I had built this whole E-Commerce platform for him and his company (I single-handedly did all the coding, infrastructure, etc. Not taking any credit for their incredible sales team.) that was running in multiple countries, bringing in millions in sales.
But I started getting pretty bored once it was stable enough and just running and started seeking greener pastures.
And he said (I'm paraphrasing) most people are either builders or maintainers, and rarely both. And he said I was a builder at heart. So I hate maintaining things. Which is why, when I helped hire my replacement, he was VERY much a maintainer, and he flourished in that second phase since it had reached maturity.
Using that framework, I think that the ratio of builders to maintainers at Tesla is not healthy right now. It seems VERY healthy at SpaceX, for example. They're innovating on new technology AND on efficiencies of the existing tech and logistics.
The builders got them to where they are (I'm still a generally happy Model 3 owner), but the maintainers are the ones who make the maintenance and service experience great, incrementally improve manufacturing, parts availability, all those unsexy things that have more to do with logistics, building superchargers etc.
Because they are too lopsided with builders, they keep inventing new stuff instead of continuing to innovate with EVs. For a while there were enough builder type challenges with manufacturing but even those challenges seem to be exhausted.
I'm surprised to see that they've gutted the supercharger team because it seems like the ultimate "services" sector where they're in better shape than anyone else to make basically free "services" type money from ALL EVs in coming years with NACS.
It’s simply that these things aren’t respected by…someone…or someones, and don’t get the attention they deserve from the people that could provide it.
However, This is just wordplay redefining the concept building.
If the purpose is maintenance, it is maintaining.
IMHO, if you have a shitty harassing manager, you can switch from maintaining to being anti-work in a few months. And having a good manager can lift you from being a maintainer to being a tech lead at any company. This is a simple psychological trick that most companies have not figured out yet and it's very sad.
Employees are diverse, and what works for one, doesn't work for another. Similarly, what ICs say will work and what actually works are usually very different.
While I agree ICs underestimate the difficulty, I think what ICs are usually responding to is that the managing isn't good. Whether that's because managing is difficult or because their manager is bad is in some sense not what matters. Those problem are the managers' job or the managers' managers' job.
In Tesla’s situation, they need more people with a maintenance mindset to sustain their company.
SpaceX has a nice mix of both.
The world will always ask commandos to stay around as soldiers and soldiers to stay around as police. But that’s not their role. They’re needed elsewhere.
I saw this with my own eyes back in college. A friend started a computing facility newsletter. Every Sunday he was up until dawn finishing the copy in it, and then Monday he would find a working printer and print copies. I think he was funding it himself for the first few months. One of the computing staff (the “student liaison”) fought him every step of the way. He was constantly being trouble, making it hard to distribute the newsletter. Telling him he couldn’t use the printer. Random stuff like that.
Well. My friend was reliable and 6 months passed. Every week the newsletter came out and it became part of life on campus. My friend moved on and guess who put up their hand to keep running it? It was the liaison. The same guy who had made it so hard to start in the first place. He’s just a born police man. I think deep down he loves maintaining the status quo. Once the newsletter was part of the status quo, he naturally took it on himself to keep it going.
I really took it to heart and changed what I thought about career progression. I'm probably a builder/scaler I def get bored in the maintenance phase.
It's probably experience bias but the maintenance phase orgs I have worked for were more like warehouses that kept systems on shelves and let them rot until all the customers bled away. These were mostly growth by acquisition PE companies. It was like working at a fruit stand selling only rotten fruit. We were never given time, budget, or resources for even basic modernization. Everything was firefighting. One team after acquisition, lost their devops team, and let their pipelines degrade over 5 years to the point they couldn't deploy anymore. I've seen on-prem solutions deployed 20 times to a VM across 50 VM's and called cloud. It took a weekend for the team to deploy (10-15 people because support had to manually test every env because it was so fragile). They also tend to attract and retain talent that is done learning and growing. I had an Ops Engineer at one of these orgs tell me in 2023 that no one told them they had to learn Docker. They know what they know, and they push back on anything new which in turn drives away engineers that do want change. Everyone knows it's broken but no one will commit any resources to fixing it. The business doesn't care as long as they are retaining.
It's minefield and even when they talk about how committed they are to change during the interview you walk into fortified silos and no support or budget to break the deadlock.
