Ask HN: Did the Tesla return to work happen?
There was a big splash a couple of months ago with the letter Elon sent employees saying get back to the office.
What happened?
Did people go back?
Did people quit?
What happened?
Did people go back?
Did people quit?
However a lot of folks quit but it has less to do with the remote work policy and more to do with a massive options cliff that occurred recently. Once the golden handcuffs came off a lot of folk figured it was time to move on, which is fair given the hell they went through to deliver 3 and Y + the 10x appreciation in their options.
She basically became a millionaire from those stock options. Even though she only made $150k when she joined. So it's not all bad.
I would be somewhat resentful if I had a manager at an engineering plant that was located thousands of miles away. I think managers working in the same physical location as workers is the right call
not at Tesla, but another FAANG, and half my team quit when RTO was announced.
So we labeled three days “preferred in-office” and made it clear you could still work from home on those days if you wanted. People much prefer this system.
Maybe Google is different, but I doubt it. Probably Google used to be different, and no longer is, and a bunch of people are going to be unpleasantly surprised.
"Preferred in-office" makes sense when it's not as you described. It all just boils down to how much you can trust your boss and their boss, and whether you believe the company will make a good faith effort to communicate policy changes to you effectively. There's always the risk of someone you've never met getting a promotion and all of a sudden the definition of "preferred" changes but isn't communicated.
What answer do you want really ? It's good to be suspicious but you need to leave room for actual good policies.
In this case, if I were a Google employee looking to advance in the company, I would show up on the suggested days with a convincing-looking smile on my face. If I was already at a level where I didn't expect to advance further without changing companies, I would continue working from home and be prepared to be on the top of the list the next time layoffs came up.
Also to speak your language, one of the reasons people propose WFH or other benefits is precisely because they feel they don't hold so much power in a market where SWE are in high demand. So they 'sort-of-expect' you to use the benefits as proof that you 'sort-of-value' them and will stay. That doesn't mean you won't have to s** d** to advance.
Speaking for myself, I don't care at all whether people are in the office or not, and since I work in a totally different location from 80%+ of the team, I wouldn't know anyway unless we have a meeting together. I know that other peer managers I work with feel similarly. I've also been managing people in distributed locations for more than 20 years at this point, so perhaps I have more experience with it than others. I'm sure there are teams that handle things the way you describe - but I don't run one, and I won't work on one.
For myself, I enjoy being in the office because I have small children at home and I find it more challenging to concentrate unless I lock myself away in my bedroom, and if that's what I'm going to do, I'd rather be in-office. That being said, I'm WFH tomorrow and Friday because I have some personal things to take care of that are easier to do from home.
I also want to emphasize that we started off with a fully "you do you" philosophy, and we even pushed the managers on the team to make sure that they worked from home a few days a week at minimum to demonstrate that it was okay and model the behavior we wanted to encourage. My preference would be to keep it that way.
As I said in my original post, though, after a few months we asked people what THEIR preference was, and they (by a significant majority) wanted more structure on when to be in the office. Not to HAVE to go to the office, but to know when to expect to find other people in the office, because people didn't like going to the office only to discover that only two people from a team of 10 were in the office, but 5 of the others had been in the day before. Some teams had already informally started agreeing on "default in-office" days on their own.
We went to great lengths to try to emphasize that there is no obligation or expectation, but that if all other things are equal, these are the days when people should expect to find others on their team in office. Some teams (AFAIK) still pick one or two days a week to focus on in-office for themselves.
My higher ups have communicated that they're fine with people working from home, and you don't need to tell anyone, just mark your calendar that you're at home so people know to enter online meetings. People range from being in office the recommended 3 days a week, to 5 days a week, to rarely coming in, to never coming in ever, and I think people using any of these permutations are doing great.
One additional detail on the company policy side, we do have available remote work and you do (at least initially) get paid the same moving to remote and staying in the same place. I know at least two people that have successfully applied to work remote and I believe the vast majority of people who applied were approved for remote work. I can't speak for people going for high level management positions but I assume things would be different there.
Opinions are my own.
Our team was split between 2 offices in different cities so all our meetings were still done on video calls but it mean the two sides of the team could get together. Also if we all met up in one office every few months then we had a day of the week we'd default to.
Suggested structure, but freedom to choose!
In 2020, we had a manager join from a different FANG and she sent two emails the first Monday of break. Apparently another manager immediately texted her and told her to stop!
In all honesty, I have several work pals who do read their emails when on break (their choice) - I prefer coming back to 500 to 800 emails, quickly go though the important ones and realize that 8/9th of the problems solved themselves without my intervention.
What are the psychological or social mechanisms behind this?
I'm rather of the kind who don't like to be told what I should do so I can't relate much. (I'd appreciate it if people would tell me they would be pleased to see me and that could actually make me come, but that's different than some emotionless guideline)
As one example, consider the "unlimited vacation" policy and pushback around those. Sure, the official policy is unlimited, but try taking more vacation than your manager wishes you would and see how that affects your next performance review.
