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Comment by flumpcakes | Hacker News Reader

This is disgusting behavior from SpaceX. It must be even worse for the majority of older people who are more likely to have well established families and "only" want to spend 40 hours of their lives a week working.

The fact they had an expert working 10 hours a day 7 days a week apparently was not enough. They have to be in their twenties to get the real "techbro" badge.

I have a strong belief that technical skills aren't as important as the ability to be a suck-up in most mega-corps. You can easily buy a suck-up offering graduates a six-figure salary. It's like VPs are building their own personal armies not to get ousted by the other feudal lords.

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Having a single point of failure is a terrible idea for the health of the company. It is often unavoidable early on in a product, but if the product is successful, there is a strong need to eliminate the single point of failure.

This can be very hard on engineers that were previous the go-to person for a key area. The person and product was successful so the ask to delegate and dilute ownership seems completely illogical. Some ICs don't want to give this up and so they switch from IC to management for the wrong reasons, leading to a manager that isn't really interested in management and is reluctant to delegate and enable the team.

I've seen this occur many times and it's always painful. Starlink is now large enough that it's a huge risk to have a single key person responsible for optics.

It sounds like the author was never given the chance to build organizational redundancy. It was done around and without them in a strangely secretive way.

It's important to remember that we're only hearing one side of the story here.

It's very clear the author has emotion about what's going on, and there are several emotionally toned segments in his account. That's understandable, but it also likely means that this is a biased account of what transpired.

Fundamentally, it sounds like SpaceX is having other engineers shadow him because he's a single point of failure. That part alone is not remarkable.

From the sounds of it, they were hiring inexperienced/incompetent yes-people into areas of his expertise. That's not really organisational redundancy in my book. Just more blood for the blood gods. I have been places where there's something very simple that a dozen people don't know how to do or the reason why it is there or that it even existed.

The more we see of Musk and the culture in his companies, the worse it is.

"The higher a monkey climbs, the more of his arse you can see"

At some point it’s just a pixel in the distance. Still, watch for falling sh!t.

Well, to put that another way -- at some point, the only thing you can see is the arse.

He doesn't have keys and feet?

They are. The larger your reporting section the more important you are. Importance is described through resource allocation.

This was one of the categories Graeber put respondents' my-job-is-bullshit reports into, in Bullshit Jobs.

>I have a strong belief that technical skills aren't as important as the ability to be a suck-up in most mega-corps.

Hasn't it always been this way at organizations, tech or not? Not even suck ups but people that don't cause a stir, keep their heads down, yes men to whatever the manager asks, etc.

Personally, I've seen it in action in a workplace where everyone "loves" so and so. That person would put on a good face and tell them how "amazing" everything was in every interaction. Behind their backs, that definitely wouldn't be the dialogue.

>You can easily buy a suck-up offering graduates a six-figure salary.

Or less. A name brand, prestige title, or industry. When I worked in visual effects, it's enough to get your name at the end of a movie to justify working 80-90 hour weeks. Video game peeps had it worse and you don't even see their names on a big screen.

>It's like VPs are building their own personal armies not to get ousted by the other feudal lords.

This is pretty visible in transitions right? New manager comes in, people loyal to old ones start melting away to different groups or leave to either join old manager or go somewhere else. The new manager brings in people they know and trust.

It's how we all benefit from weak ties.

Sucking up to some degree is team work. You need to know how to work with people to get what you need and move the company forward. Each person is different and part of working at a large company is learning how to interact with a multitude of personalities, many that you would not get along with outside of work.

It is like high school, it is like politics, it is like any group of humans interacting. You skills are part of the equation, but your people skills are as well.

It's the people who can go with the flow that stick around long term and actually have a meaningful impact on the success of the company. It's very easy to get caught up and think everyone is against you and burn out.

I think the distinction is it’s a very different to schmooze as a way of getting things done in service of a larger mission vs sucking up in a non-productive way of meeting purely selfish ends.

They don't also (I believe) take work away from younger workers because they are more likely to change jobs frequently—which is much more common. Pretty clearly ageism.

Absolutely. This behavior is commonly known as “empire building”.

Karoshi is a real thing, and something that gets exponentially more likely as people grow older. There's nothing unethical about setting adequate boundaries so that even the most committed and hard-working employee does not inadvertently burn out, or worse. Work smarter, not just harder.

From reading the article he would have been fine if they assigned him as the manager to train them. But they took over his roles, required training and didn't report to him in any way.

Maybe he isn't a good manager?

Did they let him try? He was already training junior engineers.

I'm guessing they probably worked on different teams with their own managers. There is a lot of overlap between purchasing, supply chain, manufacturing, design, etc.. We're talking about hundreds of people.

He also wasn't a manager to begin with, that requires it's own set of training, but we are getting way way in the weeds here to even be talking about this all on one person's point of view. There are so many factors that go into org structures, interviews, cross team collaboration, etc..

It's easy to feel slighted when you don't have a full picture. What we do know is the work pace is so frantic that I wouldn't attribute these things to malice immediately. Just a lot of people trying to do a lot of things in a short amount of time.

SpaceX sends real people on rockets into space. If they dont do the job right, people could die. Ive had a back injury, I actually had an artificial disc placed at my L4/L5 (which by the way is a life-saver and my back is 100% now). But there is no way in hell I could do a demanding job or any job at all when I was going through that. Creating redundancy for his position is a no-brainer in this situation.

Right. Making people work 10 hours a day, 7 days a week is exactly the way to avoid human error and accidents.