Clearly this basic idea crops up in numerous forms. Part of the point of this specific scheme is that it is circular: once a given thing has reached the town planner stage, it has become some combination of pervasive and dependable and well-understood, ready to be used as one of the foundations for future exploration.
The way I see it is these companies need it, but it is impossible to satiate that need, so they must find the next best thing.
If you have a project with 500 individual contributors or even just 50, it is impossible for one person, even geniuses, to understand and comprehend the whole. It is also impossible to staff all those positions with top talent at scale.
Raw talent and engineering is replaced with heuristics and policies and red tape.
It becomes like sailors operating a ship made with forgotten technology. They each have superstitions and operational knowledge about their little part, but nobody has the ship schematics.
Similarly, there probably isn't single person on the planet that could fully explain how a modern computer works in detail.
It is impossible to know every detail, but it is certainly possible to understand and comprehend it. The ability to zoom out and zoom in is essential for senior leadership (even if some people appear unfit based on this criteria). Of course it works only if your organization is… ehm… organized and doesn’t look like a bunch of unicorns of all sorts and colors, so that you can extrapolate the methods of work of one team to another.
This will be the downfall of modern society. When nobody remains who understands all the tech we rely on it's only a matter of time before the whole house of cards comes down.
But the progression is not necessarily the same time scale for the product and the person. Maybe it was in the past, before computing.
I don't think he understands that and there's really not anything I can do about it but move on.
There was a huge wake-up call as they kept working with this brilliant chef who all but refused to write down recipes, share processes, or do anything but run his restaurant the way he always had. He just couldn’t see that going from restaurant to franchise was an entirely different thing than running a great restaurant.
If I remember correctly, ultimately despite a bunch of different creative approaches, they had to back off.
I think about that a lot when businesses want to go from building to scaling.
(He wrote the Agile Manifesto and developed TDD while working at Sun in the 90s)
What really disturbs me about recent Tesla communication is that the Semi is just not being mentioned.
Tesla is basically a battery packager at its core business. The Tesla Semi represents a massive amount of demand for packaged batteries, and Tesla's model has the best prototype-demonstrated abilities. That is what the next ten years of the company is about at the core.
Elon needs to go. Give him the 56 billion, and then send him off his way to ruin Twitter which isn't important. Tesla is one of the most important companies in the world in terms of keeping the EV transition on the cutting edge and keeping the feet to the fire on the old ICE companies. Maybe the Chinese companies will take that up, but there is so much uncertainty in China now.
Tesla is taking too long to release models. It is NOT good at building. Their battery leadership is gone, CATL and other chinese companies raced past them.
The future of EVs is LFP and Sodium Ion, and then probably Li-S or Na-S. Tesla has no leadership in those, it's all China.
There's a pretty compelling argument out there that an electric semi is currently not economically viable because the weight of the battery cuts into the weight the semi can haul without exceeding the gross vehicle weight limit on public roads. In this regard, it may be telling that Tesla's first customer was a company that sells potato chips - one of the lightest weight per volume products you can transport.
I would say the biggest headache for Tesla in the semi space is that they were not first to market and there are multiple competitors shipping trucks now. And while Tesla has decent battery production, CATL makes way more and is evolving the technology much faster. Everyone else will just use those batteries. Maybe Tesla will too, if they keep trying to make the Semi a viable product.
I wonder if they did a calculation to determine if this course of action will actually save more carbon emissions than it will cause in the form of road destruction and the need for refinishing them from the increased weight.
It's not being mentioned because it's a dumpster fire.
It has delivery rates that today are 30% of their contractual obligations for 2017, seven years ago now.
Pepsi, Sysco, UPS and Walmart have or are all given up and gone to competitors.
Musk even implies that the outlook won't improve there. Blames battery availability, actually.
EV trucks should have a shoe-in for lot tenders, it works well with the recharge cycle, would work with drop in batteries, etc., but Musk wants his on the Interstate, regardless of feasibility.
He's also managed to convince the faithful that no-one else is doing or capable of doing commercial sized EVs, despite BYD having 60,000 electric buses operating, and others.
Source: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...
Yeah, this did seem surprising to me as well. This is one of those mailbox money type of systems. However, I'm guessing they've realized that maintaining the infrastructure is something they do not want to do. So instead of running the network, they should just make the chargers, or license them for others to build. Tesla is pretty much the quintessential example of a rent-seeking company, so these ideas seem right up their alley
This seems impossible. How is it doing rent-seeking?
