Elon Musk says ‘get off your work-from-home bullshit’ | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk says ‘get off your work-from-home bullshit’

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27 pointsmfiguiere29 comments

You know what? I am positive I am more productive from home but I would still push for working from home even if I wasn't. At this point if you want me at all you have to be willing to let me work from home most of the time. Fuck this idea that we owe maximum productivity to our employers, this is a two way deal and employees are allowed to negotiate their conditions as suits them

Moral issue? I disagree. This is a simple competition for skilled labor, where one of the perks up for negotiation is the option to work from home. I’m willing to leave my company for another that guarantees my remote work, and I may be willing to accept lower pay in return. My quality of life is that much better without being in the office.

Well, they’ve tried everything but pulling the morality card, so I guess here we are.

I just cannot understand how a single employee of his watching / reading this can stay and work for him… If you are good enough to get a job at Tesla / Twitter / SpaceX you can get a job elsewhere. I makes no sense one, that even one employee would stay there. If he called and offered me $1m/day to work at his office doing epic sh*t I would say Thanks mate, life is too short to work for people like you

As far as I understand it, Tesla and Twitter actually have a retention problem now. Twitter for obvious reasons, Tesla less obvious.

SpaceX has always been a meat-grinder from what I've heard, but the people that stay are loyal for reasons beyond money/wfh/QoL.

Still seems better than graduate studies. If you wanna throw shit into space for a living, how else are you gonna do it?

All these f*ckin' bosses prattling on about how office time is the only, moral option better be butts in seats 40+ hours like their staff. Or is hypocrisy the only, moral option for management? And unless their staff walks, they can STFU about climate and environment impact.

It's the ones that like being able to see and experience their power over employees that hate work from home the most.

It's worse.

He's there & watching like a vulture the employees every move. If you don't also commit 48 hours a week you are considered bad.

He is exactly the bad boss personality that isn't hypocritical, just expects total & complete commitment all the time.

As the guy who has kids with female employees in the office outside of his relationships, I guess I know why he wants employees nearby, eh.

Also - very RICH about the moral thing. The Edgelord who prides himself on spitting on rules and norms has something to teach us about morality, you see.

Is the CEO-to-worker ratio of 398.8 not a moral issue? Hard to take the morality argument seriously here.

Are there hard metrics that say remote work hurts workforce performance?

I am pretty doubtful there are studies out there that don't have major flaws.

I would like to see a measure of home vs. a quiet office vs. a noisy open plan hangar. At a glance, Twitter probably chose the latter: https://www.officelovin.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/twitt...

“Walls and doors” were on the Joel Test; why did nobody ever start competing on this?

This is a mild hope, if office space prices undergoes the critical absurd crash they certainly are undergoing: offices & doors.

> I’m a big believer that people need to be more productive when they’re in person

Yet compensation will not be proportional. Part of the reason WFH is good is because workers are getting some options. The evidence is simple, business owners would, and will, prefer robots and AI over people. They want that kind of control. I'm pro capitalism but this is undeniably one of its greatest flaws, which is dehumanizing people in the name of competition and market value.

Is there a version of capitalism that doesn't suffer from this? It seems like dehumanization is in some ways precisely the mechanism that makes it work.

I'm not sure whether prioritizing profit above all else is necessarily part of capitalism. I can imagine a world where businesses have a different top priority. A business can still survive without cancer-like growth that reaches global levels with tens of thousands of employees and lobby groups. Of course, that world would require every business to agree and not pursue profit, otherwise the ones that do will out-compete the rest. It seems like a much deeper problem than capitalism, and one that is being mitigated the most by capitalism if we compare it to the previous economic systems.

Prioritizing profits is a part of capitalism. Capitalism is simply the private ownership of the means of production, but the interests of the capital owner are to use capital to accumulate wealth, which leads to exploitation of labor being a method. This is especially so versus the falling rate of growth as an industry matures. The tendency of capitalism then is to consolidate into an oligarchy of major dominant corporations and conglomerations, which is that aforementioned cancerous growth.

Capitalism won out over previous modes because it outcompeted them. Granting laborers some economic power (as opposed to slavery or serfdom) turned out to be an enabler for economic growth.

In the example of WFH, markets could end up winning out in the end as new telework industries outcompete the prior office commute industries. This could end up enabling innovation to be untethered and accelerate.

That's all capitalism is: the theft of workers' profits by shareholders.

They’re taking all the risks for me.

I see capitalism as the best solution so far to the greedy nature of humans. It doesn't solve for business owners constantly trying to squeeze the most out of workers like farmers and their livestock. There are definitely better solutions to be discovered, probably not communism because even though it sounds good, the greed nature of humans can exploit communism even more than capitalism. It's a tough problem.

On the flip side, capitalism can enable greed to a global level never before seen, and communism (as in communist states as opposed to "True Communism") can enforce a level of fairness given the limited resources. The former can dominate entire countries and create banana republics, and while the latter can inflict misery, it is not on the level of complete failed states where senseless violence roam the streets.

It seems that capitalism coincided with empires globalizing the world via colonization, and as such inherited imperialist "features" that are not necessarily tied to the idea of free markets and capital. Those companies that did horrible things for profit, are allowed to do so because of capitalism, but it's not an inherent feature of capitalism, in my limited knowledge. To that extent it's like we're trying to find an economic model that will solve for human greed in every possible scenario. Maybe it just needs to be complemented with other societal values or moral structures.

Not everyone has a private jet to be flown everywhere. But that's because well fed human does not believe hungry human.

Musk being associated with a worker rights issue is like Jim Cramer backing a stock.

Person that sells cars for commuting wants people to commute. News at 11.

Remote work works.

Yeah, and I say 'fuck you, Elon'

Lol. No

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