Whichever side of the remote vs. in-person debate you fall on, I think this is a net positive for the industry. More companies are starting to become strongly opinionated on the topic and that leads to a wider spectrum of options when searching for a job. There are many people out there who hate fully-remote and are suffering as a result of the isolation. There are also people out there who are thriving due to remote work. Both can co-exist at different companies.
Of course, springing this on already remote workers is problematic. Tesla is no stranger to low employee retention. In the short term they will have an exodus but perhaps in the longer term they'll have a workforce more aligned to their culture.
This is an excellent take. I personally never want to work in an office again, but I know many—many, many—people who never want to work remotely again after the past two years of pandemic.
We need both: companies that want to support fully remote staff and those that want everyone in-office every day. Having companies with strong stances is a good shift for everyone because enables workers to easily figure out where they do (or do not) want to work.
> Of course, springing this on already remote workers is problematic. Tesla is no stranger to low employee retention. In the short term they will have an exodus but perhaps in the longer term they'll have a workforce more aligned to their culture.
From Elon Musk's statement, Tesla's employees have far more pressing matters plaguing their employee relations than the crapfeat that's this remote vs on-site stance.
Once your eggregious boss makes it his point to refer to mandatory minimum work hours of 40h/week, this means Tesla's employees are already being exploited and subjected to abusive working conditions that are recognized and imposed from the very top.
Elon Musk sounds like a Dickensian factory worker, and working for such a character sounds equally soul-crushing, even if you work from home.
> The decision is far more about the culture leaders want to create in their organisations than about the “right” or “best” way to do things.
Given the distain in Elon Musk's messages on this topic, he is very much opining on what is "right" and "best", and not about the culture he wants to build.
To quote Matt Levine[1], who I think was making the same point more eloquently:
> Elon Musk does not like remote work, which, you know, fine, but this strikes me as being less about remote work and more about a general culture of being ostentatiously intense
It reads like a person drunk on their own kool-aid. I can imagine "richest person ever" being a title that goes to your head. He's unhinged, and going full Howard Hughes.
It's been pretty wild watching Elon set his reputation on fire over the past 6~10 years. He certainly had his detractors before then, but it's hard to find a single person standing up for him today. Too much money genuinely is an illness.
Yeah, depends on when you got on the "oh, Elon's actually a whacko" train, I guess. The Hyperloop fantasy was 2013, the "pedo guy" thing and whatever is going on with his bizarre child name was 2018, COVID reactionary junk in 2020. Just an increasingly public, downward trajectory over the last 10 years.
> He certainly had his detractors before then, but it's hard to find a single person standing up for him today.
Maybe in your echo bubble, but that is factually quite incorrect.
Elon has made some questionable choices over the years and while I not a fan of many of them, I think he generally at least tries to use his capital for the betterment of the world. I think his "mission" is in fact the reason he uses to justify harsh behavior like described in this article.
The vast majority of my peers prefer him to any other billionaire and why wouldn't they? Do you prefer the Zuckerbergs and Bezos' that do almost nothing but chase profit? I'll take the people who risk it for progressing tech and innovation any day of the week.
> The vast majority of my peers prefer him to any other billionaire and why wouldn't they? Do you prefer the Zuckerbergs and Bezos' that do almost nothing but chase profit?
All billionaires suck, but Musk sucks the least so get on the fanboi bandwagon?
Please.
None of these tech billionaires deserve to be treated as anything but the robber barons they are.
Musk? He's at best an unhinged narcissist. And that's being kind. The fact that he's bought into his own fan fiction and thinks of himself as a noble futurist doesn't matter much to his overworked employees, the people Musk has defamed on Twitter, or the shareholders he's defrauded through blatant market manipulation.
so if you painted a picture today that had sentimental value to you, so you would never sell it, but someone offered you 1 billion dollars for it (therefore making your net worth instantly 1 billion) would you suck just because you wouldn't sell your picture and give away the money?
Because that's not too far off from the vast majority of billionaires who simply can't/won't liquidate their potential net worth because it would have negative consequences.
> Because that's not too far off from the vast majority of billionaires who simply can't/won't liquidate their potential net worth because it would have negative consequences.
That's... not how the rich access their wealth.
Musk himself has taken out massive margin loans collateralized by his Tesla stock. This allows him to live a very lavish lifestyle without actually having to liquidate his positions or pay any kind of income or capital gains taxes.
In fact, this is how most extremely rich individuals operate: their wealth is locked up in equity and then they take out tax advantaged loans to fund their lifestyles.
So yeah, if I had a painting worth a few billion dollars, and a bank offered me a 500M loan collateralized by that painting, yeah, sure, of course I'd take that deal.
Though ironically, Musk has also recently sold billions of dollars worth of shares, first back in the fall, and again in advance of his purchase of Twitter. So I'm actually not sure how your hypothetical applies to Musk.
firstly musk doesn't live a lavish life (not that this really matters towards my original point that being a billionaire doesn't mean you suck) for the past couple of years he's been living in a ~50k house in south texas.
Back to my point, if you had the hypothetical painting you could take out a collateralized loan but you still couldn't give away your money to reduce your net worth or else you'd default on your loan - so the point still stands, you'd be a billionaire and I would argue there's nothing wrong with you being a billionaire....as to whether musk can liquidate and reduce his networth - why? Did anything meaningful change in the world when he liquidated 10 billion? To that point he did it so that he could become the individual who paid the most taxes in history and that changed basically nothing with the federal balance...in fact if you used 100% of every billionaires net worth in the US and put that towards taxes you wouldn't be able to even run the federal government for a full year on that budget - much closer to 6 months.
To clarify once more - I'm saying being a billionaire doesn't mean you suck. You absolutely don't have to do anything evil to become a billionaire. The system which allows for the creation of billionaires is broken, I'm sure we agree, but it isn't musks fault that wallstreet has been allowed to create complex abstract financial devices that seemingly have done nothing but created more wealth inequality. Musk certainly benefited from these financial instruments, but you can't default to suggesting he did anything evil just because he benefited from it. In the same way that someone can value your painting at 1 billion without your input, many people have valued his company at many billions of dollars without his input. He did nothing but create a valuable company, which is the opposite of evil.
The alleged sexual assaults on his private jets, among many other things, would suggest otherwise.
But maybe we have a different definition of "lavish". Speaking for myself, I don't have personal masseuses on my private jets.
> He did nothing but create a valuable company, which is the opposite of evil.
And exploit a non-unionized labor force. And engage in illegal market manipulation and stock trading on multiple occasions, including in just the last month. And defame people on twitter because they didn't like his insane ideas. And lie about his stock sales last year (which were part of a prearranged filing way before he hosted his little PR gimmick disguised as a twitter poll). And there's the whole masseuse thing...
But you're right, he's otherwise totally cool. Definitely not a narcissistic megalomaniac that's utterly obsessed with his personal image.
Musk has been described by his former partner as someone who lives "below the poverty line" - do you know musk better than his ex-girlfriend?
He reportedly works 120h/wk regularly. Do you spend that many hours working? I certainly don't and I would never describe someone who did as "living a lavish lifestyle".
As for the allegations, I don't know how that pertains to him living a lavish lifestyle as literally anyone at any income bracket can both commit crimes and/or have crimes alleged against them and seems to only serve as your point of trying to defame musk for whatever reason.
Lastly, you didn't even address the main point, which is that being a billionaire does not make you "suck".
It's very easy to sell off your 7 luxury mansions including your family mansion in Bel Air when you can just live in any luxury mansion without your name on it.
The only people who fell for the spartan shtick are gullible fans who want to believe a myth and the IRS.
or maybe the only people who accuse partners of lying are just jealous people who can't fathom the idea of having excessive wealth and not living excessively.
Your article is paywalled but I don't know anyone who is making the claim that musk refuses to do luxurious things - only that it's evidently not his priority to have a life of luxury.
> The business mogul [Elon Musk] was seen with Australian actress Natasha Bassett, enjoying a meal together at a very expensive hotel, where rooms cost upwards of $1,300 (£1,030) – wow.
The only tech advancement I can name off the top of my head from AWS is the dynamo paper in 2007, which to be fair has a substantial amount of influence.
In terms of social impact I would say starlink alone will have more impact than any advancements amazon has made. There's no telling how many decades may have passed before people took terraforming mars seriously without someone like Musk - and that appears to have serious potential to save our species some day.
I think that's hard to compare to AWS that effectively just enables better monetization of the internet through various bloated digital service industries.
Granted I understand everything I'm comparing is extremely subjective, so I wouldn't say you're wrong by any means. My perspective is just very different than your own.
Amazon has a starlink competitor in project kuiper. AWS has made massive investments into solar and wind energy.
AWS owns a chip company (Annapurna) producing cutting edge networking, virtualization, and server chips. AWS has a leading industrial IoT / computing at edge platform.
