Elon Musk: Just walk out of bad meetings | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk: Just walk out of bad meetings

bbc.co.uk

51 pointsikeyany47 comments

That's not actually what he said - the article cuts his quote in half, and seems to attribute sentiment that's not there:

"Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren’t adding value. It is not rude to leave, it is rude to make someone stay and waste their time."

This is a weird, and somewhat sensational, interpretation of that line in the memo. It is clear that the mandate is to only hold useful meetings, only as often, and for as long as they're necessary. Nothing strange about that kind of mentality...

So he Pulls a Fixler?

Could you explain what the massive implication difference between the quote and the paraphrase is? I'm not seeing it for some reason.

I think the big difference is in the actual quote, he's not saying walk in to a meeting and say "this is dumb" and leave. He's saying the meeting might start out being useful, but then end up slowing down or going into a tangent, and when it just becomes corporate speak and the topic doesn't actually interest you, you should leave or the meeting should probably end there.

Interesting, I didn't quite interpret it that way but I can see what you're saying; thanks.

Not only that - the meeting might be highly useful and productive, but not to _everyone_ summoned.

i.e. those that find themselves in a meeting where they are not needed or have nothing to contribute should leave - however that isn't saying anything about the actual meeting being good or bad.

The entire quote doesn't actually say anything about 'bad meetings', it says that you should leave when you are no longer contributing to one. How many times have you sat through an hour-long meeting after your 5 minutes of review/updates are over? That's what he's talking about - if you're clearly not needed anymore, you don't have to stay in order to be polite.

I hate time wasting meetings, I was on a conference call one time that had gone on for over 90 minutes over a completely inane decision. At one point I got up from my desk, left the building and went and bought a box of doughnuts from a store five minutes from office. I came back a d had missed nothing and no one had noticed I was gone. utterly pointless.

I'm sure the majority of these pointless meetings are just organised by "business" people to justify their jobs. If they aren't in meetings what would they actually do with their day...

The meeting was a discussion for what limit to put on number of items for a proposed new kanban column. 90 minutes to discuss if it should be zero or one, they couldn't agree so ditched the entire column proposal altogether.. Sigh.

Thus was at a time where we already I think 13 columns on our kanban because of someone spending all day seemingly working on dev process and i guess columns were there way to show they had done somethinf....

says the guy who still has a few millions on the bank when he drops all his jobs. This is really the kind of stuff where an entrepreneur who never really worked a real job to pay rent (i.e. because he has no alternative) is a really bad manager. The advise sounds reasonable on paper, but that's simply not how people work.

This is a recommendation he's passing onto his own employees.

> This is a recommendation he's passing onto his own employees.

I think it was clear the parent already understood that when they said

>> This is really the kind of stuff where [he] is a really bad manager.

Eh, I don't think that's fair. You're talking about someone who used to budget $1/day for food and showered at the YMCA.

Yea the guy basically went bankrupt back when SpaceX and Tesla weren't yet doing so hot and almost lost everything. He gets pretty emotional talking about it even [0]. Whatever you think of him, I would caution confusing extreme optimism and directness for being out of touch.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P8UKBAOfGo

Completely different. It isn't about being wealthy or not. Musk has never had a 9 to 5 job so he doesn't understand how that world works. Nobody just walks out of meetings like that.

I agree, however I don't think it's "just" the 9-5 job. If you had a big safety net and could move into your moms big house when sh*t hits the fan, even then having a 9-5 job you would still not follow some rules. But when you are so poor (like most people) that you really require not to lose your job, then is when you really have to do things you don't like just so your manager doesn't get pissed about you.

Yup, that's why Elon is making a company rule to leave a meeting when you think you don't contribute to anymore.

Have you... Ever read anything about his early life? He wasn't dirt poor but he certainly wasn't born into wealth.

What? His dad was a millionaire and also a weirdo.

I shudder to think how much more I could have accomplished if I'd worked for a CEO who had my back like that! I've had jobs where half my time was coding and the other half was in meetings. When all I wanted to do was code. Guess that might be why I was attracted to startups in the first place!

While meetings can be unproductive in the form of code, your mind shouldn't be unproductive. Often boring meetings are a good time to reflect and daydream and improve designs.

Productivity is the greatest source of waste. Coding the wrong thing is worse than being in a long meeting which might have led you to code the right thing. And by write/wrong I mean for the user.

Coding is the easy part of software creation. You can teach anyone any technical skill in a fairly short amount of time. Teaching someone systems thinking, and UI design, and just plain good taste is much harder.

You're assuming that the meeting will result in the correct thing being done. In my experience, that's not at all guaranteed.

The most efficient path to doing the right thing for the user is just to do something, get feedback, and iterate quickly.

I don't disagree, but often that "thing to just do" isn't code...

Yes, sometimes the most efficient way to feedback is to not write code at all. Maybe it is a design document, maybe it's a prototype or mockups.

Sometimes it's creating software that the user can actually control and understand and solve their own problems vs waiting for a developer to create that one feature they need.

But that would require a little bit of thinking outside of code... Those boring meetings are a chance for your mind to wander and play around. The outcome of the actual meeting is less important.

Ponderous meetings don't design good software. Every meeting heavy piece of software I worked on was hot garbage. You're much more likely to get good software if you have the engineers do the job themselves, then tell them to start automating. Once that's done, have the engineers train people to use what they've created full time, and watch them automate that (by simplifying and writing help docs) as well.

