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Comment by Endama | Hacker News Reader

My understanding is that the conditions inside of Tesla's manufacturing are brutal. I have friends who work on the production side and they effectively tell me corporate culture is driven by fear. I am definitely cheering Tesla on for global warming reasons but I worry that Musk is running a Faustian bargain that may bite him in the backside long term.

These numbers though are really exciting.

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I have friends that work there too and I've heard from some that they love it and some that they didn't.

It's been enough of a spread that I suspect it's just normal "my manager is bad" type of variety.

yeah, it was a big question around the 5000/week ramp up, but if nothing cracked I guess everything is back to normal~.

Ah fair enough, thanks for the share!

I've got a friend on the assembly line in Fremont. He says he doesn't mind the hours too much. However, they basically keep adding extra or overtime shifts to his schedule. I think right now he might be working 5 or 6 day weeks, and I'm fairly sure they're minimum 8 hours, and obviously with overtime could be several hours above that.

Sounds awful, but in some ways isn't that how manufacturing has sort of always been?

Sounds awful

Sounds better than bustin' ass for 60 hours/week for my base salary. Your friend is getting paid 1.5X for every hour over 40. And, yes, it is not uncommon over the years. My dad would seemingly work every overtime hour given. And at time-and-a-half, so would I.

50% extra for giving up your time with kids, excercise, sleep, family, and general fun in life sounds like a terrible deal.

it really depends on how much you make and what your cost of living is. In many situations that extra cash is a life changing difference.

Then you should consider yourself very privileged. Not everyone is in your position.

The person I was responding to was expressing gratitude at having the opportunity to earn 150% ones normal wage per hour. My point is that it’s not enough to offset the opportunity cost. If anything, employers should be discourage from asking for overtime pay at all, and make it 10x regular pay or something instead of 1.5x so that people can enjoy a better work life balance.

The person I was responding to was expressing gratitude at having the opportunity to earn 150% ones normal wage per hour.

You working salary at your local tech whatever? How much are they paying you to come in on Saturday? I ask because you seem to have missed the point.

And 1.5x is the employer discouragement. Who wants to pay 50% more because of poor planning?

I understand what you’re saying, that 50% is better than nothing. Which obviously, I agree with. My contention is that even 50% is not enough to make up for what the worker gives up. Obviously the lack of opportunities may force the employee to accept the arrangement, but I’m speaking about a work life balance overall.

And there are many positions where the cost of hiring/training/retaining employees is higher than 50%, so it’s more advantageous for employers to just give overtime, which employers obviously utilize. But because an employer can force the employee to work overtime, it’s not clearly a beneficial arrangement to both.

Meh, we're just talking past each other, probably were from the start. I'm saying, "time-and-a-half beats working on games at EA for 80 hours/week for base, your factory-working friend has it better than a lot of tech workers" and you're saying "overtime sucks". Both statements are true, we're just negotiating the price...er, wait, wrong metaphor.

vs 0% extra; not so much.

The problem with overtime is that in most cases it's not a choice.

You either do it or be forced to quit.

Yeah, I worked for a while for an electronics component manufacturer that had a monthly hockey stick production schedule. For the first half of the month, I came in to work to wipe down my desk and bullshit with my coworkers. For the last week of every month, it was all-hands plus overtime. If the last day of the month happened to be a Monday, the production manager would try really hard to talk you into coming in for the weekend.

It was absurd. Sensible people hated that place, while a lot of other folks just accepted it as normal.

I suspect the conflicting accounts of life at Tesla work out similarly.

I worked on the line at GM, and it seem half the worker were always looking for some way to get less work or have someone else do part of their job while they get paid the same.

I was personally told to slow down because I was making my job look too easy, IE not as many workers were needed.

Those type of people would find working for Tesla a living hell where you are expect to work and not laze off. I am sure working at Tesla is hard work, but lots of people love working like that, however there are tons of people who will whine and complain if you try to get them to work properly.

I'm sure a lot of that will go away as their manufacturing process settles down. I like the recent announcement that they're going to simplify interior options, and that tells me that they're taking a look at optimizing their process.

Simplifying the process means better quality control, which means more predictability, which means less stress for employees.

I'd love to see them get on par with other car manufacturers on cars produced per employee per factory.

They're simplifying the Model X interior choices, that's a lower-volume model. Model 3's only interior option is color, black or white.

Tesla is not planning to get on par with manufacturers that outsource a lot more than Tesla does. In fact their new Chinese factory is planned to be even worse, because it will produce battery cells and car motors in-house.

So, less options for customers (not saying that e.g. Audi is exaggerating on that front) and full vertical integration. There are reasons why oitsourcing happened, I did not see a convincing explanation why it is good for Tesla not doing it.

Henry Ford and the Model T lives. :)

And their exec level is still a revolving door. I wouldn't pop the champagne yet.

And they keep hiring amazing people, so what's the problem? Isn't it great to have people come and go if they remain strong believers in the company and are ready to work again with Tesla?

For instance, John McNeill was Tesla's global sales and service VP and is now COO of Lyft. I wouldn't be surprised to learn about some deals between the two companies in the future.

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