AWS played a huge role in the development of Alexa, especially in regard to network latency. Even 15+ years later, S3’s new sharding algo and use of formal methods and proof based testing are as cutting edge is it comes.
Amazon is also the most advanced logistics company on the planet. Literally off the charts, to the point that benchmarks do not even include them due to the huge gap from the competition.
Sure, except him being probably the most productive human being ever, revolutionising 2 industries, and actually doing something useful with his wealth (looking at you, Bezos, Gates & Buffet)
Yes, that's why it's been so wild. Guy was pretty much solid gold ten years ago, he led a lot of genuinely great stuff. Then he took a long dive down the deep end and now his reputation is in tatters.
Apart from a few things like union busting and this remote policy, I've only liked him more and more over time. I was never a "musk fanboy" whom it's hip to whine about and degrade today (you agree with something mean space man said? bOoTlIcKeR sImP!111) but all that whining and degrading has only had the effect of pushing me to like him more. I love that he seems to stand by what he believes instead of letting society tell him what to think, and he's in a position to do so with "fuck you money." I can see a lot of what I would do in what he does so it's a kind of vicarious satisfaction when that makes Twitter droves mad. It's hip to hate cars, he still has cool visions using cars like hyerloop which I love; people whined about the aluminum ships, I love seeing some classic style brought back into things; ungrateful diver guy deserved to have his name dragged through the mud; etc.
Going full "Hughes"? Exactly which policy has Musk put abnormally large influence on?
Maybe the <$1MM lobbying tesla does? (compared to the ~$15MM amazon does in an arguably much less regulated space)
The only thing I see with Musk becoming the richest man alive doing is putting a target on his back for unjustified attacks. He is the better of the billionaires and the world would have progressed technologically many decades farther if all billionaires behaved as he does. Not that I would claim that is "better" for humanity (as that is a very hard metric to define), but I don't think it's hard to imagine that being more optimal.
If we're not talking about hughes conquest to control the government then I'm at even more of a loss to how there's any comparison to Musk. Exactly how is Musk anything like the extremely OCD recluse? Musk who is notorious for sleeping in factories isn't anything like that so the only conclusion I can draw is that people just thought of the first "rich bad guy" that came to mind and drew a (weak) comparison.
It really feels like he enjoys punishing his employees. A lot of the decisions they make just seem much more sadistic than they do practical or even economical.
In the Fremont facility, assembly workers have a breakroom which is stocked with many brands of cereals. Dispensers full of that dried carton cereal. It was just cereal, milk, water, and drip coffee. Hot cooked meals you can get from a food truck waiting outside between the lobby and parking lot. Tech workers had longer lunches and can walk across the street to the burrito joint. While Google has a restaurant in every building, Tesla had a food truck.
Clearly you haven’t been to the Fremont facility. It’s a factory. There are no burrito joints across the street. There is a BART a distance away, entirely industrial and a food desert. It hugs the freeway and you can’t really walk anywhere.
[..]The remote location all but demands on-site dining options for employees (a necessary convenience that also keeps folks close to work).
A single food truck fed the Gigafactory when it opened in July 2016.
Today, the culinary program has grown to encompass 20 trucks (with 12 to 15 on any given day), nine markets run by Rounds Bakery of Reno, an outpost of Roundabout Catering of Sparks, cafés from Sakana Sushi and Bangkok Cuisine of Reno, and a main cafeteria that stretches to 19,000 square feet.[..]
Personal opinion - remote work is not the future. A hybrid work model will be the future for software jobs.
Remote works best only when they already have a shared context and trusting relationships. That's why it worked pretty well in the early stages of the pandemic. Now that employees have churned, I am noticing a huge drop in productivity of teams simply because a vast majority of employees are new, have no shared context and have very shallow relationships with each other.
Work that has low ambiguity and needs execution - awesome for remote work.
Work that requires trust and deep collaboration - very difficult remotely. It doesn't it mean it can't be done but the communication fidelity is MUCH lower over Zoom and this cost has to be paid somewhere.
And, yes, employee churn makes all of this worse.
I've been of the opinion that the rush to remote work is unavoidable but the industry will regret letting it get out of hand.
Which I still think is the case. I think we are reaching the point where we see the big limits in WFH show, we see generally lower engagement, more difficulty doing big difficult projects, etc.
Yeah, but the hybrid model won’t allow you to live let’s say in the south of France while working for a company with HQ in Paris. The hybrid model kills one of the main benefits of remote work: being able to work for many more companies than the ones around your local area.
Not just fidelity, it can also be a strain. I'd much rather, as in hundred times more preference, sit in an open office situation than have a zoom/meet/teams open for a long stretch.
I think it's something with not knowing where people look, and the unnatural feeling of not actually seeing someone in the eyes even if I'm looking at that person and they are looking straight into the camera.
I frequently just look away from the screen, out the window instead, when meeting with teammates. Some may interpret this as disinterest, but 1-3 hours of staring into the screen on meeting is really hard on physical and mental terms.
That said, no problem at all IRL. I'm mostly quite social.
Is the implication here that taking issue with these demands and trying to change them is somehow depriving Musk of his freedoms? Because that's not how freedom works.
The implication is that until Tesla workers unionize, they’re left to either tolerate these labor actions or find better quality of life with other employers.
Super disappointed in the human he’s turned out to be.
This is crazy talk from Elon. Demanding your employees spend 40 hours a week "visibly present" in an office, rather than judging them by the value they have delivered to your business is absurd.
I very much enjoy working from an office and have been commuting to my office for the last year for my software job when almost none of my coworkers were. After March I was hoping more people would come back, but its really really low. I'd estimate about 5% of people are mostly working from the office, and 20% are coming in 1-2 days a week or for team events. These roughly matches what I've seen in polling of tech workers. People are voting with their feet.
I wish it were different. I would like to work in the future with a primarily in-office culture, but I don't see how that happens. A company that demands 40 hours in-person from people who can work remotely is not going to be able to attract the necessary talent.
This is clever, but it is unlikely his motivation is to microscopically increase demand for Teslas by having Tesla's white-collar workforce commute more.
It is much more likely that he earnestly believes that the trade-offs for Tesla organization favor a fully on-site office workforce, knowing that will drive away some excellent team members.
(It's hard to argue with Tesla's success; but it seems to me the future more broadly is away from on-site office workforces... even and especially at companies doing well.)
Of course he does not believe that making Tesla workers work in-office will increase demand for Tesla, but Elon Musk dunking on remote work is bound to have some effect on other tech CEOs which might create a ripple effect and cause even more people to start commuting again.
For a man that has been investigated by the SEC for tanking his own companies stock price with a few tweets, it's hard to imaging someone accusing him of having ulterior motives for the sole purpose of increasing his wealth. I certainly don't know him personally, but outward evidence would suggest to me that your comments implications are without merit.
It was only a handful of weeks ago that Elon saved himself 140+ million dollars by flagrantly violating securities laws. This has been discussed endlessly as part of the Twitter news.
He also said in a tweet about it that employees who don't like it can "pretend to work somewhere else". I guess he can pretend he has any senior engineers left as well.
That being said, as much as I'm not a fan of this at all, it is good to see that the execs are included (or at least the email was sent to them, so I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt). Often the people at the top who are pushing for these policies don't apply the same to themselves.
> That being said, as much as I'm not a fan of this at all, it is good to see that the execs are included (or at least the email was sent to them, so I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt). Often the people at the top who are pushing for these policies don't apply the same to themselves.
I don't agree.
Speaking as a manager, management are the usually the ones who want to be in the office because our jobs require so much communication and human interaction. Given the choice, of course I'd want to have my days and days of endless meetings in a shared space where I can read body language and so forth!
It's the ICs that don't want to commute, and I completely understand that! When your job is 50-60% heads down focus work (as opposed to myself, where I'd bet it's 20% at best), going to the office kinda sucks.
So there's nothing terribly heroic about requiring execs to come in. In fact, a huge part of the reason there's a fight about remote work is because management and ICs fundamentally have a different experience of work and want/need different things.
The problem I have with forcing execs to the same policy as workers when it comes to return to office is that most tech offices are located in extremely expensive cities where most employees now can not afford a decent house to raise a family. The execs can live anywhere in the world and lavishly on their salaries but in the bay area a average house runs about $1.6M, try to buy that on a 100-200k a year salary.(note tesla office is in palo alto where the avg. price of a house is $4M dollars, I don't know how much the TX office home prices are)
Housing costs are the elephant in the living with this issue and a ton of others. It's IMHO a domestic crisis in the US. Unfortunately the people running the country are benefiting from it, including the older members of the middle and upper middle class sitting on gigantic amounts of home equity.
I don't agree with what he said and would never work for him, but what's the insult exactly and how has anyone been disparaged?
Working for a company is a voluntary agreement between both parties, he just established his terms, if you're an employee, you can accept them or reject them.
