Two Tesla Production Chiefs to Leave Ahead of Model 3 Ramp-Up | Hacker News Reader

Two Tesla Production Chiefs to Leave Ahead of Model 3 Ramp-Up

bloomberg.com

76 pointsmgevans48 comments

Who knows the real story here, but I can imagine once your stock options vest, financial prudence and personal sanity don't really point to doing the next big ramp-up at Tesla.

You're heavily recruitable for large swaths of stock at any number of startups, presumably with a status bump on top, or you could just take your well earned millions and chill for a bit.

Whoever is running the Model 3 delivery program is going to be living at the office for the next 36 months, by contrast.

Will say this: I met a director from Tesla just after their unveiling of the Model X. She said a small number of people were assigned to fully assemble / prep each vehicle shown that night.. for roughly two weeks they worked 20 hour shifts and slept 2 hours each night. Most teams were working on them right up until the cars rolled on stage; there was still wet paint on one. Also, it was said a "normal" workweek of 16 hours days isn't uncommon..

So, your theory is the story.. she can't wait for options to fully vest and gracefully exit. It's not for lack of thrill, growth, etc. – just that after 3-4 years it is heavily taxing and a pace of sanity is much desired.

I hear people tell stories like this about successful companies all the time.

If this is really how the game is played. I quit.

Nobody said success was easy or didn't involve sacrifice. Just sayin'

Many years ago I worked as a geologist and watched as a very low-yield gold mine went thru cycles of getting funded, building some infrastructure and then declaring bankruptcy, until finally there was enough infrastructure there to actually make something happen (and maybe the rising gold price helped in the end).

It seems this strategy can be applied in different scenarios/fields and with money, people, money and people... Opens your eyes.

Sprint deployment / critical fixes are one thing, but for a year I did 90+ hour work weeks on a CPG startup and fried myself. More specifically, I was so burnt out on the very thing that was supposed to catapult me to the next level. The concept of positive burnout is very real..

>If this is really how the game is played. I quit.

It's not a game.

I think success, even greatness is possible with a more manageable work/life/sleep balance. It's just far slower and more expensive. SpaceX and Tesla are brute forcing greatness at the expense of a few people that are also impatient for change/success. If they are on-board with the mission, they are probably okay with it until they get their gold and can rest (if they last that long).

I just don't get how you can be successful doing stuff that way. People with that little sleep are not going to function optimal. They are going to make mistakes.

But both Tesla and SpaceX seems very successful so I wonder if they are successful despite of this or because of this.

Or whether this story is apocryphal, being twice removed from the original workers.

I think it requires strong, perfectionist, top-down leadership. See for example Steve Jobs or James Cameron. They aren't the most popular bosses, but they create amazing things by working their people hard and watching everything very closely.

Additionally, they are incredibly driven and hard working themselves. They expect the same from everyone below them.

Both. They are doing amazing things so they attract awesome people that are dedicated heart and soul. I have a friend who was telling me first hand of their experiences at spaceX and imo it's just a matter of time before some exhausted person makes a mistake and there are huge losses of money and/or life.

Both Tesla and SpaceX have reasonably limited, though dramatic, product failure modes- a car crash or a rocket explosion, respectively. Both have already happened in spades without damaging either's reputation too much. A 1.5x multiplier on engineer hours is worth that kind of risk.

Which is depressing, but it makes sense.

Companies like spaceX tend to have several levels of failover that prevent a single exhausted person's mistake from causing huge problems.

I once lived in a hacker hostel with a girl who was working 16 hour days at Tesla doing embedded systems programming. She said she honestly loved it, got lost in the flow state every day and didn't feel any effects from the sleep deprivation.

These people do exist. (Though maybe not long past early 20s).

I've been in that mode -- it can be fun, as long as you like the work and don't have other responsibilities (family, etc.)

As soon as it starts causing conflict with other areas of your life, it's a fast track to burnout or nervous breakdown.