Thats shifting the goalpost, I didnt comment on SpaceX overall work hours. I commented on a specific employee being disabled. That said, his rockets work - so what argument do you really have?

for jmull below: "no relevant information" He needed back surgery and I have myself had back surgery. I have first hand experience on this topic. Your comment is really out of touch.

You've diagnosed a person's work capacity despite having none of the relevant information and no training to do so.

Really, how can you possibly believe this judgement has any bearing on the situation?

I was referring to OP that you replied to.

You basically stating that SpaceX have to be careful about letting him work after surgery. At the same time they're totally okay overworking engineers all the time which is known to inevitably lead to human errors.

Fact that Musks' rockets work might be very well despite terrible work conditions.

Historical reference: soviet rockets also worked even though some of engineers almost died in Gulag camps.

If that was all they'd done, it would've been fine. However, according to this story, that was just the turning point and even his manager didn't know what was happening.

No.

I design medical devices, same thing.

Its OK for people to take time off for things like back surgury, and people should be able to expect they get their job back when they recuperate. The business processes' should be setup such that the business can accomidate this kind of thing, its the cost of doing business. Anything less is just lazy and cheap management and leadership.

Designing medical devices does not equivalate to having had a back issue and knowing what that entails. They run a lean team, they need their people now. Not in 6 months to a year after a back issue is resolved. Its not a union job. Thats what you sign up for.

for teh_klev below: You're taking a complete strangers begruntled story at face value. Again, I had back surgery, there is no way in hell he only missed a few days of work or was working anywhere close to capacity through this ordeal. Back injuries where you need surgery dont just disrupt your work, it disrupts your entire life and it takes time to put the pieces back together.

> they need their people now. Not in 6 months to a year after a back issue is resolved.

You may have missed this from the article:

"I said I expected to be out for only a few days"

and

"returned to work after missing only a few days, as expected"

That's absolutely no time at all.

He claimed he only missed "a few days", and that he had given advance notice 1-2 months of notice. I don't see the problem with that.

>They run a lean team

Isn't this at odds with your previous comment about redundancy being a no-brainer?

He was a principle engineer in an optics lab. Having worked in both optics labs and aerospace, I can say there is very little reason to think that a "bad back" in those roles puts astronauts at additional risk.

> I had back surgery, there is no way in hell he only missed a few days of work or was working anywhere close to capacity through this ordeal.

I'm sorry, are you a doctor? A friend of mine just had back surgery a month ago. Something with his spinal fluid. He was fine & pain free after three days. They sent him home from hospital after four at which point he went back to work.

There are so many reasons why someone may have back surgery. You seem to deduce something from /your/ back surgery. A specific case and a sample size of one ...

You're all turned around here, let me try to help.

First, I want to thank you for sharing your medical challenges. Coincidentally I've also had quite a bit of back issues my whole life, and it seems to he getting worse. I'm at the age now that I'm expecting some sort of surgury is in my future if I want to stay active for another 20-30 years. Congratulations on your 100% pain reduction after recovery. Having designed quite a few products in that space (surgical navigation systems, bone drills, taps and screws, etc) I know from personal experience that that orthopedics is a pretty brutal thing, that's why they cannot Ortho surgeons "mechanics". So thanks for that. Here's to you and your continued health, and hopefully when the time comes for me I have a similar result. You've given me hope, that's one of the greatest things one can give another - thank you.

On to getting you turned around.

1 - I mentioned my career in medical devices because you menrioned in your comment the seriousness of OPs work and that if they mess something up people could die. I've designed high volume disposibles that are made in quantities of hundreds of thousands, also capital equipment that has a typical life span of 5-10 years. If a mistake I made gets all the way to the patient hundreds, likely thousands of people could be harmed or killed. (See the Phillips ventilator stuff currently in the news). That being said, in highly regulated spaces like medical, aerospace, cars, etc. if such a mistake made it all the way to the customer, it's not typically viewed as a failure of the engineer that made the mistake, but as a failure of the company process'. There are tons of checks and balances built into the system (by law) such they there has to be a real systemic problem with the company, it's culture and processes, for a mistake to result in harm. Again, see the ongoing phillips thing.

2 - I have also spent much of my career in small teams, often less than 10. Still, in these cases, people get to take care of themselves without fearing for their jobs.

3 - Precisely because of the importance of the work is why you want a veteran engineer like OP. In one hour of work they could identify and resolve an issue that may take less experienced engineers a month for find and solve. I know because I am that guy, and do it weekly.

4 - Space X is not a small team, they have thousands of engineers, they shouldn't operate this way, and your analogy to your small team doesn't hold in OPs case.

5- IMO you in your situation should run a slightly less lean team that allows for your employees their humanity. If you can't, you don't have a viable business plan and should get anothe r that affords your employees their humanity.

Thanks again for the hope, I wish you the best with your health moving forward.

This (OPs situation with space x) is simply bad management. Criminally so.

Would you be happy for your roles to be taken off you with no discussion or involvement in the process? After all, you might die?

Yes, redundancy is a good thing. On the other hand, addressing it for an older employee after an injury makes their motivations sound suspect. Would they have treated a younger employee in similar circumstances the same way (because, yes, younger people do get injured)? For that matter, why didn't they have redundancy built into an important role from the outset (making it policy would reduce the likelihood of ageist behaviour)?

Because stakeholders revenue and all that very important stuff on the yearly reports which loses relevance the next year. Because both bonus and dividends are calculated on yearly basis, I'm not sure there's much motivation on the decision makers to put enough weight on the long-term plans. Lip service aside, yeah the most obvious things will be made redundant, all the rest getting pushed aside as "cost of doing business". And they're not even completely wrong.

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