The parent comment linked to a tweet where he ~says~ implies everyone else working remotely is "pretend working".
Also in the emails:
> There are of course companies that don't require this, but when was the last time they shipped a great new product? It's been a while.
Seriously, no one else except Tesla in the whole world ships great products?
He also regularly makes disparaging comments on his competitors whether it's auto manufacturers, the self driving industry or even insults at politicians. Seems totally unnecessary for someone in his position of power.
> everyone else working remotely is "pretend working"
Can you quote? I didn't see this in the sent emails, which is the news being discussed. He said everyone working remotely is pretending to work?
> Seriously, no one else except Tesla in the whole world ships great products?
Taking pride in ones own products is very common in companies. In any case, I don't think these qualify as insulting, if you feel insulted, I'm guessing you'll be feeling offended very often.
> hey elon a lot of people are talking about this leaked email, any additional comment to people who think coming into work is an antiquated concept?
> They should pretend to work somewhere else
I think it’s a reasonable interpretation that Musk is saying people working remotely are only pretending to work. For people who believe they have been working hard remotely, IMO it’s easy to see why this could be viewed as insulting.
> I like how you ignored the next paragraph where I said he disparages everyone and went straight to telling me I’m sensitive. I’m not surprised though.
He may do this occasionally. Your original comment said "always".
> Always disparaging and insulting people who don't agree with this controversial views
So I didn't feel the need you address it, because you were arguing something different than what you originally said. I don't think you're sensitive, I think you don't use words like "insult" with precision.
> It’s right there in the parent comment:
It doesn't imply he thinks everyone working remotely is pretending. That's your, very unkind, interpretation.
I'll be the odd man out and say he's right. Communication is hard enough to do effectively, let alone over remote work.
The only formula that seems to work: relationships were developed in person then moved to remote. But unfortunately this makes it impossible to onboard anyone. Furthermore getting this to work at scale still seems to be a challenge.
His presentation style... definitely cold and brusk. Wouldn't be my approach
I was onboarded with 3 other colleagues, while the company was fully remote. I'm fully integrated into the work and company culture. I love my colleagues and get along great with them.
I don't undertand this "you can't build relationships over Teams" sentiment. Have people forgot about online gaming? There are millions -- I'd wager a billion -- close friendships that started (and maybe stayed) fully online. The bar for colleague-level acquaintances is much lower.
Slight counterpoint: Productivity is really high, but having basically zero relationships with my co-workers is isolating, and I work best when I have a commute and a dedicated working space.
I worked remotely for over six years now so my 2pence:
>I work best when I have a commute and a dedicated working space.
I sometimes have this urge too, thankfully renting out an office space is fairly cheap and can be done quite flexibly for when you need, and most importantly -- WHERE you need it.
Otherwise having a dedicated home office is great, but I understand that it might not be so if your family/living situation is different.
>having basically zero relationships with my co-workers is isolating
It doesn't have to be this way, you absolutely can make long lasting and very meaningful bonds without ever seeing a person.
And productivity wise, it is all about processes and culture, both office and remote can work wonderfully or be a disaster.
I personally prefer working in person right now, and go in even though my organization does not require it. But Musk is wrong. There is nothing inherently worse about working remotely. If your people are less effective remotely it could be due to a lot of reasons (including morale), and they are all fixable.
Color me odd also. My team of software engineers was very productive working remote for the first year or so of the pandemic. But, we already knew what our projects were and the designs were in place, so in person collaboration wasn't so critical.
Things started to slow down as we took on new projects remotely. We got back up to speed when we started coming into the office a couple days a week. The collaboration was better and the random interactions with other teams throughout the building seemed to help get us back on track.
We are now 3 days a week in the office and that is working very well for us. I don't think remote work is the future, I'd lean toward hybrid work environments being the future.
Dang, I guess all of HashiCorp's products, or the handfuls of startups that have launched within the last few years, or some of Apple's newest features, are "not great" per his definition then?
I love my Tesla, and I definitely prefer working from an office, but this feels like borderline 9/9/6 talk, and I can't support that.
I used to be a Musk fan. Maybe I didn't know enough about working conditions. But with the recent twitter stories, and this horrible bossy statement, I'm done. He's just an asshole.
I don't understand the outrage. I also like WFH, don't want to work more than 40 hrs a week etc, but Tesla is a pressure cooker of a company, aiming for the sky, what do you expect? It's not a lifestyle business kind of company. I like Tesla but would never want to work there myself, that's for a specific type of extremely ambitious, smart people without many obligations to family etc.
Apple? They might not be remote friendly but I've only heard stellar things about wlb. Amazon though, and any musk properties are notoriously run like sweatshops. Yeah maybe TSLA isn't massively overvalued and equity will continue to push that TC to the top tier, but call me a skeptic.
Maybe software. I personally know multiple mechanical engineers (smart ones from Berkeley) who were worked into the ground at Apple. Like >55h work weeks.
Even if tsla is massively overvalued (which I agree is likely) that doesn’t mean it’s a failed business plan, a crash of stock price back to “normal” does not mean the business plan is a failure. Aka even without high valuations tsla could have a toxic work place and still be stably producing successful cars.
They don't require all employees to be superheroes. They've identified the key roles needing to go above and beyond and then focus on hiring high-quality employees. Superheroes not required. That's how you make it sustainable.
Working 40 hours a week is not a 'lifestyle business'. It's a limit imposed by law in a lot of the civilised world and exceptions to it are rare in every company I've ever worked at (inc. successful/exited startups). You don't have employees working more than 40 hours a week because you're working on a super hard problem and changing the world. You do it because you've convinced them of that bullshit and you want to minimise staff costs.
Look, I live in one of those "civilized" countries (continent really), and while I enjoy and need the work life balance, there may also be a reason Tesla, SpaceX and the FAANGs were founded in the US and not here. There are many other reasons too, but I recommend reading "Liftoff" about the early years of SpaceX to get a sense of what's needed here. Neither SpaceX nor Tesla would exist without the crazy work ethic of its leaders and employees. Tesla, despite being valued at ~$1 trillion is also far from a mature company and has the vast majority of its growth ahead. It's not a place for work life balance yet, maybe in 20 years but not now.
If you don't believe in Tesla's mission, that's ok, you don't have to work there. But plenty of people do, and so far they have been richly rewarded with their stock options 20X-ing over the past few years, making many of them millionaires.
The messaging is... problematic, which is nothing new to Musk's style, or lack there of. But this isn't very far fetched from what Nadella was saying in 2020 of Cook has started to say or Google has been saying of late(but with MUCH better messaging). These corporations with huge offices and large management infrastructures mean they have invested large amounts of money in both.
To completely retool their management style/concept and leave their gaudy, one-off offices half empty would be a huge waste of capital and, more importantly, ego. To begin from a place of "Get your work done and we'll review that" instead of "let's see how many hours you're willing to work to show your dedication" is a giant shift in the relationship dynamic, as well. I understand that this isn't all managers and companies, but I think most people can agree that there is a prevalence in the software industry (and others, I assume... I only know a few, so I stick to software, art and cooking but only software seems relevant to this conversation).
Right, if people never commute to work, they'd never use cars. It's not like our entire country is built with the assumption that you'll need to use a car for going literally anywhere (unless you live in few select big cities with great public transportation).
The number of miles I put on my car per year has gone down to about 40% or less what I was doing pre-pandemic. I got the standard lease of 12k miles per year for my new car and I'm on track to do about 6k miles this year. Pre-pandemic I think I was doing 14-16k per year.
For this past year I'm driving about what I used to outside of work, so working from home has been the only major change (2020 was different, I barely used my car and had to put fuel stabilizer in it a couple times).
Remote work is not suitable for all positions and for all people. There is a percentage of us (mainly in the software industry) who work better remotely, but this is heavily related to the team composition, experience, environment, management...
Can we please all of us stop being at the two extremes, office or remote, and accept that there are shades between black and white. The companies that will benefit from all this shift of mentality will be the ones that will adapt, allow remote work to those that can really utilize it and benefit from it and on the other hand bring back to work the ones that thrive in an office :-)
Thank you for saying it better than I did. Everyone seems to want remote these days. But it’s really not possible for even half of employees. If say maybe at most only 20% qualify for remote work.
I'm in the automotive industry and apart from the obvious factory workers I cant think of a single group of colleagues for whom it would not be possible to work remotely. I also dont agree with the "software industry" asterisk. As long as your work is done 100% on a computer, remote work is more likely than not suited for you.
Don't take this as a toxic comment, but we're talking about taking away 1-2 hours of time of living and breathing human beings. Out of what? 6-8 hours free time? If anything, the employers should need to prove why remote work isnt possible. Anything else is damn near unethical.
I should add, that I'm blessed with a great union that allows me to cut my weekly hours, which I will do once I reach a comfortable level of income that suits my lifestyle. Which is to say: I really, really, really like spending my own time on myself. So my view on this topic is highly skewed.
