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But those aren’t moral issues, they’re productivity issues. My younger brother used to do his computer job from the office because it was attached to the factory. It meant he could talk directly with the people manufacturing the steel frames he specified in the building dressing to get the right thing built quickly. This was a USP of the company vs other design shops.

This could be true for Tesla, there’s no morality to this. The fact Musk brings morality in suggests he’s talking out his arse.

Twitter is a different company. If he doesn’t bring morality into it, he doesn’t have to be a hypocrite. He could easily say “working on site is necessary for Tesla, not for Twitter.” Being dogmatic is not good business.

> But those aren’t moral issues

According to the dictionary, morality is simply “ principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior.”

> they’re productivity issues

Some would say that choosing being unproductive when you could be productive IS immoral. Not only does Benjamin Franklin jump to mind, but the entire Protestant-informed culture of “the West”. Japan’s culture is also infused with a productivity mindset.

> According to the dictionary, morality is simply “ principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior.”

Right/wrong in this case are meant in the sense of "it's wrong to murder people" as opposed to "saying 2 + 2 = 5 is wrong." The former is a statement of morality, the latter is a statement of correctness. This does not link productivity / morality.

> Some would say that choosing being unproductive when you could be productive IS immoral.

Therefore it's not an axiom. Most people would only consider it immoral if you chose to be unproductive for the sake of being unproductive. For example, refusing to do your job while expecting to be paid is something many people would consider immoral.

This is different from choosing a path you prefer, that happens to be less productive. For example, doing something more slowly but more safely may be less productive but also something many would not consider immoral.

> This is different from choosing a path you prefer, that happens to be less productive.

In the context of one's life, I agree fully. However, once you choose to work in a collective, choosing to be less productive without a positive tradeoff to the system, harms the ones around you.

The positive tradeoff to the system is that the employee who prefers to WFH is happier and less stressed, which leads to increased productivity and retention. Now whether this offsets the decreased productivity from not being there in person, that's what's being argued over.

Nothing you said here sufficiently answers the specific points I raised.

> those aren’t moral issues

I think you may have missed the issues they intended to bring up. The moral issues I see could be that you might have one class of worker ("knowledge worker") who is able to work from home and another class of worker who is unable to work from home. It's along the lines of the difference between paid catering for the executive suite but not the rest of the office.

No they’re not even remotely related. One type of work can’t be done from home, one can. That’s not a moral discussion, that’s just a description of reality.

Paid catering isn’t an intrinsic part of the work, so it has absolutely nothing to do with this discussion.

The exclusive paid catering I gave as an example is something that might foster resentment towards executives from the rest of the office staff. Work from home, regardless of circumstances around the work which allow for it, can be seen as a similar privilege which might draw resentment from one worker group to another. I think something like that is what was being suggested.

Why stop here?

Some workers have shifts, some have to work outside in the rain.

It's only fair that everyone works outside in the rain in shifts?

Agreed.

There are people whose jobs involve abseiling from the side of a building.

Therefore it's only fair that we should all be doing our jobs while abseiling from the side of a building.

I would say usually this is deftly handled at other tech companies (MSFT, AAPL, Netflix, Facebook, Google) by outsourcing all meal preparation, cleaning services, security, low level IT, contract manufacturing to other companies. That way there is not a separate class within the same company. This works most of the time to not create a press $*$!storm.

The challenge for Elon (and Bezos/Jassy) is that his two of his companies rely on physical labor and can't outsource the physical part but still need tech talent that could otherwise WFH.

I don't envy him or Bezos/Jassy...

If you don't say stuff like this you have folks even on the tech side who will protest (i.e. TBray of AWS VP).

"I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of COVID-19," he wrote.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-engineer-resigned-tre...

The jobmarket is "unfair", we all have different conditions and earn a different wages. Suddenly when Musk hates WFH he cares about fairness?

I think its important to realize that Elon's smart enough to realize that part of his job is performative - for his primary investors/faithful (i.e. Cathie Wood, Tesla Daily, Hyperchange, Ross Gerber).

They want Tesla to maintain that original "Elon sleeping under desks", all hands on deck, Tesla hunger of yore. To them - they probably were concerned about the design teams getting to soft from WFH and getting uppity.

Also a symptom of that management style is measuring input not outcomes.

A star worker for them is someone who works 16 hours a day, adds 10K lines of code and sleeps under their desk. Not someone who goes for a long walk in the park while thinking deeply about the problem, and then spends half an hour at the keyboard refactoring to remove 1000 lines of code and clear a major performance bottleneck.

