Elon Musk Tesla email: Remote work is no longer acceptable

Imagine hiring a house cleaner, who would insist you be present in the house when the house is being cleaned?

Elsewhere here, you said you've watched his interviews and yet you missed him mention, more than the dozen times over the past few years, how he split his times between his companies?

> Please do inform us then.

I've pointed you to where you can find that out yourself. If you actually care to learn something, you'll spend the time. But if you're content with your preconceptions and the media's take on Elon, whatever I say here will fall on deaf ears.

* You want to be in-person: If everyone is remote there's no point in going in.

* You want to be remote: If everyone is in-person, you're at a career disadvantage.

My order of preference is:

• Everyone in-office because they want to be there

• Everyone in-office and some want to be there

• Everyone in-office and most don't want to be there

• Hybrid where everyone picks what works best for them

• 100% remote

That generalization definitely doesn't hold for everyone. I've made so many great and lasting friendships from work over the years - even picked up some new hobbies and gone on trips together. If I'd come in with the attitude that it's a bad idea to make friends or socialize with coworkers, I would have missed out on a whole lot of life-enriching experiences.

This sentiment confuses me. Maybe it depends on the kind of company you work at, or maybe it's a cultural thing (I'm in the UK), but I've met many of my best friends through work, as have most people I know. It seems like one of the main ways to make new friends as an adult, and to be honest I've never experienced any downsides to it.

My hypothesis is that the shift to more WFH has not reduced opportunities for advancement at all but has drastically shifted from one population, who knew how to maximize output from office interactions, to a population that knows how to maximize output from more virtual settings.

People who shine at the coffee machine, at business lunches, who are good at putting pressure on employees who arrive late at their desk, or know how to look efficient in front of a superior during in-presence meetings are completely clueless in how to operate virtual teams efficiently today. There are two possible responses to this: adapt or fight for the mythical "return to normal".

I am actually quite happy that this shift occurred at my company. New managers we didn't expect to be in 2019 have risen from nowhere amongst our ranks and are driving their teams surprisingly well. They are showing great initiative in establishing new processes and finding tools to support their operations, their team morale is generally good, I sincerely believe they are making us better in the long term.

Other managers, mostly late boomers I have to say it, are taking a huge hit to morale. We regularly receive complaints that we don't allow firing employees just because they don't want to come to the office. I actually had a senior manager telling me to f.off because I told him "you are a leader, it's your job to motivate her to come work with you at the office, not ours." I have recommended letting him go since...

One thing is for sure: moving to virtual settings, even partially, is requiring new management skills. I am still thinking this over but I believe managers' self-esteem plays a big role in the transition to virtual settings: many old school managers tend to assume they are successfully managing as long as they can see their employees physically at work during office hours. Whoever comes earlier and stays later is automatically ranked a better employee, even assured promotion, and whoever comes to the office for a meeting is immediately perceived as a better employee than those who joined online. Many managers who don't feel they have physical power over their teams anymore are struggling to regain control.

This approach doesn't work anymore in office settings, especially with qualified workforce. With WFH, there are people who start later, who disconnect earlier, who come back online after dinner, during weekends, who go on long lunches during work days or interrupt their morning for a 9.30am-10.30am workout. From what I see in our books, this doesn't affect our numbers negatively but stresses the hell out some of our managers. I am seeing a lot more flexibility in my employees than in my managers, which is somehow ironic!

To conclude my point, I think the issue with adopting a more remote/hybrid approach in the company stems from a lack of self-confidence amongst entry-level and middle-level managers in their ability to use "modern" tools to both interact more efficiently with their teams and to acquire the data they need.

Any manager who still struggles to share me his or her screen during a virtual session and can't refrain from complaining orally that "these tools suck" in 2022 has become a red flag to me.

You're right about this. That's a stupid reason to buy a car, though, and indeed a stupid reason to buy anything.

No, they don't have this right. What the 'people' might find unreasonable can be, in fact, very reasonable from the point of view of their employers, who quite possibly have far more knowledge about the best way to run an organization. They also have far more responsibilities than workers, the biggest of which is paying the salary. The employee can get away with not doing any work for months, which is relatively easy on remote. Try getting away with not paying salary!

To combat unreasonable policies, people DO have a different right: to quit and find a job they like more.

Also you're assuming it's possible to control who is slacking / incompetent or not. It's not.. it's a partial information game. Hence the policy.

Supply chain worldwide is still broken due to Covid (China's closure of multiple cities recently), so...

I certainly am. We are only human.

Your IT example is great as something that could be done offsite but worsens relations if that happens (and is not likely to be as effective).

There is a huge difference between the system slowing down and someone remote fixing it, and the system slowing down and everyone on the floor knowing that Dan from IT upstairs is working on it.

Also I have seen remote teams swear blind that there is not a speed issue, and they have remotely checked the systems and network on their end, while the warehouse/factory is in meltdown.

Not a great example, considering the recent Axx SoCs and M1 SoCs that have transformed Macs as a product and differentiated iPhones from Android were entirely developed in Silicon Valley. Most of the software and hardware engineering happens in the Valley as well.

It's only a shadow of its former self.

"None" is probably a bit much but I agree it rounds to a number close to zero.