Don't generalize your own situation. I live alone in a decently big apartment, I have way less distractions at home than at the office. It's different for every person.
I was significantly more distracted and less productive in an office. It's the same with everyone I've spoken to, in tech or not.
And with all the side effects, particularly the crazy energy use to move people around needlessly, it's such a net positive for society to just embrace remote work.
I'm going to guess that, as an employer, you're doing something massively wrong to not be able to to trade 2 extra hours saved by the commute into at least equal productivity. Unless the work requires in-person & physical collaboration for a very specific reason, you're doing something wrong.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say this is very much a "your mileage may vary" situation and that there is no panacea in terms of work arrangement. It's pros and cons all the way down. Same goes for debates over what type of office layout or setup to use. There is no panacea, only tradeoffs.
If you run a company it's your responsibility to decide for your company, taking into account your industry and team and such. Don't just follow trends or reactions-to-trends.
All the remote work success stories I know of are in software, law, consulting, graphical or video design/editing, or finance where one is dealing almost 100% with intangible things that can be transferred just fine in digital form.
Tesla makes cars. With the exception of the software team most Tesla work involves physical objects, and even with the software team it involves making software to operate a physical object. That sort of work is quite a bit harder to send remote. Factory work is basically impossible to remote and will remain so unless we get telepresence level robots that can be operated remotely.
Lastly I have to keep harping on a major hidden driver of so many employees demanding remote work: fucking housing costs in major cities. Remote work has allowed a ton of people to escape high cost of living cities where they are subjected to ever-increasing rents and are permanently locked out of homeownership without a liquidity event. I've heard multiple stories of people being pushed to return to the office in Silicon Valley only to retort with a demand for a 2X raise to afford housing.
Unless housing costs in these cities improve employers are going to have a hard time recruiting anyone who isn't straight out school in those places. You simply can't raise a family in e.g. San Francisco unless you are rich. The choices will be remote or to relocate the whole company to a more affordable locale.
Also IMHO means nobody should be building new companies in these cities unless they are going remote-first or remote-optional or are willing to pay 2-4X salaries... but the latter will only drive local RE higher. Build where it is economically rational to build.
> There was a reason for the office. As an employer I can tell you most workers are not able to focus or properly contribute remotely.
Can you share what method you used to determine this? Has productivity dropped in a measurable way or is it something like the duration between when you send a Slack message and when they respond?
Sorry. I've hired several remote employees over the past 2.5 years. We now have teams comprised of individuals from all over the country - something that was simply impossible working in an office building. I have the stats showing our productivity has soared. My company is now hiring execs (VP-level folks) from all around the country. The WFH culture has been fully adopted, and quite successfully at that. Oh, and my company is a Fortune 200 blue chip that's over 115 years old...
Why are you worried about distractions? Is the sole focus of your company that the people you pay are 100% focused on something? Obviously not. Pick a better metric, measure it, and see if it is performing worse than before remote work.
And if you don't have the metric to back it up, you can't claim remote work is bad.
If you think you can't measure something, read How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business
I'd only go back if I got an individual office. Managers didn't really want us present and focused when open floor plans and removing walls became a thing.
we don't get distracted in the office? no water cooler chats about the weekend? no loud conversations one cube over? no foot traffic all day long breaking your concentration? no hour long lunch breaks where I leave the office?
I have worked in many companies, in several countries, from startups to a few of the largest companies.
Without exception, work in the office has been far more distracting than work at home.
Counting also the hours lost with commuting, in a day of work at home I have always worked about a double number of effective hours per day compared to most offices.
There have been only two places with a productivity somewhat approaching the work at home, and that was because every pair of engineers had their own closed office, well separated from the others.
Discussions with the colleagues from time to time can be very useful, but most of the real coding or design work is better done alone.
Are there studies that prove that working from the office is more effective? You must have studies proving this, as I'm sure you're not advocating for collectively wasting billions of hours of time each week on commuting "because we've always done it that way". Surely.
It takes a loooooooonnnnnggggg time to published peer reviewed research, and the better studies will need to compare pre vs post so I wouldn't expect them till next year, at least.
I wonder how IC employees and middle managers will deal with the mandate.
Let's assume you manage a team of six engineers and two people decide to just not come into the office but continue working. Will you fire them? It would take 6-9 months to hire, onboard, and get the new engineers to a point comparable to the ones you just fired. Meanwhile I'm guessing you're not going to get much leniency in hitting our KPIs because 33% of your team just left.
Elon clearly has a Hobbesian conceptualization of power. Key phrases in his memo precipitate gracefully from the very same naturall power, instrumentall power, relative power, and ceding power that Hobbes lays out in Leviathan. Let me demonstrate.
> Tesla has and will create and actually manufacture the most exciting and meaningful products of any company on Earth.
Here Elon describes the consequences for working from the office. It is the use of power as the ability to secure well-being or personal advantage 'to obtain some future apparent Good'. It's to affect a change in the world - the ability to manufacture exciting and meaningful products.
> If you don't show up, we will assume you have resigned.
Elon directly connects presence with power in this statement. Resignation is the ultimate absence of the power to affect change within Telsa in the same way that not showing up is. Conversely, Tesla's power is the aggregation of the presence of its workforce. Instrumentall power is definitionally the aggregation of power and they buying of compliance. Tesla's buying of compliance are the wages paid in exchange for labor.
> There are of course companies that don't require this, but when was the last time they shipped a great new product? It's been a while.
In this passage, Elon establishes a conceptualization of relative power. He strikes a comparison between companies that require presence and those that don't. Those that do have the power to ship 'great new product's, and those that don't, don't.
> The more senior you are, the more visible must be your presence.
This equation constructs an equivalence between power and presence. It is under-girded by the assumption that a manager's power is the aggregation of power (compliance) ceded by their direct reports. Those with more aggregate power must show more presence. "That's why I lived at the factory so much," is evidence that Elon sees himself as having the most presence and therefore the most power.
I've demonstrated how Elon has a Hobbesian account of power directly tied to Hobbes' ideas of naturall power, instrumentall power, relative power, and ceding power. Elon sees himself as the culmination of this power and consequently he see's Tesla as his Leviathan.
I love working for "companies that don't require this" and shipping (in Elon's view) non-"great new products"... and being able to spend time with my family every afternoon/evening...
> Is your company hiring remote software engineers? I just started looking and would like to apply if so. My email is in my profile. Thanks.
A tip: If you are looking for something, you should make the person that actively pursue opportunities. You shouldn't expect someone to go into your profile, get your email and write to you.
Now, if you are not looking for a job, the same applies for recruiters (they are the ones that should actively look for you at that point).
I shouldn't have even done it cause it's a hacker news nope to be off topic, but I like the serendipity. Also meta commentary is frowned upon. I'm not ideal but I am hard-working.
On the one hand I _know_ Elon is right (even if I don't like admitting it).
On the other I know that there's a social/societal benefit to keeping remote work normalized and I'm beginning to think it's worth the economic cost.
Edit: I can’t reply because of the stupid rate limit soft-ban. I think there are definitely ICs that are equally (or more) productive at home. I don’t think this is true for the general population, or even the general population of tech workers. From what I’ve seen industries that require above-average collaboration have suffered the most.
Right about what? There’s great economic value in collocated work, absolutely, and I personally much prefer it… but there’s also great economic value in remote work. The premise that the last 2 years (in which remote work was forced because of a disruptive global event) is representative of remote work’s economic value doesn’t hold up.
A more accurate take is, many companies are unable to realise the economic value of remote work because they’re still operating as companies that only know how to realise the economic value of collocated work. Musk is one of them. He’s right… about his own deficiencies.
I also personally prefer it, but I can’t deny the impact in my own company and others I follow. The video game industry is another example of remote work causing huge setbacks.
I've met a number of newly WFH types who act like "this 'working from home' is nice! nudge nudge wink wink" and basically assume everyone is f-ing off like they do. Many folks have zero self disciple if people aren't watching them. It's telling to hear them describe the past 2 years as some sort of vacation but "now it's time to get back to work..."
I don't understand why this is a big deal. He wants to run his company like this. You guys don't want to work at a company like this. Neither of you wants the other but you're upset by this?
If the owner of the company I worked for, who invested well over 40 hour weeks so he could become insanely rich, wrote an email that referred to 40 hours minimum in such a flippant way, I would 100% find a new company to work for.
This idea that Musk famously risked it all to make Tesla so he could come out as a billionaire does not scale down to an individual level for employees. Musk slept on the floor so he could become insanely wealthy, not to get a $10k/year raise.
This type of manipulation is constantly abused by rich oligarchs. They start these endeavors usually with huge parachutes, and then expect their hourly employees to risk nearly as much as they did, with no parachutes, and without the world changing profits that come with it. Citing hard work the entire way, knowing full well that it is the hard work of their employees that they depend on to keep the gears moving, but that those hard workers will not become the next Musk or Gates, regardless of how many hours they put in.
