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Comment by zaroth | Hacker News Reader

There's no defending Tesla's worker rights or saftey record. This is a company that's stood at the brink of failure for years and only survives through the blood, sweat, and tears of its employees.

Maybe you believe Elon when he says that it's worth it, but there's no arguing that it's a steep price to pay.

It's incredibly frustrating that no one has figured out a way to bring about the kind of transformative change that Tesla is after without such back breaking sacrifice. But I think the fact remains there's too much non-linearity in the means of production to get where Elon is trying to go without pushing his people to the limit.

The only "answer" I can give is just that I hope TSLA employees are getting enough equity to make it all worth it.

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I don't think line workers should be asked to sacrifice their health to make the company successful. It is highly unlikely they are getting any meaningful stock options or bonuses associated with their level of sacrifice.

It isn't the equivalent of a startup employee working through the holidays to ship code. The benefits of workplace ergonomics, not only to employee health but also to production speed, have been known for decades. Tesla doesn't have to reinvent the wheel here.

I imagine the stress level on the software engineers is equally insane and perhaps just as debilitating as the physical labor of the line workers.

It's no justification, but IMO you simply can't get where Elon is trying to go without that level of sacrifice from the people carrying the load.

Tesla apparently made a lot of basic mistakes in designing their initial production line, as you say, basic ergonomic failures. Now what we hear as they scale up for Model 3 is that it's people building machines that build cars. If there's a human actually on the Model 3 "line" then by definition it won't run fast enough. My own experience is that automation is asymptotic in that it takes orders of magnitudes more engineering to achieve progressively more "complete" automation. Not everything will be automated, and the whole line will run so hard that the parts which aren't will be absolutely brutal to keep up with. But I have absolutely zero evidence for this, it's just a hunch.

> It isn't the equivalent of a startup employee working through the holidays to ship code.

I agree but I think that scenario can also be pretty exploitative.

You should read the article. They are a high number of incidents, but they are mostly minor things.

It's a poor way to compare a company's safety record.

I have to think that any industry with a high rate of injuries is going to have far more "minor" injuries than amputations and deaths.

Really? The fact that this article is based on 2015 stats, and the company has improved to be significantly better than the industry average since then is a pretty good defense...

Learning from mistakes is one of the key traits of successful people and companies.

In the dozen or so articles I've read on TSLA factory conditions and manufacturing culture, I think to describe it as a "mistake" is a gross mischaracterization.

Elon himself has said, to stay alive they have had to push harder than imaginable. He tries to put himself in the center of it -- work the longest hours, face the worst of the conditions. Which is admirable but still a glaring symptom.

Elon is the king at the head of the charge. But it's still a bloody charge all the same.

What, exactly, is "worth it", though? SpaceX, sure, that could be worth it. They're actually innovating.

But Tesla? A goddamn car company? What the hell is so important about fancy cars for rich people that they have to screw the workers for?

Sure, they call themselves an "energy company", and they have made "amazing advances in energy technology", but both Tesla's fancy solar panel AND battery "advances" are literally just licensed Panasonic tech.

I don't get it.

It's not at all "literally just licensed Panasonic". Panasonic is a key partner but Tesla is making very important contributions across the board.

It has built and proven that electric cars are feasible. It has built THE trailblazing electric car. It is the iPhone of cars. All other manufacturers are now scrambling to catch up and build their own. Consequently we'll see millions of these cars. Unsure how many rockets we'll see...

Global warming. We're at or past the tipping point already, but electric cars and solar houses are definitely the direction we need to be going if we want to avoid disastrous and irreversible climate change. If--if--Tesla can help make that happen, it'll be worth a lot of sacrifice.

What caused climate change before there were people?

There's a relevant xkcd about that: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1732:_Earth_Tempe...

Fires have started without human intervention in the past. Therefore, arson is a myth.

I think it's a mistake to think that a more efficient personal vehicle can make the difference in climate change. The fundamental problem is that personal vehicles are NOT efficient, except on a personal level. A disruption in transportation is needed. Trains that are cheap and easy to install would do it. Something out of left field that hasn't been invented yet could do it. But improving cars can only ever be an incremental change, and we're well past the point where incremental changes can help.

While I agree that efficiency won't make much difference by itself, you should see the bigger picture. Electrical vehicles allows people to use renewable sources. Autonomous driving allows people to buy less cars.

Long term they will also be more ecological to keep and maintain: They are simpler machines that break much less, and batteries are pretty much the only thing that will need replacement, which will eventually be 100% recycled using renewable energy.

I have real doubts about switching to electric cars being adequate to address that problem.

Alone, no, not at all. But no one change was ever going to be enough. Electric cars (and home solar, which, as I mentioned, Tesla is also big into) can both be parts of the larger puzzle.

> I think the fact remains there's too much non-linearity in the means of production to get where Elon is trying to go without pushing his people to the limit.

What is the basis for that? It is an easy rationalization for an issue with serious consequences.

For far too many problems the work doesn't subdivide cleanly. A single person "pulling" for 16 hours a day at a given problem achieves 2x more than two people pulling at it for 8 hours each.

Or to put it another way, when Jeff Dean pulls an all nighter and commits code at 6am before collapsing under his desk for a few moments rest, for the rest of the day, all of Google is twice as productive.

For some disciplines, yes, but it seems unlikely that factory floor work is one of those.

(Also, back when I was still pulling all-nighters, I could do 3-5 days worth of work in a night, but I'd be largely useless for the rest of the week, so it was a wash at best. Good for catching up before a deadline, but not really a strong strategy overall.)

> but there's no arguing that it's a steep price to pay.

What's so steep about it? It's marginally higher than the industry average. Some other members of industry will be higher than that average as well. The numbers in the article don't paint the picture of Tesla being a charnel house compared against its contemporaries.

The guy who volunteered to work double shifts to make a lot more money got tendinitis. Should Tesla have denied his request, on the off chance he would get tendinitis?

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