However poverty and appearing to work hard to be at the top of an extremely competitive scramble out of poverty is my rough idea that isn't too hand-wavey in the direction of religion or culture.

The above creates a dynamic where people will still work 40h to hit breakpoints, or will drop down as much as possible to stay at their current breakpoint (because working more isn't getting them there anyway). Doubly so because income tends to be a far bigger decider for things like housing and rent (highest expenses) than budgeting.

Even looking briefly at job listings in my area, most places are either fully or partially remote, and even those that are partially remote sometimes have a note saying that they'd accept fully remote candidates if they were good enough.

As to the 40h/week thing, I don't hugely keep track of my colleagues' hours, but my impression is that averaging 40 is the norm, but most places I've worked don't track that explicitly, so working about that or less seems to be the norm. In places where you record explicit overtime hours, I know a couple of people who do more than 40h/week, but they tend to also take extensive holidays off or travel a lot on long weekends. I wouldn't say that's the norm though.

Come join my team, people are productive and go climbing in their extended lunch break.

The whole concept of Economy is slavery in a way, economy will grow if people work (or increase productivity), something we have to participate unfortunately. There is inflation making sure you will not have enough tomorrow. The only people are making out of the loop is people working in tech industry.

1. If you hire people you can’t trust to do the work or if your company is so broken that people pretend-work, it’s not like warming up the seat in the office will change anything.

2. Let’s just forget about the last two years where most were remote and companies kept making record profits. Clearly, spending hours a day sitting in a polluting car to all gather in a room is a good use of everyone’s time and resources.

Nothing about his public presence suggest nuance and a capacity for intelligence.

Is he secretly a genius? Maybe so, but his comments about voting Republican due to twitter mob reactionism, when he is deliberately trying to buy what is obviously a political trumpet to cudgel people with suggests that he has no game theory at all…

I suspect that he was lucky and interprets his luck as genius and favor from God

The fact that he works as many hours as he claims isn't a good thing. It isn't a badge of honor. It's not good that he has had so many romantic partners, it isn't good that he has so many kids that he clearly isn't raising, it isn't good that he is publicly so out of balance and is clearly constantly feeding his own ego with no boundaries. It isn't good that he now is facing sexual misconduct allegations. None of these things are good. None of those things are respectable. None of those things are OK for a role model to be modeling. We need to stop idolozong people for simply being rich and famous and good engineers and we need to start idolizing people for being good humans.

Elon isn't a good human. Everything he or his fan base is told so, he and they (you) hide behind all the "good" he's doing do as to draw the attention away from him not being a good human.

> My life would be exactly the same without any of his products.

And what about the lives of people who'll come after you, generations after you? Well he does care. And if you think that he runs his businesses for the money, then you're in for a big surprise when I tell you, there are far far far easier ways to make lots of money with someone of his skills and intelligence, than trying to compete in two industries, one monopolized by a few with a mind shatteringly high barrier to entry, and the other saturated by established players that have optimized their cost over a century and reduced their margins to bare minimum to stay competitive.

> while my life (and everyone else here as well) would not be possible without the products from traditional "boring" companies that nobody cares about anymore

Wait 50 years. Then Tesla will be traditional, boring and the one that one's life would not be possible without.

Your grand kids will understand.

> An automotive manufacturer who is anti union in 2022? Wtf

Perhaps you should do some research into the current state of "unions" and their members' satisfaction.

So I may have been wrong about Tesla itself, but there's plenty of companies of all stripes that go significantly above 40 hours a week, even in contexts where there have been studies demonstrating reduced productivity when working 50+ hours.

I'm not necessarily saying Tesla is absolutely wrong here, just that the argument that "well Tesla is doing it, and they know their business, so they must be right" is BS - companies are routinely wrong about how to optimize productivity.

I think about this quote from Bezos in 2017 a lot, which is quoted in Mik Kersten's Project to Product:

"As companies get larger and more complex, there’s a tendency to manage to proxies. This comes in many shapes and sizes, and it’s dangerous, subtle, and very Day 2. A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right."

I'd say "being in the office" is a proxy here.

Just like Amazon, most of the employees work in Whole Foods or fulfillment centers. But the professional staff in software engineering etc don’t have to be in the office to do their work. Even if their software impacts the fulfillment center they likely have never set foot in one.

The ford motor company bargain was 8 hours of work, 8 hours of life, 8 hours of rest and a middle class lifestyle. The tesla motor company bargain is…? Seems like mediocre to bad pay, 12 hours of work, 6 hours of life, 6 hours of sleep? Yeah, i’d be unionizing if I was a tesla worker.

> This is less than we ask of factory workers

Implies it's maybe not so optional

It's very easy for this to become a heated thing. I too wish discussions on this would trend away from absolutism. There's too much gray in the world for this to be productive.

I find a possible motivator in that is there being a sort of imbalance with preference -- if we assume whoever 'wins' sets the tone for the future.

If those who love the office get their way, the remote lovers (more likely) concede more than the opposite.

The remote people don't need other people to be remote. Just accommodate by using Slack, Git, whatever. The in-office people however do 'need' people to also join them on-site for the benefits of it to truly realize

(As much as I hate words like synergy, it really is sometimes easier to just hash things out in person)