If I'm wrong, I want a list of millionaires that Musk has created. Bonus points if they still work at Tesla and didn't have to spin their experience off into another project, so the work-to-profit transfer can be 1:1.
> If I'm wrong, I want a list of millionaires that Musk has created.
I was with you until this. There are definitely many millionaires minted from their original equity grants several years ago that have gone up 1,000%+.
I knew when I wrote this that someone was going to conflate early venture capitalists with employee shares. There are probably some very early employees who became rich from their stock, sure.
To amend what I said a bit, we're talking about employees with shares (or any other comp) that they get from their "hard work" that turn them into millionaires.
If working 40+ hours at Tesla makes you into a millionaire in the same way using other people's money to start a company does, then I will stand corrected.
Elon is a smart man, many of these executives are smart people, they know working for a company does not pay off in the same way that entrepreneurship does. They admit as much when they describe why they deserve so much money.
I'm not even saying employees should expect that type of return, what I'm saying is that executives should not use their hard work to become massively wealthy to try and influence their employees to work just as hard, when they know the payout is not there. It's manipulative.
Everyone knows Musk "slept on the factory floor" to get Tesla working. That type of investment has paid out well for him. It won't pay out well for the workers on the factory floor.
Someone that joined as a new grad 5 years ago would be a millionaire today. If they had been selling along the way, maybe even wealthier than if they had held on till this moment.
You are severely underestimating the absolutely meteoric rise that $TSLA has had. Even a single $100K initial grant (low even for a new grad at the time) a few years ago would be worth north of a million.
I cant name them directly but some quick math suggests Elon has indeed made many millionaires.
Tesla IPO'd in 2010 with 13.3 million shares
Tesla had a bit under 1000 employees in 2010
Tesla stock price was $17 in 2010
Tesla had a 5-for-1 stock split in August 2020
Tesla Stock price is $748 a share today
1 share of Tesla in 2010 is equal to $3,740 today
It would take 268 shares of Tesla from 2010 to be a millionaire today. that's $4,556.
Elon's success with Tesla should have produced at least 1,000 millionaires if his early employees believed in the product.
I cant say that still translates to today's workers, but if his vision is that there is still just as much room to grow - then he would be making a lot more millionaires if he is correct. Even amongst todays newer employees. Idk if I would bet on that growth at this point since it is already a household name now and it wasnt before, but I have no actual reason to think one way or the other
> I cant say that still translates to today's workers, but if his vision is that there is still just as much room to grow - then he would be making a lot more millionaires if he is correct.
Therein lies the rub, as they say. He may have spun off millionaires based on original investors, and maybe a few early employees forwent salary for stock options and became millionaires.
But we're talking about hard workers who put in over 40 hours a week currently. Are they working for stock options that are going to make them millionaires?
> Are they working for stock options that are going to make them millionaires?
Maybe, maybe not. But now they are working for a well known company that looks good on a resume, and I have no reason to believe they are not being paid fairly for their work.
Seems comparable to the big law firms. those might be worse tbh. Do it for the experience and Resume, then get out.
As a kid he was estranged from his dad, his dad ultimately only gave him around 20k. Elon Musk has been successful based on his own background, not his dads who was a remote, not positive influence in his life.
> Musk famously risked it all to make Tesla so he could come out as a billionaire
I really hope that we don't guess people's motives. Attacking motives is not just a logical fallacy but also leads to more serious problems as it prevents us from having civil discourse. Look at how angry the left and the right are just because they project what people think per their ideology.
There are valid complaints about Elon Musk (either a few or a lot, depending on your point of view), but categorizing him as an oligarch would remove the specificity of the former meaning of the word.
Perhaps people are bored with the word billionaire and want to use an edgier sounding synonym. That is how languages work - they evolve. (i.e. the word literally is now mostly a synonym for figuratively.)
Considering the unchecked influence money has on politics in the United States, every billionaire is an oligarch as soon as they start donating money to political parties.
"Oligarchy" is not subject to metaphor or "well kind of but don't you see"
It only becomes an -archy when the actual literal power is openly and legally held
Otherwise, neckbeards would argue that literally every society in history has been a kleptocracy, which is a far more apt description of the sarcastic viewpoint on this society than "oligarchy," which is when rich people are put into office which matches the thing they are good at, would be
Oligarchy does not mean "rich people hold power because they're powerful," or anything even slightly like that
Think about the society that you see in comic book alternate universes every so often, where they make Thomas Edison the chief of industry, et cetera. The nonsense one where we somehow have the ability to divine who's good at what by looking at the history of their wallet, and on that basis make meritocratic elections. In such a society, a lottery winner even who exceeded the wealth of others would wield nonetheless no power, because it wasn't earned.
Practically speaking, there's no way such a thing could plausibly exist. But that's what the word actually means. It's one of those things where people trying to use it to sound deep and wise end up undercutting themselves (like "utopia.")
Can Musk be considered such, considering his antagonistic relationship with current establishment? His acquisition of Twitter could be seen as his first move into politics realm.
I agree oligarch doesn't characterize Musk (tycoon or magnate might be more appropriate), but there are a great many oligarchs that end up on the losing end of the tides of politics -- surely this is true of Petro Poroshenko in Ukraine or countless now semi-exiled oligarchs in Russia.
But I also wouldn't want to exaggerate the temperature of the hot water Musk is in; he's under fairly minor securities scrutiny thanks to a series of unprecedentedly stupid foot-in-mouth decisions he had 100% control over and could have immediately and trivially avoided at no real cost, he picked a fight with the government over reasonable COVID restrictions and they more or less declined to fight back, and lately he's posted a bunch of tweets of the form "DeMoCrAtS mOrE lIkE dImOcRaTs pwnt!!!!" while a joke video game site slaps him around with a trout. Besides that the most credible claim there's political antagonism is a bizarre to make the White House press secretary say the word "Tesla" which seems at best to be a re-run of the "Why Won't Obama Wear A Flag Pin" controversy, only somehow stupider.
I'm just saying I wouldn't describe myself as having an antagonistic relationship with the government because I get parking tickets sometimes and I have tweets calling elected officials clowns.
The "current establishment" of the US comprises two major political parties that switch control back and forth (and sometimes control different parts of the US government simultaneously, as seems likely will occur in 2023.) I see no evidence that Musk is picking a fight with both parties, just the one that is currently disfavored to retain control in the next Congressional elections.
He'd be bankrupt many times over without his ability to work massive $ from the US Gov - I'd argue it's one of his biggest strengths, trailing somewhere after his stock market influence abilities, both of which seem key to how he bankrolls massive capex+opex infra projects.
This so much. Every single Musk adventure seems to requires massive federal subsidies and/or investment to stay afloat. Tesla, SpaceX, Boring Company - it's questionable whether any of them would exist if they were competing in a completely free market.
Some think he's saving the world, but from what I can see, he might just be the world's most effective leech.
Who do you have in mind? I can't think of a techno oligarch that hasn't pledged to the current establishment.
However you feel about the Biden laptop stories, how many of these oligarchs allowed its spread? I think you're kidding yourself if you think oligarchs work against the establishment, but for some reason it's a pretty common view; that of fighting the more powerful, when really that's you.
His first move into politics? His platform (even when he wasn't an antagonistic asshole) was political - climate change, species survival, deregulation.
And those only pay out if you don't consider the mining costs to make the batteries. If you do, they're significantly worse
We should be sticking to combustion cars, atmosphere sourcing the gasoline (we said "it's too expensive" back when gas was $0.79 a gallon; things have changed) and mandating 10% inefficiency into something chemically stable, so that road trip driving becomes part of the solution
Elon musk has nothing to do with saving us from extinction level events. He's taking research money from nuclear and putting it towards solar factories, which make the problem worse.
Elon Musk has not performed any altruism. Almost all of the other billionaires have. He's never given any money to charity at all. No, that word doesn't mean "he's working on stuff."
You're just trying to make the man you're a fan of look good by pretending he does things he hasn't done
Why did you think that he was something other than a car maker who lies for publicity a lot?
> You're just trying to make the man you're a fan of look good by pretending he does things he hasn't done
I'm not parent, but it sounds like you might have the causality of this backwards. Parent wouldn't be a fan in the first place if he didn't think that he's done good things.
> I'm not parent, but it sounds like you might have the causality of this backwards. Parent wouldn't be a fan in the first place if he didn't think that he's done good things.
You seem to need a quick brush up on what marketing is.
Parent is a fan because the internet told him to be. Parent is a fan of great things that Musk explicitly has not actually done.
Perhaps it would be better to be more charitable to parent's views (and to mine).
> You seem to need a quick brush up on what marketing is.
> Parent is a fan because the internet told him to be.