Elon may be performing for his shareholders, but if he was actually smart he'd be informing them. It's notable how many of the actually-smart rockstar CEO's didn't seem to care what their shareholders thought.

Contractors are treated pretty poorly at those companies

Agree - definitely is still an issue - mostly noticing that introducing outsourcing and badge levels/colors seems to make it less press-worthy.

Classic bureaucrat response.

"People are getting annoyed by these implicit class differences in our organisation, what do we do?"

"Let's encode them explicitly in the contracts. Then we can blame it on the contracts and pretend it's out of our control!"

> That way there is not a separate class within the same company.

No, you've now created an even "lower" class within the company.

No, but it's fair for a company to mandate some minimum level of behavior that reflects a baseline of values. A cable company I worked for had fewer holidays than most other companies, even for their corporate employees. The rationale was that if the line cable installer or phone rep was schlepping in to work, then so should the marketing guy.

This is ridiculous, we already have a way of making up for differing work conditions, it's called pay.

If you think it's "unfair" that some people have to commute into work then pay them accordingly.

It seems, however, that the idea of a pay rise is often the last resort for employers, no matter the circumstance.

And nobody looked at that and said "wait... why not just give holidays to these folks too?"

Because it fits his mental model.

"But role XYZ can't work from home therefore no one should work from home" is the silliest of all arguments. It's similar to "Back in my day, we didn't have parental leave and it was very hard, so why is it fair that young people should not have to go through the hardest experience too!".

Here's just some of the benefits to on-site workers in role XYZ of other workers being able to WFH:

* Quicker commutes (less congestion from people needlessly traveling) and thus more free time.

* If a partner is WFH, they haven't wasted time commuting and thus have more time and energy to assist with the household.

* Higher salaries as the jobs requiring a commute become less desirable vs. WFH jobs.

* Higher salaries as the business wastes less money on having unnecessary office facilities and (theoretically at least) workers could demand these savings be reflected in their salaries.

* Improved health from reduction in pollution caused by commuting.

* Reduced cost of living from less wasted land used for offices that are only used 30% of a week.

* Lower taxes or improved government services as less money needs to be wasted on infrastructure that is overwhelmingly built to cater for the 12% per week that it is used to needlessly shuffle everyone around.

* Increased productivity from reduction in illnesses transferred on public transport and within office facilities.

* Improved happiness and productivity resulting from workers being able to setup a workspace/home office that is most productive for their needs. Fresh air, lighting, seating, etc are all controllable by the worker at home.

* Households could switch to having a single car.

If one were to debate against WFH, more sensible arguments would be things like:

* Greater heating / cooling efficiency to cram more people in a single cramped building than to have those same people heat / cool their homes individually. Passive houses largely solve this.

* More efficient access to some services such as getting a haircut, buying goods from a specialist retailer, etc if they're all centralised in a CBD as opposed to requiring individuals to travel all across a city. Increased deliveries to home negates this.

* Forced exercise (on average) due to workers needing to walk between transport options and an office building, whereas at home they don't have to walk anywhere unless they are motivated to do so.

Also:

* Larger population to recruit from, because distance to office does not matter.

* More diverse workforce, because people with some physical and/or mental disabilities, will be able to work remote.

It seems weird that the office workers are working from the office and not in the production line too, no? Do your meetings while assembling a car, I'd you're worried about the people assembling cars feeling bad

I think that is the preference/ideal scenario that Musk has in his head.

Take a morning standup with your coworkers about supply chain/scrum, head to the factory floor to show the technicians how to flash the latest firmware to the infotainment system, do some heads down work, go home, eat dinner and then take a phone conference late at night with your Tesla China/Berlin counterpart.

Probably impressions matter on the factory floor and when you scale up operations. You don't want a situation where the people on the factory floor just refer to the design team as "corporate" (i.e. "corporate" wants us to do this, guys we have to redo X over again on all 10,000 cars we produced today because "dude in corporate" thinks its not going to work otherwise).

I think this is probably where the motivation comes from. You don't want the people who get their hands dirty viewing the people that make decisions for them as some floating heads somewhere off in the ether. If they dont come around ever that's what's going to happen. It creates resentment, destroys morale, and you have to balance that with the morale impact of making the information workers show their faces often enough.

Given that Tesla have been producing cars where the steering “yoke” literally falls off on the highway after a few miles, I wouldn’t be so sure this hasn’t been implemented already!