Okay. I've not experienced this situation indeed. Official policy / stated expectations has always matched actual expectations perfectly well wherever I worked, to the best of my knowledge. A difference there must be a mess to handle indeed.
You might think that the people who get to Google are independent thinkers, but it's quite the opposite. Look at it this way: they spend 12 years in primary and secondary education being told what to do, and they study standardized tests to advance to the next stage of their education at a university.
They spend 4+ years there, all the while taking tests and exams and going through courses where again they are told exactly what to do every step of the way, with granular feedback as to how they are meeting the standards. Then upon graduating with a degree they put their knowledge to use by studying for what is essentially yet another entrance exam into Google.
The person who follows this kind of trajectory hasn't had an opportunity for truly independent thought probably their entire life. They are conditioned to follow guidelines, and the first questions they'll ask for any task are: "Where is the rubric? What are the rules? How will I be evaluated?" because they know how to succeed when there are guidelines and rules and procedures to follow. Take away those, and they will flail. I've seen it many times.
For the people who prefer to be in office a few days per week, it would be nice if those few days also overlaps with the in-office days for the people they wanted to meet in person, and it's easier to make this kind of coordination at a higher level. Thus management guidance is basically "let's pick these day(s) of the week where our team would try to be in the office together".
Even the CEO should talk to his team about the viability of decisions before just making a company wide announcement.
As an investor, I'd stay away from such companies.
My favorite time in the office is during the summer period when a random set of people is left behind because of vacation. You get to speak to different people than your usual crowd, the cliques are split up, sometimes you even speak to someone from a different department.
The work-from-home with an office available have been a bit like that.
This is the way. People can debate all they want about in office VS remote, however there is VERY clearly some level of preference for employees whether they want one or the other. The pandemic just straight ripped people out of office chairs into their homes without even asking. This is a happy medium IMHO.
For what its worth - my company was setup from the get-go as 100% remote and do quarterly in person meetings. When we recruit we are very up front about this "you need to be comfortable with essentially operating on your own".
Within engineering, the more junior people really wanted to return to office. The people with 10 years of experience and 2 kids at home really wanted to stay home. Not surprising, really.
Our engineering team remained remote, but not everyone is happy about it. I get emails every other week asking engineers to not come into the office very often because we don’t have enough extra desks for remote employees to be in the office very frequently.
> Did you care to ask your employees what they think? Why not?
While I do think it’s very important to keep employee’s desires and career goals in consideration, questions like these aren’t necessarily aligned with what’s best for the company or getting work done. If you survey employees about how many hours they’d prefer to work each week or how big they want their next raise to be, you’re not going to get answers that reflect what’s best or even realistic from a business perspective.
That doesn’t mean you can ignore your employees desires, of course! But you do have to keep in mind that most employees will default to responding with what’s best for them personally, and for a lot of people from the general population that can mean something very different than what’s best for their team or the company.
He said “I realized” rather than “we decided”. It heavily implies that it was his decision.
How did you end up choosing Tue - Thu? Would it not make more sense to “sync” with each other in the office on the start and end of the week?
So move far away from the office. Got it.
But bigcos don’t trust their own employees and have to justify their massive capital investments in office space. So there is a real, tangible benefit to startup life over cushy bigco.
There are a few startups that have gone all-in on remote and embraced that as a recruiting point. However, they seem to also being using that as a way to justify lower compensation. Makes sense, given that a lot of people will take a lower comp in exchange for full remote work.
Meanwhile, I’m actually seeing more remote job listings from companies like Google
I've also done a lot of interviewing over the last year and only one startup (Vanta) refused to allow long term remote. Every other company I talked to said they loved it.
Feel free to reach out again if you're interested and interviewing -- we're still growing quickly!
Some companies may have conclusively determined that for them, in-person is far more productive than WFH, and so losing certain applicants is an acceptable tradeoff.
As an anecdote, a friend works on a team that does a lot of hardcore low-level algorithm development. They require at least three days of in-person each week, since collaboratively doing math on whiteboards just doesn’t work as well over Zoom.
In reality the rich get richer etc. etc.
Or they could take an 83(b) election when granted the options. Or they could exercise some fraction of their options. Or they could sell some of the shares in the multibillion-dollar secondary market when they exercise to pay for the taxes.
Your broader point stands. But there are more choices than “eat it.”
Effectively you can't unless the startup allows for it. I have stock and when I tried to sell on the secondary market exchanges all said that there's a lot of interest but due to the company always exercising right of first refusal no one will bother.
Most companies don’t require Board approval for transfers. (There are better ways to moderate the process.) Companies that do are the ones choosing to restrict their employees, not the tax code.
But since you ask, the stated purpose of AMT is to make sure high earning individuals are not using tax loopholes to avoid paying any taxes. I assume it applies to ISOs to prevent employees from being compensated only in ISOs to get the better tax treatment.
