure-for-continuous-innovation-pioneers-settlers-town-planners-2f33be932179 https://medium.com/building-the-agile-business/a-structure-f...

Ductapemaster 2y ago
Thank you for sharing this! I read this a long time ago and promptly lost the link, despite me coming back to the principles often.
dlivingston 2y ago
Wow, great read. I'm 100% a Settler. What should I be doing career-wise to maximize this? Joining startups?

josephg 2y ago

Yeah I absolutely agree. The way it was told to me, there are 3 types of people: Commandos, soldiers and police. Commandos like cutting their own path through the jungle and going behind enemy lines to do something nobody thought possible. Soldiers work as a team to make a stable foothold. And after the area is secure, police keep the peace and deal with problems that come up. The world will always ask commandos to stay around as soldiers and soldiers to stay around as police. But that’s not their role. They’re needed elsewhere. I saw this with my own eyes back in college. A friend started a computing facility newsletter. Every Sunday he was up until dawn finishing the copy in it, and then Monday he would find a working printer and print copies. I think he was funding it himself for the first few months. One of the computing staff (the “student liaison”) fought him every step of the way. He was constantly being trouble, making it hard to distribute the newsletter. Telling him he couldn’t use the printer. Random stuff like that. Well. My friend was reliable and 6 months passed. Every week the newsletter came out and it became part of life on campus. My friend moved on and guess who put up their hand to keep running it? It was the liaison. The same guy who had made it so hard to start in the first place. He’s just a born police man. I think deep down he loves maintaining the status quo. Once the newsletter was part of the status quo, he naturally took it on himself to keep it going.

atonse 2y ago
Oh I love this analogy, thank you!

ivan_gammel 2y ago

I have heard another version of this classification: people are either builders, or scalers, or optimizers, but rarely combine the traits. They are good for different stages of the company growth. Builders are good at the most risky and innovative stage from founding the company to getting first customers. Scalers know how to become big and profitable. Optimizers squeeze the juice and keep moats deep.

jeffwask 2y ago
About 5 years ago, I had a conversation with my CTO that amounted to this. He told me paraphrasing, "I'm a one trick pony. I take companies from this size to this size and when I'm done, I move on to the next. I'm very good at this and I'm happy doing it." Plus he made a lot of money doing so. I'd worked with him at two companies and it clicked that he had a playbook and he ran that playbook at each new company. He refined the art of going from this stage a to stage b. I really took it to heart and changed what I thought about career progression. I'm probably a builder/scaler I def get bored in the maintenance phase.
- ivan_gammel 2y ago
  Maintenance/optimization is an interesting stage: on one side, there you mostly need to execute by playbooks rather than be creative. Is it boring? On the other side, it is the stage where you need the most skill and expertise: you actually need to know all those playbooks, and standards, and regulations, and best practices, and war stories. There you stand on the shoulders of giants and establish connection between today and many centuries of others experience. You do need to innovate still, but that is now an intricate art of balance between not wrecking the ship and still being relevant. Is _that_ boring? I don’t know. I want to try it closer to my retirement.
  - lancesells 2y ago
    I've been a builder for a lot of my life but the last 10 years I've worked as an optimizer. The interesting thing about that is the work and playbook I used in the past is more of just a standard industry practice now. I used to do an audit and find a ton of low-hanging fruit and go from there. Nowadays, there's a lot less to correct and I have to think in different ways to provide true value.

AtlasBarfed 2y ago

That is not good, because what Tesla needs is a much larger range of models. Minivans. Delivery trucks. A real pickup. Work trucks. The Semi. What really disturbs me about recent Tesla communication is that the Semi is just not being mentioned. Tesla is basically a battery packager at its core business. The Tesla Semi represents a massive amount of demand for packaged batteries, and Tesla's model has the best prototype-demonstrated abilities. That is what the next ten years of the company is about at the core. Elon needs to go. Give him the 56 billion, and then send him off his way to ruin Twitter which isn't important. Tesla is one of the most important companies in the world in terms of keeping the EV transition on the cutting edge and keeping the feet to the fire on the old ICE companies. Maybe the Chinese companies will take that up, but there is so much uncertainty in China now. Tesla is taking too long to release models. It is NOT good at building. Their battery leadership is gone, CATL and other chinese companies raced past them. The future of EVs is LFP and Sodium Ion, and then probably Li-S or Na-S. Tesla has no leadership in those, it's all China.