No, good designers design good software. You aren't going to get good software with or without meetings if people making the software don't have the skills to do it. Garbage in, garbage out. Diving deep in code is an expensive way to find that out. I've also never met a good designer that just jumped in code without knowing the domain. Sometimes that requires them, gasp, meeting with people first to learn about the domain.

But yes, most meetings are terrible, but you can't always know that ahead of time. Elon Musk is a perfect example of someone jumping head first without knowing to fill the pool first. Some of their production problems have been solved by other manufacturers a hundred years ago.

I guess doing only coding would work great, with only nuance - if you are the only who is coding at company .

He didn't say walk out of meetings if you like to code instead; he said walk out of unproductive meetings, if they're wasting people's time. There's a fine line there...

In my experience genuinely productive meetings are rare...

The point the parent comment is trying to make is that meetings are a waste of people's time. Most software engineers will agree that the majority of meetings are unproductive.

Most software engineers often fail to see value in things that aren't of immediate interest to them. That doesn't mean meetings are a waste of people's time.

I'm actually worried this is going to backfire massively precisely because people interpret it so liberally. I hope he realizes what judgment calls he's asking everyone to make.

It will be a test of whether he's hired good people.

> The point the parent comment is trying to make is that meetings are a waste of people's time.

Any guesses what the corresponding point I was trying to make was?

Sorry if I didn't make it clear but I would have only walked out of worthless meetings, not all meetings. I've had meetings in my career where I didn't know why I was even there and those where nothing was ever decided.

I'm very much in favour of cutting down on pointless meetings and processes for processes' sake. However, I think that "just wanting to code" can be an organizational anti-pattern as well.

Code doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's only by context that code is provided with value and meaning. If you're the only person working on the code and you know exactly what you want to achieve then just wanting to code might work. In almost any other case you have to communicate about what the code is actually supposed to do because otherwise you're likely to create wasteful instead of useful code.

Sounds like a minefield honestly.

Being lower in the hierarchy but making decisions whether a meeting is worth your time pushes a ton of risk onto you if there is a mishap.

How do you respond to "You would have known if you stayed at the meeting"? Would the CEO have your back? How many times before you start getting a "problem employee" reputation.

I think you'd quickly realize to just stay at meetings but now you have no grounds to bring up criticism since it is assumed you could just walk out.

>You would have known if you stayed at the meeting

If a meeting is structured such that an attendee has enough time to realize it's pointless and leave before the meeting gets around to the important part, then it's a bad meeting. That meeting sounds like it should have been an email, or a message in an IM channel, or even more than one smaller meetings.

A manager who structures meetings so that people have to sit through pointless drivel in order to receive one or two important nuggets of information, is a bad manager who's scheduling exactly the kind of bad meetings that Musk is talking about.

It must be hard to manage a company in the age of online outrage and excessive media attention. I imagine people will censor themselves in meetings/emails for fear of it getting 'leaked'. A bit similar to the kind of self-censoring people will do in authoritarian governments.

This email was meant to leak.

The actual quote has a slightly different meaning than what many are assuming - as far as I understand the actual quote was this:

> "Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren't adding value. It is not rude to leave, it is rude to make someone stay and waste their time," Musk writes.

from http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-productivity-tip-le...

"In general, always pick common sense as your guide. If following a “company rule” is obviously ridiculous in a particular situation, such that it would make for a great Dilbert cartoon, then the rule should change."

The entire memo: https://electrek.co/2018/04/17/tesla-model-3-production-goal...

Come on, would it really be the end of the world, if they got another small round of investment just until they hit that 6000 a week mark?

If tesla really is as good of an investment as they say it is, then the situation is nowhere near that dire. From the sounds of it, they're going to make their 6K per week, it's just a question of when. By all means, be efficient and cancel those meetings. But you don't need to push employees to the brink of failure.

A leaked email outlined other ways staff could help streamline operations.

These include walking out of meetings, sidestepping the chain of command and ignoring company rules on occasion.

Thought experiment: Imagine you were reading this about Uber, not Tesla. Why would you feel differently? How about back when Kalanick was CEO?

The people who need to hear what you’re saying are desperate not to. Until a critical mass realize that Musk is trying to get rich, not send them to Mars, you will be shouted down. It’s like sports fans; when their team wins despite career-ending fouls they’re not saying, “oh that’s it for my team,” they’re saying, “We did it, and with only nine men!!”

When the reality distortion bubble bursts on this one, only then will cutting corners, treating employees badly, deceptive and dangerous marketing around autopilot, and endless unfounded hype be seen as unacceptable.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-18/californi...

I'd imagine at a large enough company there are bound to be obviously dumb rules that some low-level manager invented to power-trip ("All employees must walk on the right-hand side to walk to the left-most bathroom past 3pm").

My only concern is that it will be less "ignore obviously dumb rules" and more "ignore safety precautions".

If I were reading this about Uber, my first response would be surprise that they have company rules.

Violate company rules is a dangerous thing to say (or admit publicly; seems like a tee-up to a lawsuit). But the other two... those make sense.

Elon Musk always has advice for other people that we can't follow because we're not also rich. Just walk out of meetings. OK.

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