Question: Are you a non-fan of Musk because of marketing? After all, five years ago many people were much bigger fans of Musk, and the last few years have been full of anti-Musk messaging from various corners. So perhaps you are more a victim of marketing than parent? The "Internet" is for sure telling people to be anti-Musk nowadays.
I think it's more charitable to treat your views and parents views as sincerely held, and argue about the views directly, not about whether or not they are "just the result of marketing/the internet/the media/whatever". It'll make for a more interesting conversation.
> Question: Are you a non-fan of Musk because of marketing?
I'm a non-fan of Musk because it is default to be a non-fan of people, because he's done nothing of value, and he's done a lot of damage to the planet
I don't like people who call heroes pedophiles. I don't like people with a long history of firing their staff for what they say, who go on to call themselves free speech extremists.
I don't like ultra-rich men who give nothing to the starving.
I don't like people gassing the worst in politics.
.
> After all, five years ago many people were much bigger fans of Musk
If you take your opinions from Reddit and HN, maybe.
Please stop trying to explain that it's normal to like this man, and diagnosing people for failing to get it, now. This is ultra-fan behavior, and really quite gross.
.
> I think it's more charitable to treat your views and parents views as sincerely held
It's very weird that you keep invoking charity.
I'm not really that worried about the opinions of a Musk ultra-fan, frankly, nor your attempts to tell me that I should steer my opinions to what you think will make for interesting conversation.
Look, say and think whatever you want, I don't really care. But just fyi that your comment is pretty rude, and assumes a lot of things about me that aren't true.
It's not in the spirit of this site to act this way, which is why I made my original comment. More importantly, it's just a pretty obnoxious way to behave towards people. If you don't care cause you think I'm just a "gross ultra-fan", well, that's your right, you do you.
You really tried to ask me whether the reason I wasn't a fan of him was because marketing made me so after I said really why; questioned whether I was "the victim of marketing;" instructed me that the reason for my not liking who you like is the internet telling me not to; instructed me two separate times in a single message about how to be charitable (by agreeing with you, and with nothing to do with actual charity;) then recoiled when I said "stop fanboying at me," as if I was the rude one, and chose to lecture me at length about the spirit of the site and how rude I am, for not wanting to be told that my opinions are based rather than what I said actually on marketing by someone who can't tell me my first name or whether I wear glasses
In reality, it's for the reasons I said before you argued with me about my beliefs and identity, then called me rude when I reacted by not couching up to you and learning about myself from you
I think you really honestly can't see it
Please stop now. Third time in a row that I've asked. Thanks.
Because the average nameplate capacity of solar is below 20% globally, and infill is natural gas. Solar is only zero carbon if you look at it out of context.
This planet has nighttime. This planet has bad weather. Solar fans usually say "batteries," but that's absolute nonsense; there is nowhere near enough copper on this planet to wire them up, or lithium or lead to make them. When they're not grid backed, which is what we're discussing here, they'd have to be half the size of your house, they'd cost $600k, and you'd have to replace them every 25 years. You think the housing crisis is bad? Wait for the battery crisis that solar fans want.
There's a reason that every time they build a solar plant, they build a natural gas plant right next door.
After that, someone inevitably insists that we can just cover the planet in transmission wires. And I mean, if you even think that through for a tenth of a second
On top of that, *solar plants don't work*. Ivanpah has wanted to shut down for 20 years straight because it's bleeding money, and produces less than 10% of the power it was expected to, but the state won't let it, because then their green laws aren't satisfied anymore (and they're only satisfied now because nobody counts the infill carbon.)
Another thing nobody seems to understand is flywheel smoothing. The variability in power is being physically smoothed by (usually) a large spinning piece of rock, similar to the metal disc that smooths power demand in your car. You remember how the one at Level3 cut a notch through the highway when it spun out of the building? That was with a professional maintenance team. You want one of those in every house, or at every city block?
Energiewende failed for a reason. Germany threw almost two trillion dollars at it for 14 years, and all they did was 6x their cost of power, drive their reliability down, and increase their carbon output (even with flywheels, start/stop cycles aren't free; turning those gas plants on and off is a disaster.)
Solar only makes sense if you look at it on paper, driven by an amateur who's googling shit.
As soon as you look at what actually happens at plants, start folding in all the topics you didn't know about, experience, look at whether there are materials to support the fantasy, look at what can be recycled instead of just saying "recycle it," etc?
It just doesn't work.
One of the world's largest and most industrialized nations tried for 14 years, and it was a disaster.
> When they're not grid backed, which is what we're discussing here
Are we? Or is it just your deliberate narrowing of the topic for convenience?
> After that, someone inevitably insists that we can just cover the planet in transmission wires.
Ah, yes, "Someone" a.k.a. Straw Man.
> solar plants don't work. Ivanpah has wanted to shut down
Ivanpah is solar thermal. The main thing making it less competitive is cost reduction in medium- and large-scale PV installations, and [citation needed] for them wanting to shut down.
> Another thing nobody seems to understand is flywheel smoothing
Another thing nobody cares about in this context because it's not essential. Most large solar projects are turning to molten salt (not batteries BTW) for storage. In such a system, there's no need for flywheel smoothing.
> You remember how the one at Level3 cut a notch through the highway
No. Do you remember the thousands of oil spills, fires, and other adverse events associated with fossil fuels, or the nuclear-power-plant disasters? No technology is perfectly safe. It's not sufficient to cherry-pick an example or two. To have any kind of point here, you'd have to show that overall solar is less safe than alternatives.
> driven by an amateur who's googling shit.
Totally uncalled for, against the guidelines, and also more descriptive of the people pimping nuclear. That's the very epitome of "works great on paper" google-research, ignoring still-unsolved problems with older designs and hand-waving over anticipated problems with as-yet-untried ones.
> > When they're not grid backed, which is what we're discussing here
>
> Are we? Or is it just your deliberate narrowing of the topic for convenience?
This attempt at a table turning shows that you really have no understanding of the mechanics of this discussion.
Yes, that is exactly what people excluding you are discussing.
I have no interest in engaging with you, because you've made clear that you have no understanding of the material.
There was just recently a very public court case that showed Elon Musk gave at least a few hundred thousand dollars to charity on a whim for his girlfriend at the time. I find it hard to believe no charity if only because of tax games people at his level play.
Imagine thinking that bringing up a one time gift for someone else was a way of explaining why the world's once richest man should be considered a philanthropist for giving a sum of money that is worth less than the average hiring bonus in his AI department.
A man worth a hundred billion plus may not be considered generous for giving away less than I have. No. I am in no way rich or important. He can do more than I have, and you absolutely will not hold up a pittance like that and pretend it forgives him the insane damage he's done.
This level of apologism reflects on you. Please stop putting it in front of my face.
When we as a people have grown, we will judge billionaires for their allowing the starving to die, instead of gathering in groups to show that we're wise enough to admire them.
Stop looking up to those who could stop the death, and choose not to. They are not worthy of your respect, and you should learn that.
I'm not religious, but there's a lot of wisdom in what nearly every religion says about rich men. Here in the West we tend to be familiar with the Biblical phrasing: "Indeed, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."
I have no expectation to go to heaven, but my fat ass is getting through that needle, because there are dozens of human beings who eat because I mail my dollars. Every time someone in a pope hat tries to stare me down, I get to look back with clear eyes. Feels pretty good.
The UN World Food Programme makes it easy. The hardest part is using a British spelled word every month. (Indeed, if I ever become rich like him, one of my plans is to go to them and tell them I will fund fixing world hunger if and only if they switch permanently to the American spelling. Makes my skin itch.)
Put your signature on food for another person. Try it, one time. You won't stop.
Pretty soon you'll get why I don't care about a couple hundred grand, from a man who spends tens of millions on car commercials every month.
And you might understand why I think you shouldn't be impressed either. And why I think that if we all started expecting him to do better, and stopped being impressed by silly tricks like fake flamethrowers and smoking pot on vaccine denier radio, we might be better off.
Do you know how much he's had removed from his taxes through lobbying for exemptions? That's a pittance. A trivial pittance.
Elon Musk challenged the UN to explain how $6b could help against world hunger, and said if they did it he'd foot the bill. They solidly answered.
It's been years, and he's trying to buy Twitter for $44b instead.
He's literally got all the resources he needs to solve world hunger, and instead he's wasting time trying to put two block subways under sports arenas which even trivial video game simulations can show would never, ever have worked.
Can you imagine anyone being in a position to solve a job like that, and choosing not to?
At least Bill Gates is tackling malaria. But the ones who aren't doing something like that? Not my favorites. I'd say something more severe but HN has a habit of treating criticism of the rich as bad behavior.
With that amount of money, he could just rent an academic to tell him how to do good, and he chooses not to. I don't understand how anyone, ever, fails to judge that. I genuinely don't.
I don't understand how we've gotten to a position of not hating rich who don't give back. It used to be socially normal to loathe these people, to the point of calling them robber barons.