Also, everyone gets sick of everything eventually. At some point the tasks being done in those 16 hour days will cease to be fun and absorbing and interesting, at which point it becomes a living hell because you have to spend all your time pushing yourself forward, rather than being pulled forward by being fascinated by whatever it is you're working on. It's not sustainable even if there are no conflicts with other areas of your life.

What is "that little sleep"? 16 hours a day leaves 8 hours a day, you can easily fit 6 hours of sleep there.

A mere 6 hours of sleep is a little amount.

Commute there, commute back, shower, eat, say hello to spouse, go to sleep might just take 2 hours, but i wouldn't describe that fit as "easily" (maybe if you live at work).

Remember we're not talking about the exceptional 16h day once in a blue moon but the normal modus operandi over months or years.

Also, 8 hours per night is how much most people like to sleep (and i suspect for good biological reason, long term).

Makes me wonder if companies like that would consider giving people 3-6 months break after big projects and get it into the culture of the company that you should make use of it. Instead of jumping ship people would come back feeling refreshed and if they were drawn to the work in the first place feel the need to fill the hole they have

I'd suggest reading the Elon Musk biography and it will be clear why this will never happen at Space-X and Tesla. It's just not in his DNA to understand the value of family or work-life balance

Adding it to the list.

That was my life for a while doing field service in the power generation industry. Fall through spring are busy with work because power plants make most of their money in the summer so maintenance is done in the off seasons. so we'd get the summer off after working months of 7/12s. Still worked out to a really good yearly salary as well.

There's this narrative that you see a lot of people here express. The narrative is that there are no trade-offs to be made in terms of success and quality of life -- that the most work output you can get from people is also when you ask relatively little of them and dedicate yourself to their happiness.

You should be suspicious of people telling you that the world has no trade-offs, that everything's win-win.

While there is of course a point beyond which trying to work people harder is strictly counterproductive, that point is, for most people, well north of 40 hours a week. It's probably well north of 80 hours a week. Your 81st hour in the week is almost certainly nowhere near as productive as your 35th hour is, but it's probably not negatively productive.

And if you specifically hire for people who can be productive in long weeks, you can definitely find people who can add productivity to the 80th hour and beyond.

Those people may quickly become unhappy. They may eventually (or rapidly) burn out. And you may be a real dick if you ask this of people. But it's one way to get a lot of value, fast.

I don't think that companies ought to routinely ask for very long hours. But that's because I think that it's inhumane, not because the universe has created natural law that says that long working hours remove productivity.

Tesla goes from one firefighting to another, it's a place that while growing is not "growing up". End of quarter are always nuts, people are asked to perform miracles and of course quality suffers when everything is a fire. They had some serious rethinking of how the organization works lately so a bunch of people that had a lot of power ended up with considerably less of it, and some new faces are ascending rapidly.

I agree that the situation isn't ideal, but that's what happens when you attempt to compress 100 years of corporate growth into 10-15 years.

I don't work at Tesla, I'm just familiar with the situation through close acquaintances. People are getting REALLY tired of hearing "next quarter will be different and we'll start putting processes in place..."

The Model X has been plagued with problems. I'm guessing they were asked to leave.

I am not so sure, it could be they are leaving because Musk is interfering too much in design and production that they cannot effectively do their jobs. Tesla has the highest warranty expenditure per car in the auto industry, even out pacing Mercedes. The X simply has too many tricks that its obviously not from any self respecting design committee but pushed by someone who doesn't listen. Same problems arose when they did their first car.

It's going to be a tough few years getting the plant running profitably. Tesla hasn't tried to be price-competitive before. They need to get good at low-cost, high-volume auto manufacturing. Trying to get "fast", "cheap" and "good" all at once is very hard. Tesla tends to get "good", but not the other two.

For comparison, see Apple's plant in Fremont, 1984-1992. This was Steve Jobs' vision of manufacturing.[1] It looks great. It's got automatic stacker cranes. It's got pick and place machines. It's got mobile robots. Everything is very tidy. But it's inefficient. Designing a factory around a storage and retrieval warehouse machine turns out to be a bad idea. Too much of the plant is material handling rather than manufacturing. Apple closed that plant and outsourced manufacturing to Foxconn.