Having paid AMT myself on exercising ISOs, I concede its an annoying additional thing you have to consider when taking an offer from a startup. But its not some grave injustice. Tech employees at successful startups with in the money options will be just fine.
Big co still wants people back, but will have a few remote teams for those who won’t come.
I think it's one of these lies that are repeated ad nauseam and now many people believe it. Managers are important and necessary no matter how their reports work. Before the pandemic I had bosses living in another country. Does it mean they were unnecessary? This logic doesn't hold any water.
How come they are not necessary under WFH?
The only obvious administration which is not needed (or needed less) is office management. So the people who make sure the kitchenett is clean, the toilets are stocked with toilet paper, etc etc. For every other type of “management” why would you need less of it all of a sudden?
Edit: as someone pointed out, he was a consultant who worked for a short period. nonetheless, I still think the videos are quite eye opening to how they operate day-to-day (while navigating around NDA in explanations).
Where I live you generally have a 3 month probation period and I don't think anyone who leaves within that period would even write this in their CV.
There were literally hundreds of people who had a better view of the org than him
His newsletter makes more sense when you read about how he considers it his most successful business after a long string of startups that didn’t work out. He’s basically growth hacking his way to more subscribers with every trick in the book.
I don’t know what claim you mention, but his newsletter goes into lots of details, is open about how this is just what he is hearing from people, etc. I don’t know what major claim you’re talking about though, but I do get your point about the business angle.
Tho honestly I would not trust any SVP at a company like Uber to have an understanding of what it’s actually like to be an IC, or PM level. Hearing what people at that level are thinking is way more valuable to me.
What do you mean? He shares true stories and is insightful. He never claims to have been an SVP or CTO. As a CEO myself, I’d much rather read about how a company works from an engineer’s or eng manager’s perspective than from a senior leadership perspective. I think that’s part of why Gergely’s writing is so valuable. You get specific, well sourced stories about how things actually are inside a variety of companies—not just what the external perception is.
I'm not familiar with his writing, but you can learn a hell of a lot about the internal workings in your company in four years.
Oh that's interesting, I'd have taken the opposite view - that having a 2 month gap on your CV would be interpreted by most HR depts as worse than explaining a 2-month job as "not a good fit"
Edit: I guess I should clarify that I don't see gaps in CVs as a bad thing, but from personal experience I know some HR depts have an irrational fear of them.
A 2 month gap is nothing. Like, maybe an extended holiday or a quick refresh between jobs. If I leave a job, take a few weeks for myself, then start handing out resumes at that point... It could easily be 2 months before an interview is lined up somewhere.
I personally don't think any length of gap in a resume is the business of a hiring department. There are hundreds of legitimate reasons that someone took a few months or even a year or two off (e.g. extended travel, children, caretaking of someone sick/elderly/whatever, etc.). In a lot of cases, the reason for the gap might be super personal (health, death of family, etc.) and really not anyone else's concern. And I'd rather not work at a place where they think a 2 month gap is something they need to worry about -- if I can do the job, I can do the job regardless of my employment status 2 months ago.
Sounds like he is making things up. Coding next to a car is pretty specious.
Maybe they worked on factory automation software and Workflows - then it makes sense. But for normal software development you do it in an office or a lab with all hardware components you need attached to a test bed and others simulated. Then once in a while some release software will be flashes on a prototype car and taken for a test drive. But not on any arbitrary car leaving the factory. There are strict regulations about prototype cars.
Source: Worked 10 years on automotive software at a car manufacturer (not Tesla)
Again, I've worked places where people do this. More precisely it was storage array software, but we had an onsite datacenter and people were live dev-testing redundancy capabilities, etc.
I think I just gravitate to workplaces where I have some physical access to the systems I'm writing code for.
I can't figure out if you're not a programmer or just a typical programer.
Edit: many places don't have perfect simulation setups, test infrastructure, etc. Sometimes you just have to test on a real product.
He's right about this.
I've worked at places like this. It's very effective if you don't have extensive test and simulation infrastructure. You can say it's a bad practice, or a bad work environment, and you may be right. My point is, many places work like this.
"You are doing hard work... there is no white-collar/blue-collar, its not a thing"
_sigh_. I can't even tell if this is satire anymore.
So, which of these did happen?
Not everyone that works at Tesla returned to work-in-person. Some have.
> Did people go back?
Yes. At least partially.
> Did people quit?
Yes. At least partially.
See? It's confusing.
Did A Happen?
did b?
did c?
did d?
Maybe it's useful to highlight them?
Working from home has downsides that people refused to understand before they experienced it for themselves.
Still better than a freaking "Open" office. I don't get deafened by HVAC noise at home, or have to pretend to be able to focus while two managers with nothing better to do blabber on about non-work things right next to my desk. And then those self same managers will have the gall to critique my work ethic.