Elon Musk's 'antiquated' views on working from home threatens Tesla

businessinsider.com

5 points·gitgud··2 comments

Is there not a fundamental difference between Tesla and MAGMA-type companies?

MAGMA, and the industry in general, produces software. Software doesn’t care about its location, and you can “touch” the product you’re working on from home.

Tesla produces cars. I can see a strong argument for Tesla workers getting benefit from being near the (physical) product. This may not be true of, say, the finance people, but I think it’s safe to say Elon is not very interested in the non-technical sides of his businesses.

Not everyone in Tesla (or at any other automotive company) produces cars in a factory. Some write software, some write specifications, some do SIL/HIL testing, some do procurement, some work on legal concerns. A lot of these jobs can be done from home - maybe 50% of the company size (and I know from references from Daimler where I formerely worked that those things are still done in a WFH style). It seems like Elon wants nobody to work from home, independent of whether it would be possible or not.

At the same time there's even some things in MAGMA companies that can not be done from home. If one is working in a datacenter to fix hosts which broke down, then it's simply not possible to the same from home.

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