This is the sort of problem you hit in setting up a manufacturing plant. It's easy to end up with too much work in progress spread around the plant. This is worse in automotive, where work in progress is physically large and needs storage space.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUjyh2Fhnuk

Interesting timing for this as they report earnings tonight. They also announced that they've leased 2 buildings near Livermore that give them almost 1,000,000 square feet of space.

There is alot of speculation on CNBC that these announcements were made early to help direct the investors call as TSLA is widely expect to report poor earnings this quarter due to Model X delays.

Tesla's Powerwall is also starting to be installed. I always thought they'd announced the powerwall to gauge interest. I assumed that they'd want to focus all their battery storage capacity towards car deliveries. I guess this is a positive sign that they can meet their battery needs.

I thought the consensus was that the Powerwall was to soak up some capacity at their upcoming plant and get their per unit costs down.

I seem to remember reading that the powerwall is specced to use the batteries removed from Tesla cars once they've reached something like 70% of original capacity. Reuse is cheaper than recycling.

The new buildings are because the factory is running out of space for office workers - there's quite a few there and now they are pretty crammed and in places where ventilation and other "amenities" are not readily available.

Listening to the earnings call today Elon said one of them is staying on for a transition, and that they will be announcing a big hire in the coming weeks. Sounds like an experienced veteran in production?

I mean, this sounds like it could be hype but they have a pretty special thing with this many pre orders, US manufacturing, and a really exciting product.

Waiting for the HN fanboys to defend Tesla.

I will give the obligatory "why is this article on HN" comment. This is inside baseball and tabloid type infotainment. It certainly doesn't "gratify one's intellectual curiosity" in the way that the guidelines on posting most likely intended.

At some point you're going to just have to accept that an upvote/rating system means that the articles on HN are "whatever the HN community wants to see", and no amount of griping or rules lawyering is ever going to change that. HN is a self-selecting population which mostly shares the same interests, and those interests are usually about hacking or IT or entrepreneurship, but not always. The population likes hearing about Tesla, so Tesla articles get front-paged.

Well point taken but by that token I am sure the HN community might also want to see jokes as well as porn?

Now you could say "yeah they do like that but don't like seeing it on HN". But I say it's more than that. It's that that type of post would get flagged by the mods and taken down as not fitting in as 'appropriate for HN'.

The HN community actually likes Musk rather than Tesla. There are cool things that are happening by other auto makers but you'd never get upvotes on a post about their executives. At least not anywhere near as frequently.

HN upvotes jokes all the time. As for porn, it would be removed by the moderators the first few times, but if a majority the community decided it really wanted it, it would eventually push back on the moderators and the moderation standards would change (well, or YC would just shut it down). At that point it would be up to you whether you wanted to keep coming here, but at the end of the day there's no real way for a vote-based system to perpetually override what the community wants. In practice it works because we're mostly interested in the same things and mostly agree on what isn't appropriate, but you do get edge cases like this.

This comment breaks the HN guidelines, which ask you not to call names in comments. We also ask people not to post drive-by dismissals.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

What would be nice is if you could issue some guidelines on downvoting.

What would be the point? Who would enforce them?

Ahead of model 3 ramp-up? Last I checked they didn't even have a single "production" car yet and that ramp-up isn't scheduled to happen for the next two years.

It's like saying "Obama to leave ahead of zombie apocalypse".

The Model 3 is supposed to already be in customers' garages in two years. The ramp-up better have happened by then or they'll be behind schedule.

As for why the ramp-up is a big concern now: There were several times more Model 3 reservations than Tesla projected, so they need to increase their production capacity in order to meet the demand. Getting ready to produce the cars is part of the ramp-up, and it's turned out to be a bigger task than they expected.

Also the "reservations" are not contracts. If the Model 3 is significantly delayed, some number of those will not follow through with a purchase. Especially if there are other competing options on the market by then, which there almost certainly will be.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com