AlexandrB 2y ago
> What really disturbs me about recent Tesla communication is that the Semi is just not being mentioned. There's a pretty compelling argument out there that an electric semi is currently not economically viable because the weight of the battery cuts into the weight the semi can haul without exceeding the gross vehicle weight limit on public roads. In this regard, it may be telling that Tesla's first customer was a company that sells potato chips - one of the lightest weight per volume products you can transport.
- rootusrootus 2y ago
  It may not completely offset the battery weight, but electric class 8 trucks have an additional 2000 pounds of GVWR allowed. I would say the biggest headache for Tesla in the semi space is that they were not first to market and there are multiple competitors shipping trucks now. And while Tesla has decent battery production, CATL makes way more and is evolving the technology much faster. Everyone else will just use those batteries. Maybe Tesla will too, if they keep trying to make the Semi a viable product.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

dylan604 2y ago

> I'm surprised to see that they've gutted the supercharger team because it seems like the ultimate "services" sector where they're in better shape than anyone else to make basically free "services" type money from ALL EVs in coming years with NACS. Yeah, this did seem surprising to me as well. This is one of those mailbox money type of systems. However, I'm guessing they've realized that maintaining the infrastructure is something they do not want to do. So instead of running the network, they should just make the chargers, or license them for others to build. Tesla is pretty much the quintessential example of a rent-seeking company, so these ideas seem right up their alley

robertlagrant 2y ago
> Tesla is pretty much the quintessential example of a rent-seeking company This seems impossible. How is it doing rent-seeking?
- dylan604 2y ago
  My understanding is they were offering subscription services. I could have misremembered that. I know other makers were considering the same type of thing.
  - Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
    There are only two subscriptions that Tesla offers: FSD and Premium Connectivity. And since you still have the option to purchase FSD outright, I don't consider the subscription option as rent-seeking. With Premium Connectivity, the way I see it, it's necessary to actually cover the costs associated with it. For those unaware, Premium Connectivity, you don't get any video/audio streaming services in the car, and the navigation can only use bare maps rather than satellite imagery. Note that these limitations don't apply if you instead tether to a mobile WiFi AP, such as your phone. The $10/month pays for the extra data your car uses on the mobile network, which could be a LOT of data if you watch video streaming while supercharging frequently. Unless Tesla is getting a sweetheart unlimited data deal from some carrier, there are probably some people that actually cost Tesla money from streaming a ton of video. But someone like me, who drives only ~5 hours/month, I'm probably not using much data from the audio streaming.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Sammi 2y ago

This is the PAEI model which is from the 1970s. People are either Producer, Administrator, Entrepreneur, or Integrator. It's a scale from E to P to I to A in order of early to late in the company lifecycle. There are even personality tests for this online.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

oars 2y ago

This is a very valuable observation ("builders" vs "maintainers") along with the comments below this.

lostlogin 2y ago

> he said (I'm paraphrasing) most people are either builders or maintainers, and rarely both. What a great comment, and it applies to so many things and situations I’ve been in.

GrooveSAN 2y ago

Assuming that framework is true - which I’m not challenging at all -, why would you need to _fire_ the builders, instead of pivoting them to new greenfields projects - as I assume Tesla has many. Unless your CEO isn’t a maintainer/optimizer himself?

bravetraveler 2y ago

[dead]

bamboozled 2y ago

I used to be like this but I think it's more like...why build something if you don't reap some of the benefits? I've build several products for several companies / individual, some of them were hugely, hugely successful, and then I'd leave and build the next thing. I just got tired of it after a while. Now I hang around for a bit more maintenance and more often than not something cool comes along.

berniedurfee 2y ago

This is 100% true in my experience. Founders are good at founding, which is generally a very shortsighted and aggressive activity. At some point, the business needs stability. Founders that stick around too long often cannot make that transition and end up making long term success untenable. I’ve heard it called “Founder’s Syndrome” when a founder can’t bring themselves to step away and hand their creation off to a better caretaker.

Joey2121 2y ago
A company like Tesla needs stability if they want me to buy an expensive product like a car - whether it be $25K or $50K. Right now I'm shopping used EVs. Won't pick a Tesla b/c I keep my cars for 15+ years and I can't be sure that a Tesla will be affordable to own during that ownership. They may not even exist in 15 years. I'm pretty sure most of the other mainstream brands will be.
- berniedurfee 2y ago
  Same. In fact my biggest worry is that the software will be abandoned and as cars age, edge case bugs will appear, but there’ll be no way to fix them. There’s going to need to be a robust aftermarket for vehicle software. Though, I don’t know if I’d trust some random EBay dongle or even Dorman to patch my drive-by-wire steering that’s been pulling to the left a bit in a 15 year old Tesla.