Elon Musk hires 2 Newfoundland interns who solved problems at Tesla factory
cbc.ca
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That's what my old company used to do (who originally hired me as an intern). The interns were tasked with a brand new project, something that wasn't business critical but would be a great new addition to the product.
Then when we came on board full time were were slotted into the regular development flow.
Using interns as grunts seems like a poor allocation of resources.
Non high end tech interns where always treated like grunts especially in high status industries and often had to work for free.
At least in the USA it is illegal for an intern to work for free if that intern is adding value to the company.
The relevant guideline is this:
"The employer doesn’t benefit from work the intern is doing, “and on occasion its operations may actually be impeded.” [1]
[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/when-interns-should-be-pa...
One of my favorite Youtubers is Curtis Stone whose channel is about micro-farming, basically farming in your yard for income. He is a big proponent on education and used to allow people to come intern with him for a few weeks (unpaid) to learn how to start their own micro-farm and then they'd leave and start their own small businesses. Now he can no longer do that, he instead has to charge them tuition. The students basically have the same experience they would have had as unpaid interns, but now they have to pay for the privilege. This is the height of stupidity.
Even in other industries you will not remain unpaid very long if you are doing valuable work. If you get an unpaid grunt work job doing drywall, after a few weeks you can pretty much do drywall on your own. Quit and start your own drywall business if they won't hire you for decent pay. You'll likely make more as a small business owner anyways.
Companies that are well run and growing do this. A lot of other companies uses interns (particularly unpaid interns in years past) as ways to save money on menial labor.
I've experienced awesome interns who were worth their weight in gold, but I've also experienced interns who were nothing but a massive distraction for the team, a complete waste of time in a startup environment where time is the least available resource, and source of nothing but drama regularly disturbing the entire team.
On the other hand, I have an intern now, who I've taught go (she made a cli and learned tdd) and had her set up a tensorflow deep learning pipeline, which is not repetitive and very exploratory.
When I started working I had no idea that the key to success was as simple as giving a crap and being consistent in your good work. I figured that it would take me decades to work on some secret skills to move up, but now I know that's not true.
Tesla is a pipsqueak. It's just ludicrously overpriced.
But also, hell yes does worth correlate with size. It's only in postmodern Silicon Valley economics that a company with twenty employees and no revenue can be worth a billion dollars. All the standard ways of pricing a stock I know of take size into account, either directly or indirectly.
BTW, the standard ways of pricing a stock includes growth potential, which is why Tesla has that crazy valuation. It's totally fine if that's not the valuation technique you prefer, but it exists.
Tesla is growing radically faster than GM, which hasn't increased its sales or global market share meaningfully in 15 years.
Tesla, 2016 -> 2017 sales growth: 67%
GM, 2016 -> 2017 sales growth: Negative
That kind of growth by Tesla universally gets you a huge valuation adjustment vs a company with zero or negative growth.
Investors are betting that GM's future is not particularly bright, that there is no growth in the business. It is discounted accordingly, which is why it has such a hilariously low PE ratio (six times earnings in real terms).
When Amazon passed Walmart in market value, it had minimal profit profit and 1/6th the retail sales of Walmart.
The market isn't primarily valuing Tesla based on what it's doing today. It's a bet that Tesla will continue to produce considerable growth for many years to come.
>GM, 2016 -> 2017 sales growth: Negative
If I sold my car on craigslist today, I'd have an ∞% sales growth rate.
(sorry)
In comparison it takes Chicago alone only 2 months to hit that number.
http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/85-002-x/2017001/article/54879/...
So 1 murder per 5000 Aboriginal females in Canada and 1 murder per 25000 people in NYC.
With those numbers it sounds like Canada's police force needs a lot of help in lowering that murder rate.
i can count 100s of companies that hire interns. that is the point of companies offering internships.
flag this to oblivion.
“But instinct is something which transcends knowledge. We have, undoubtedly, certain finer fibers that enable us to perceive truths when logical deduction, or any other willful effort of the brain, is futile.” Nikola Tesla
Can we say this is peak Tesla hype yet?
So to have 2 "Newfies" fix problems at a high tech enterprise like Tesla is both a bit of pride and a bit of tongue-in-cheek humor.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-newfoundlande...
Interns can only be interns if they do work that A. Primarily benefit their learning and growth and B. Their labor would not normally be done by a full time employee.
Is this understanding correct? If it is, wouldn't these two interns constitute a breach of said policy?
But it really makes me think that Tesla has big problems. There just shouldn't exist problems that relatively untrained eyes can spot and fix in short order. Maybe this is related to production difficulties overall?
And don't get me wrong, the fact that the solution was accepted, implemented and rewarded so quickly is a testament to Musk (and his managers). My point is just that either this was lightning striking or the production line has inexcusable issues -- that is low-hanging opportunities for improvement.
There exists no such thing, at least in the current workplace. We give importance to speed and agility (which makes sense) and this always leads for rooms for improvement even to a bystander. A direct corollary of this is that you will also have some problems/optimizations to be done and it helps to fix your biggest problem always.
Many companies have big glaring inefficiencies that employees become blind to over time. Often times, new hires will be acutely aware of them, but won't speak up because they're new. Within a few weeks or months, they just become acclimated to the situation and work around it.
Where is your history that you find these uncommon?
I can't think of a place I've been where there one isn't surrounded by opportunities to improve (although I've definitely been in large organizations where they just become part of the everyday cruft that never gets addressed).
I'd of course expect more in an organization like Tesla that is massively scaling at the fastest possible rate.
So yes, it's an example of a problem they've got probably 1000s of, but also a great example that the fixes were online so fast...