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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

> I would assume that Tesla’s pace clashes with what people are used to in the auto industry, and it might be hard for them to adapt.

Or that Tesla is playing fast and loose with the rules and compromising safety, and they felt ethically compelled to leave.

It's sort of hard to make either assumption from the outside. But it definitely says something about Tesla.

Edit: My point here is that three VP departures implies nothing in particular, only that something is changing, and it's quite a logical leap the author is making assuming it is their "fast paced environment".

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One of the VPs had left after 4-5 years like clockwork after every position with 5 different automakers. Guess how long he'd been at Tesla? 4+ years. Sometimes, it's not about Tesla magic/curse, sometimes it's just a regular company experiencing regular phenomena.

exactly. like, first question should be something along the line of "how long does Tesla exec shares take to vest?" - Occam razor and all that.

Do you have sources to back up the claim that these people left because of safety or ethical concerns?

From what I've heard, it's a grueling job working long hours and that people get burned out pretty quickly, which is a different issue from saying there are legal, safety, or ethical concerns.

> Do you have sources to back up the claim that these people left because of safety or ethical concerns?

No, none at all, that was my point. The departure of three execs in a week does not imply that it is a fast paced work environment nor does it imply safety issues.

Except that we don’t need innuendo to imply Tesla is a fast-paced work environment. You can take Elon and every employees’ word for it. It’s an extremely fast paced work environment, and if auto executives from elsewhere in the industry were lasting for longer than the average tenure, you could argue it would be a cause for concern.

If you’re going to make a claim like Tesla is “playing fast and loose with the rules and compromising safety, and they felt ethically compelled to leave,” its beholden upon you to provide evidence.

If your claim is you have no idea, then you can certainly make that claim which requires no evidence at all.

I never said they were playing fast and loose. I specifically said it’s a specious claim with as much backing as “they left because it was too fast paced”. We literally have no evidence for either claim as to the reason they left.

I directly quoted you as saying “fast and loose”.

And we literally do have evidence of one of those things actually existing in the culture. Which tends to increase the plausibility of it being a cause.

The logical process of inductive reasoning uses specific examples of a behavior or event, to formulate more general hypothesis about wider phenomenon. To see specific examples of workplace culture and theorize that it could be resulting in greater executive turnover is a good example of inductive reasoning.

Making up a bad thing that you have zero evidence of happening and arguing it’s theoretically possible it could have been a cause of high executive turnover, therefore this other hypothesis should be dismissed... is simply not a reasoned argument.

I was looking at a tesla, so I asked my friend about his buddy who went to work for tesla a couple years back.

"We don't keep in in touch anymore, he's always at work."

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