Nine million lives a year. A holocaust every eight months. Ten thousand children every single day.
People like to pretend that they have some deep insight into the money not being liquid and people not being able to and blah blah who cares, he got it together for Twitter, it's just apologism
What is the meaningful difference between having the ability to stop that and choosing not to, and actual evil? Like, really. I know it's the kind of statement that seems exaggerated and misplaced, but make a genuine attempt to answer it.
We still punish someone for causing a death, even if it's through inaction. If you're standing at a train control panel in that Rocky and Bullwinkle thing with a person tied on the tracks, and you can pull the lever to switch the track to save them, and you just choose not to? And you knew? Even if you had nothing to do with the situation, you're still going to jail for negligent homicide.
If you ask the average American who the worst person of all time is, they'll typically say Hitler, and justify it with six million dead. Better educated people might instead say Stalin, Pol Pot, or Andrew Jackson, on similar grounds.
Most academics count the largest single human's death count as Stalin at an estimated 12 mil.
Nine million by starvation every single year.
Should we have the concept of negligent genocide?
I will ask it again. What is the meaningful difference between having the ability to stop that and choosing not to, and actual evil? Really.
We all pay a substantial portion of our income in taxes. They skate. That portion on just Elon and the Waltons - on just five people, to pay our tax rate - and three holocausts every two years are prevented for the rest of time.
When do we start judging them for their excesses, their lack of doing their share, the harm they're doing to the rest of us?
When do we stop admiring the gilded cage, and realize that it's denying us our basics?
Shouldn't you have government health care, manageable rent, and a non-carbon grid by now?
Of course, given where I'm posting this, this comment is probably bad for me in the long run
Statistically speaking, most academics believe that altruism evolved because it's an effective cure for tragedies of the commons
Really, do you read that as something other than "he threw away a couple hundred grand to impress a girl?"
Do you actually think that was charity? Genuinely? Why just that once, then?
And from that lens, do you realize how little money that actually is, then, and how easy a real amount would be able for him to give?
This is probably unpopular, and certainly a personal opinion; but the more time I've put into remote gigs (in-person gig going remote during COVID, then switching to a full-remote company) the more I agree.
Everyone has different life contexts, and for some people remote is the best way for them to be productive. It's also likely that it's generally a better balance between corporate demands and peoples' lives. For me; its made work worse.
The worst part is on-boarding new remote employees; especially those with less seniority in the industry. It SUCKS. It really sucks. Effective onboarding is quite fundamentally predicated on drive-by questions; and remote makes asking any drive-by question ten times less efficient, even in the most well-meaning teams, its typing, its timezones, its meetings scheduled for the next day, its screen sharing at 720p because someone doesn't know how to use Zoom, its that gut uncertainty that the "hi do you have ten minutes to meet" message from your manager could mean anything from a catch-up to a you're fired because you're blind to every nonverbal social cue anyone in-person could pick up on.
Then there's the separation of work and home. Driving sucks; undoubtably. But put that aside and just look at the space. Everyone's home is different, but I'll describe the few experiences I've had. At the start: living alone. Going from constant, positive human interaction every day to nothing but pixels on a screen. The people who will clinically admit this negatively affects their mental health are oftentimes the same people pushing for more remote work; like having their cake and eating it too, except "eating it" means "destroying your brain". Then, living with a SO who was also working remote. I actually have no idea how people manage this without a 3 bedroom house in the suburbs. Most people don't have this, and I'm sure it works for those who do. She's on meetings half the day; I'm in meetings a quarter the day; the cats are zooming around at 10 miles per hour; the dog needs to be walked; we agree "we need a bigger space" and then look at real estate prices and realize that has to mean moving to the middle of nowhere and leaving our entire lives behind (don't worry; we can still play games and chat online with our old friends; thus, we've remotified our entire lives, from work to play; the only experience we enjoy in-person anymore is shopping at the suburban walmart in the strip mall. And, of course, each other, and we'll keep telling ourselves that's enough).
I can't reconcile the facts that I worked in this industry for five years, in person, and never experienced the burn-out I am now, with the fact that everything should be better. The job is fantastic. Remote coworkers, unbelievably friendly, smart, knowledgable. No commute. Great technology. Pooping on my own toilet every day. Everything is great, most of it sucks.
Working for Tesla would suck though. "40 hours a week at least" is insane.
Tesla seems to get a lot of work out of its employees because of how appealing the company’s mission is, but this seems like a recipe for burnout. Every employee must work 40 hours per week in a main Tesla office, unless Elon Musk himself personally approves the exception. Factory workers apparently have even more required of them.
>Tesla seems to get a lot of work out of its employees because of how appealing the company’s mission is, but this seems like a recipe for burnout.
Even moreso it was Musk's personal brand that made his companies so desirable to work for. A brand that he has spent the last few years torching to the ground on Twitter. He'll still be able to pay senior folks enough to stick around for a while. But the new grad pipeline is most likely drying up at this point.
He's gone from "building cool shit, but holy crap the hours are long" to "long hours for a toxic edgelord who has consistently over promised and under delivered" in the span of a decade.
From what I have heard from friends at Tesla, 40 hours is literally the minimum. A particular friend told me that they put 60-70 hours easily every week and so do their teammates.
It's getting very tiresome to see big oil/right wing talking points repeated on HN constantly. You can go read the Tesla impact report here: https://www.tesla.com/impact and see that they're doing their best to eliminate conflict minerals in their battery chemistry.
I know you're taking the piss but I worked for a Shell subsidiary for 2 years very recently and they actually take all the "green" stuff very seriously despite the fact their core business accounts for 2% of global co2 emissions. It's very bizarre and much of the internal "greenwashing" dialog reads like a catholic confessional.
With that out of the way there is a difference between corporate PR greenwashing and literally changing battery chemistries to not contain as many rare earth minerals.
It's the same at SpaceX. Everyone I know who has worked there said the pay sucks and the hours are long and the only reason to do it is a passion for the industry.
Musk seems to be modeling his companies on the video gaming industry.
I wouldn't say it's the industry, but the mission. You can earn more and work less at practically any other major aerospace company, and also get hired more easily. But instead of working on a goal of getting humans living on Mars, you're working on a goal of maximizing quarterly gains for shareholders.
The same culture that embraces this is the same culture that will take risks to start a new electric automobile company. It's give and take. If the workers at the factory are hourly they're also being paid overtime to do this work. My parents worked at Honda in Ohio and often worked more than 40 hours/week because they would get paid overtime. Safety incidents happen because that's just life, but most issues are attributable to drugs/alcohol, and people being scumbags.
Instead of banning something, I think we need to make sure we're allowing people to seek employment options that work best for them with sensible safety practices of course. Being able to work overtime, for example, afforded my parents a great life and a reasonable "retirement" age. You might say, well they could get paid more and join a union, etc. and while I don't care too much about unions one way or another, Honda employees routinely reject unionization because they're really happy with their employment arrangement. I bet Tesla is similar.
Speaking for Honda, many people go straight from high school to work on the factory floor. They work overtime, and they have to do a good job, but if you go and ask the employees or the town of Marysville everyone is pretty happy with the arrangement. Again, I'm not sure why Tesla would be dissimilar except that it's popular so it makes the headlines.
In the case of office workers, software engineers, or others who are salaried, well they're professionals and they're paid a lot of money.
The first reaction to seeing something like "xyz is happening at Tesla" shouldn't be to ban something that you don't understand.
I was not talking about tesla, i was talking about working 60 hours in a risky environment, but hey why not work 120? Or better, sleep in the factory eat there and pay for it?
>My parents worked at Honda in Ohio and often worked more than 40 hours/week because they would get paid overtime.
Yes that's normal, sometimes you have to do overtime, but 60 hours at a regular basis is something else.
FLSA exemptions are great! And if an employee is not exempt you can just misclassify them, they probably have no way to know they're not exempt, and if they complain you can completely coincidentally not-at-all-in-retaliation fire them because at-will employment bebe.
Disagree with that statement but I get the sentiment.
Look at Asia and how many new companies they produced despite overworking themselves to death.
The problem with Europe is not mainly this but that we truly do not have a common market.
We cant pool resources and talents into one place and launch a pan-european project.
Europe is still countries actively engaging in competition among themselves.
They are all older then a decade (some more then 100 years), he's not wrong that europe has massive problems making "big new company's", however the conclusion that it has something todo with the ~absence of exploitation is probably wrong ;)
Europes business landscape is distinctively different. In Europe you have many small global champions (mostly specialized in something that only they can produce well) and only few Mega-Corporations compared to US or Asia.
I think this is a better diversification than concentrating all GDP into a few big player.
Accenture came out of American firm Arthur Andersen which went bankrupt because of its involvement with Enron. It was incorporated in Bermuda, then moved to Ireland about 10 years later.