And since you still have the option to purchase FSD outright, I don't consider the subscription option as rent-seeking.
With Premium Connectivity, the way I see it, it's necessary to actually cover the costs associated with it. For those unaware, Premium Connectivity, you don't get any video/audio streaming services in the car, and the navigation can only use bare maps rather than satellite imagery. Note that these limitations don't apply if you instead tether to a mobile WiFi AP, such as your phone. The $10/month pays for the extra data your car uses on the mobile network, which could be a LOT of data if you watch video streaming while supercharging frequently.
Unless Tesla is getting a sweetheart unlimited data deal from some carrier, there are probably some people that actually cost Tesla money from streaming a ton of video. But someone like me, who drives only ~5 hours/month, I'm probably not using much data from the audio streaming.
Example: a utility company lobbies for a law requiring utilities to charge a junk fee.
Non-example: I charge someone to live in my spare bedroom.
Tesla is offering use of something they built (Superchargers, self-driving software, etc.) in exchange for a fee. They aren't gaming the system to force anyone to pay. You might not like the pricing model, but there's nothing economically wrong with it.
I think the problem most people have with the BMW trick is that they include the feature physically, but disable it. That does almost smell like rent seeking, but I think it does not quite get there. Manufacturers routinely hold back a bit and don't deliver maximum capability. For reasons like emissions, or longevity, whatever. This isn't much different IMO, if you're not paying anything for it then the fact that they included it anyway is immaterial.
Probably the most common kind of rent everyone thinks of, property rental, is also not rent-seeking. There is value in what is being provided.
To go back to a car analogy, it would be like BMW engaging the brakes on your car and then charging you a fee release them so you could drive (even better, making it legally required to pay the fee in order to drive on public roads). They're not providing any value at all, and then demanding money for it.
People are either Producer, Administrator, Entrepreneur, or Integrator.
It's a scale from E to P to I to A in order of early to late in the company lifecycle. There are even personality tests for this online.
What a great comment, and it applies to so many things and situations I’ve been in.
I've build several products for several companies / individual, some of them were hugely, hugely successful, and then I'd leave and build the next thing. I just got tired of it after a while. Now I hang around for a bit more maintenance and more often than not something cool comes along.
Founders are good at founding, which is generally a very shortsighted and aggressive activity.
At some point, the business needs stability. Founders that stick around too long often cannot make that transition and end up making long term success untenable.
I’ve heard it called “Founder’s Syndrome” when a founder can’t bring themselves to step away and hand their creation off to a better caretaker.
In fact my biggest worry is that the software will be abandoned and as cars age, edge case bugs will appear, but there’ll be no way to fix them.
There’s going to need to be a robust aftermarket for vehicle software.
Though, I don’t know if I’d trust some random EBay dongle or even Dorman to patch my drive-by-wire steering that’s been pulling to the left a bit in a 15 year old Tesla.
[*] and more and more all the rest of them as well.
Tesla isn’t building a robot because a scrappy team in the company discovered an opportunity for innovation. They’re doing it because the CEO suddenly demanded it between doses of amphetamines.
Tesla would look like a big company with a startup mentality if they were pumping out new automotive products that made some level of sense.
Hyundai and Kia more closely resemble what this would look like in a large company. All their new cars have unique bespoke designs and a laser focus on giving customers a compelling offering in every category.
It didn’t end well.
And in the context of this news I don't see much innovation just some cost-cutting to continue to prop up some moonshots to the detriment of the automaker portion of Tesla.
Would Optimus survive as its own startup ?
The answer is probably for big companies to let themselves get big but then start investing in the startup ecosystem. New things that aren't a good fit for BigCo should be done in actual startups.
I think trying to put everything under one umbrella is actively harmful. In its most extreme it gives you the Soviet politburo. I've speculated before that the real reason that capitalism seems to work better is because of this multiplicity of organizations allowing the system to route around dysfunction. When everything is all one big corporation (as it was in the USSR) dysfunction in any area becomes fatal and cannot be recovered from.
They aren’t at the point of disrupting themselves, this is like if Google terminated search in 2004. It’s idiotic, period.
But car sales are down across the entire market, this isn't exclusive to Tesla or EV's. Interest rates are just too high for your average consumers and discretionary spending continues to drop. It's myopic to think Tesla are doing something wrong without looking at the state of things.
Tesla is the perfect example of going corporate.