I saw this first-hand at a defense contractor. A lot of the work is classified, so it needs to be done in-office. The group of in-office workers definitely harbored a lot of anger toward the out-of-office “no-work-from-home” workers. It doesn’t help that it was mostly true (there) that the work-from-homers were doing nothing; I know because I was one of them, at one point.

> My two cents on this is that he is saying "working from home is morally wrong" - for his companies... but he left out the for his companies part.

If you watch his interview you see him say WFH is morally wrong for almost everyone in the "laptop class" and not just his companies.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-work-from-home-morall... "You're going to make people who make your food that gets delivered [that] can't work from home; the people that come fix your house, they cant work from home, but you can?"

"Does that seem morally right? That's messed up," Musk said.

There are 12 year olds working in Cobalt mines, I wonder if Musk is going to send his children to work in those. Some people have to live on the street, maybe we all should, otherwise it's "messed up".

> allowing a small percentage of people to have the flexibility to work from home all the time, actually can seem amoral as that will create two classes of workers

This is kind of absurd, though, since they are already two classes of workers. Information workers and factory workers are different.

But also, the deciding factor on whether you can work from home should be: can you do your job from home? Look at nurses. They have to be in a hospital, walking into rooms and tending to patients, right? Not phone nurses and poison control center nurses. They work from home nowadays.

> Information workers and factory workers are different.

Should they be, in terms of work-life balance?

The answer is to improve the lot of factory workers, not worsen that of the others.

That would cost Elon money though...

Yes. The alternative is absurd. Should it be mandatory for everybody to work shifts just because some people have to work shifts?

I’ve never met a factory worker who resents the existence of cushy WFH jobs. On the contrary, many aspire to have such a job.

There are also many people in non-desk jobs who could never imagine doing one. The recent example I have in mind are the wildland firefighters described by Desmond. It's hard, grueling, dirty, long work, but for many of them, it beats sitting still stuck at home attempting to look busy for some guy in a suit.

Just because our kind of people thinks of it as the dream job does not mean every type of person shares that ideal!

It seems unavoidable without artificially making life worse for some. But it should also be properly compensated.

Zero opinion on the work-life balance question, because it's irrelevant here (this is not fundamentally a work-life balance issue, and people who work remotely have their own work-life balance problems). This is about whether or not you have to physically be in a particular place to actually perform your job duties. For a factory worker, yes you do. For an awful lot of information workers, you absolutely don't.

Park rangers get to perform their jobs out amongst the majestic beauty of nature. Should we make it "fair" by forcing them to go sit in a cubicle under fluorescent lights too?

100% remote work was a thing before the pandemic and it will continue to be a thing in the future. Companies that don't learn how to adapt to this will be at a disadvantage on this point. This cuts both ways, of course. If I can do my job "anywhere" and I live in an expensive place like Seattle, I should worry that I have to compete with people in very low CoL places, and that likely pushes my own market value down. That's life. But pretending we need information worker's butts in seats downtown to operate servers thousands of miles away from them is not going to fix the problem.

I agree from a technological/logical standpoint but from a human/emotional standpoint I think there are issues. People love to complain/go to press about HR decisions. The press would love to portray Musk as hypocritical about treating production line workers as second class denizens. The headline writes itself.

I tthink the way you overcome it is by paying a premium to in office staff. In your scenario - onsite nurses likely get paid a very significant premium to the salary of a remote, phone nurse.

But in the "Elon" case its going to hard to show how your are paying a premium for onsite factory techs when the design engineers are making $$$ plus RSUs.

> from a human/emotional standpoint I think there are issues

From an emotional standpoint, sure, but not from a moral standpoint, which is what your previous post was saying. There is no moral case for punishing an advantaged class if that punishment does nothing to help the other class.

I think that's a fair point - especially if one prescribes to most economically efficient == most moral - which not all subscribe to (although perhaps of all people Musk would subscribe to this theory).

That said I could for see cases where the laptop class could be isolated from pain when a separate class has to do the physical work. Imagine a scenario where the laptop class engineer does some sloppy work in order to pick up the kids for soccer. The goof up requires 100 production line people to redo step 8 of 30 steps for 3 additional hours.

That goof up will be less visible there - buried in the timesheets of 100 workers - than at a company that has outsourced production line work. At the outsourced production company the goof up will show up as the additional change order which will have a directly mappable line item on the quarterly accounting that the responsible engineer will need to answer for.