I've worked two FAANGM jobs as a salaried engineer and or manager, rarely put in over 40. Draw boundaries, stick to them. Long hours mean the company is underfunding your team, and there's no reason you should be picking up their mistakes.
> Anyone who wishes to do remote work must be in the office for a minimum (and I mean *minimum*) of 40 hours per week or depart Tesla. This is less than we ask of factory workers.
You're just sticking to semantics. It's well known all his companies require you to work more than 40 hours. Combine that with these emails, it's easy to understand what the expectations are.
The office is a complete anachronism, entirely unnecessary for knowledge work.
It is born of industrialized times before modern networked knowledge management and communications software. It is kept in place by bad managers. It was long ago studied and shown that remote work makes good managers' teams perform better and bad managers' teams perform worse (likely because good managers manage for results while bad managers just micromanage for poor indicators of work like how much time you spend in your chair looking miserable).
The commute is an utter and complete waste of time and society's resources. Simply not commuting buys 1-4 HOURS EVERY DAY. Even if not a minute of this time is given to the employer as extra work, the employee will be significantly more productive having not spent 0.5-2 hours fighting traffic just to sit in the cheap office chair.
Smart employees have figured this out and properly demand to do better work. Smart managers also know that there are huge competitive advantages to remote work.
1) Employers can now tap a talent pool as large as the country or even globe, instead of only a 2-hour commute to one of their offices.
2) Remote work is a key competitive advantage, seen as a key benefit by the best employees, and will allow for lower salary costs.
3) Remote work can dramatically reduce real-estate costs. IBM figured this out decades ago when it started doing significant remote work and having check-in portable offices.
4) Remote work will force you to have better management, who manage for objectives instead of irrelevant manager-ego-boosting indicia of work.
5) Remote work has been proved to be at least as, and in some cases more productive than office work.
So, what is egregious about it is that it is now widely known as a bad practice.
Imagine the reverse - remote work has been the norm and now managers were proposing to the boards that they build multi-billion dollar buildings, and require every employee to get up and drive in the worst traffic to this site, to sit and work in the exact same condition every day, and zero of those conditions enable better work product (i.e., the equipment is not better than what employees have at home, etc.). Both the boards approving such spending and the employees being asked to do this new waste-of-time commute would universally say
He is not exactly wrong... email could be a bit better phrased and mandating X hrs may be a bit extreme. Overall though his main point about a great product not being built over the phone IMO is correct. At the very least you stand a substantially smaller chance of doing so...
I think the part that people most take issue with is the "you have to spend 40 hours in the office (the other 40 hours you are expected to work per week you can do from home)" part...
He's getting paid $18 million dollars per day to pretend he lives in the factories, doing none of the dangerous and backbreaking manual work most of the people in the building are doing for under $18/hour. I'm sure they're super inspired.
It probably would be relatively inspiring to have your CEO in the factory and not in his top floor c suite in a fancy suit using the only clean toilets that the whole building has to offer.
According to the factory workers, it's terrifying. He's known for walking around the factory rage firing employees at random. I think they'd prefer he be anywhere else.
> "Employees knew about such rampages. Sometimes Musk would terminate people; other times he would simply intimidate them. One manager had a name for these outbursts—Elon’s rage firings—and had forbidden subordinates from walking too close to Musk’s desk at the Gigafactory out of concern that a chance encounter, an unexpected question answered incorrectly, might endanger a career."
> "Employees knew about such rampages. Sometimes Musk would terminate people; other times he would simply intimidate them. One manager had a name for these outbursts—Elon’s rage firings
Sounds like same ol' behavior as the narcissistic Ballmer and Jobs. Being perceived as "dangerous" is part of being an alpha male, but it goes too far when you get to the top, it seems.
Nah. Having factory staff interact with the CEO would create a lot of stress for said factory staff, plus Musk is known for going into a rage and firing people.
It would be interesting to see data on which companies have the best recruitment (most applicants for similar roles). My hunch is Tesla beats most others.
> best recruitment (most applicants for similar roles)
I don't think 'number of applicants' is a good way of measuring 'best recruitment', or that 'best recruitment' is a meaningful counter when talking about conditions of people currently employed there.
Maybe your subjective opinion about the working conditions is not universally held. Recruitment data would remove individual bias in favor of the collective bias of the actual workers, which is what's most important in my opinion
Right. All that guy cares about is money, so he can sleaze off at his yacht, surround himself with supermodels and be photographed with world leaders.
End of sarcasm.
It’s not like Elon needs more money to afford a bigger house or something. The the things he wants are things that, as of now, no amount of money can buy. He is, like everybody, motivated by a desire to overcome limitations. But the limitations he perceives are likely very different from yours.
> Right. All that guy cares about is money, so he can sleaze off at his yacht, surround himself with supermodels and be photographed with world leaders.
Elon dated Amber Heard. It was revealed in a trial that he donated 1 million USD on her behalf to charities of her choice, we presume to impress her during their courtship.
> It’s not like Elon needs more money to afford a bigger house or something. The the things he wants are things that, as of now, no amount of money can buy.
He wanted Twitter, which had a very specific price tag (44 billion USD), and his wealth allowed him to purchase it.
There are plenty of examples where additional wealth has benefited Elon.
Sure. But it's not like he wants it for personal consumption. You gotta ask what is "reason why" is. What is he after? And I'd say it's something like a better nervous system for the human species as such. I'd say it's a world in which ideas can compete with one another based on merit. And that, again, is something money cannot buy today. Just like an electric car with 500 horsepower and 400 miles of range wasn't something you could buy back in 2008.
(I edited my post before your reply -- apologies, thought I was quick enough to make another point)
> Sure. But it's not like he wants it for personal consumption. You gotta ask what is "reason why" is. What is he after? And I'd say it's something like a better nervous system for the human species as such.
My reading is he wanted Twitter because it's an influential, chronically under performing platform that he enjoys using. It'll give him incredible power to shape narratives and impact how many get information.
Respectfully: Elon is not a saint, and taking him at face value has never been worthwhile.
Yeah, I saw the Amber Heard thing. Though I read it was 500k. But this is a single instance. He's not throwing money around to get his way. Saw that elonjet guy on Twitter? Elon asked him to take down the bot. The guy wanted 50k. Elon didn't do it. If he wanted to throw his weight around and get his way, he could have.
And with the Amber Heard thing, we really don't know anything, do we? Not in the trial. And certainly not why Elon did step in with his money. It's easy to speculate that he wanted to buy her affection. And perhaps it's true. He sometimes does foolish things, and he might be especially vulnerable to foolishness when it comes to relationships. But then again, we know nothing.
I don't see Elon as a saint, at all. I just think many people are quite bad at interpreting Elon's actions - and, because of that, terrible at predicting what he will or won't do. For instance, I think Elon is not interested at all about "shaping narratives". I would argue that that's a foreign concept to him. He believes, I think, that in order to change the public's opinion on something, you have to provide "precedents and superlatives". And that's what he's doing: Tesla, SpaceX, Boring, Neuralink... I really think he does believe in free speech. He sees that principle at work in his companies. He has done so many things that, when interpreted based on the assumption that he's motivated by increasing his wealth just for the sake of it, appear terribly foolish, and even reckless. Yet they immediately start making a lot of sense once you refine your mental model of what is really driving him.
Maybe he could pick up a superyacht (I suspect one could get a lightly used model at a really good price right now!), and spend a month each quarter deeply relaxing. Delegate more internal and external responsibilities (like talking to the public) to other people. This might increase Tesla's success, improve his public image, and ultimately add another half-trillion to his net worth.
Leadership at a company I worked for used to tout how much they worked.
They had enormous offices, a lounge, a bar, food (and just about everything) brought to them on demand, hired all their friends to work with them, had drivers if they wanted, secretaries who took care of personal tasks, flew first class... paid a ton.
I had a tiny cube that was falling apart under an ever blowing air vent, next to a way tpo small walk way (everyone walking by couldn't help but bump my cube / look directly in it).
Must be rough for those guys to work all those hours... /s
And of course the asymmetry between being the CEO of the company, where you sit only in the meetings of your choice and where everyone tries to make you happy vs. having to sit in meetings any manager in your chain scheduled and expects you to make him/her happy.
In general, there is a huge difference between working many hours when you can decide on a whim what to work on vs. having to work many hours on something you have been put on. When working on things I decide to work on, I often have put in enormous amounts of hours, but that cannot be compared with the typical paid work. (I am quite lucky to have a job with relative freedom, but the more I notice it, when there are projects which limit this freedom)
I work for a small company now. The "extra" time I put in is stuff I WANT to do. It's so much more fun / easier to work extra on the thing I want to do, especially when it is optional as it is for me now.
Of course, springing this on already remote workers is problematic. Tesla is no stranger to low employee retention. In the short term they will have an exodus but perhaps in the longer term they'll have a workforce more aligned to their culture.