Yet, people are in here acting like this is a violation of the Geneva convention or something.
'If there are particularly exceptional contributors ... I will review and approve those exceptions directly'
If this were truly limited to only the executive team, it's an existing point-to-point connection. No routing or extra direction necessary
...and the upsides cloud my judgement as to whether it's a net positive from the company's perspective.
While all the good I've seen for myself, it's also been a nightmare for managing the small group of people I have. I had to terminate TWO people because we discovered they were also working a 2nd job, and multiple people have had trouble focusing on work while at home.
Some people did great - others didn't. ...and there's no question that the company culture overall has suffered. I'm not saying I'm definitely for or against it - but I wish people would stop taking absolutist positions on this debate.
It's very easy for this to become a heated thing. I too wish discussions on this would trend away from absolutism. There's too much gray in the world for this to be productive.
I find a possible motivator in that is there being a sort of imbalance with preference -- if we assume whoever 'wins' sets the tone for the future.
If those who love the office get their way, the remote lovers (more likely) concede more than the opposite.
The remote people don't need other people to be remote. Just accommodate by using Slack, Git, whatever. The in-office people however do 'need' people to also join them on-site for the benefits of it to truly realize
(As much as I hate words like synergy, it really is sometimes easier to just hash things out in person)
The rest have to support, manage, or otherwise interact with the people who need to physically be there, and the most efficient way to do that is if they are also there.
Just like Amazon, most of the employees work in Whole Foods or fulfillment centers. But the professional staff in software engineering etc don’t have to be in the office to do their work. Even if their software impacts the fulfillment center they likely have never set foot in one.
If there's an issue with your design and you need to rearrange it to accommodate some production limitation, do you think it might be helpful to be able to walk down to the factory floor and look at it first hand?
There's tons of companies where you can do all the work remotely. If that's a high priority, don't work at Tesla. When you need to make physical products, it's helpful to be at the place where the physical product are being made, because they don't just exist entirely in your code editor.
If people really want to work for any company non-remote, then they will. That doesn't mean that banning remote work is popular or necessary.
Even as close to something like working on the UI for a vehicle -- I would assume they have the ability to run that in an emulator, in a desktop test bed, or even as a developer build in their personal car. And it's going to faster for most work to work that way (perhaps other than integration with a new model).
Also, I don't think most people are saying "never" with respect to going into the office. It's Tesla's CEO that's saying "never" to remote work.
Lots of things were done sub-optimally during the pandemic due to the circumstances. That doesn't mean we shouldn't go back to doing them a way that works better now that we can.
That things weren't worse is a sign that the world adapted to the new working situation very effectively.
A lot of things were doable during pandemic time because it was global, temporary and necessary. Eg: lots of people got their salaries maintained despite their job not really existing anymore. That was possible (and necessary) because we knew it was temporary. But the conclusion cannot be "As the pandemic showed us a lot of the workforce can be paid even if they don't produce anything, we should stop asking people to work at all".
Similarly, while some level of operations were able to be maintained during the pandemic, the rate of innovation and the global productivity definitely went down, significantly. If you intent to be maintaining the same working conditions, with the same effects in a post COVID world while your competition resumes regular operations, going back to regular speed, you are going to have a hard time.
Somewhere along the line, goalposts were shifted. At the beginning, the concern was about Elon saying "everyone has to be in the office all the time". Now somehow we're at the point of a false dichotomy between "always on site" and "never on site". For most people, remote work is a healthy minimum. Most of my colleagues are at home 3-4 days a week and in the office 1-2 days a week. That saves them the commute most of the time, but we still get collaborative tasks done when we meet in the office.
I imagine it could be similar for industrial designers: When they are interacting with their CAD programs, there is no need to "go down to the production line to see how their design worked out" right away. That can happen whenever they're at the factory the next time, which may be a few days or a few weeks out.
I've worked for a retail company where we made physical kiosks for stores - no one ever went into the stores to debug anything, we just worked on simulators and a couple of example units in head office.
Exactly the same philosophy applies at Tesla.
Whatever it is that Elon does it works for his companies.
If you don't want the expectation to give 110% of what you can, don't work for Elon companies.
You can argue that factory workers don't have choice what job their are doing, so they need checks and balances.
But people who could work remotely certainly can change employer if they dislike Elon work ethics.
'If there are particularly exceptional contributors ... I will review and approve those exceptions directly'Or detect non typical brain activity to alert a manager to check the worker isn’t playing games or looking at memes.
If the argument is "well you might need to interact with a line worker at the factory" working from home vs. an office not at the actual factory isn't really any different?
But reading between the lines, factory workers are expected to do more than 40 hours a week? That's less fair.
The ford motor company bargain was 8 hours of work, 8 hours of life, 8 hours of rest and a middle class lifestyle. The tesla motor company bargain is…? Seems like mediocre to bad pay, 12 hours of work, 6 hours of life, 6 hours of sleep? Yeah, i’d be unionizing if I was a tesla worker.
Sure, they should unionize if they want. Seems like most are pretty happy with the job though.
https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Tesla/salaries?job_category=manuf...
And $63k/year is mediocre at best. It’s below the national median, and I’d be willing to bet if you adjust for cost of living near most of the locations where tesla workers work, it’s worse than “near average”
As for if the workers there like it?
https://www.autoblog.com/2019/06/10/tesla-employee-satisfact...
> At jobs site Glassdoor, Tesla's overall company rating fell to 3.2 out of 5.0 stars based on reviews written in the first quarter from a high of 3.6 in 2017
A high of 3.6 isn’t exactly a enthusiastic endorsement. Toyota has a 4.0, Ford has a 4.1.
According to this[1] the median is $19.33/hr, so Tesla is not far off. It's above with overtime.
[1] https://policyadvice.net/insurance/insights/average-american...
If you want to work 60 hours a week at your FAANG or startup job, that's your choice (though that choice does have an impact in terms of the expectations within the industry) - but you're probably being paid 2x-5x so you're well rewarded for your time.
That seems unusual compared to how most hourly jobs are run. Lots of people are happy to take overtime when it's available. Never seen anything that says 60hrs per week is mandatory all the time.
So straight from the horses mouth the expectation is somewhere over 40. No mention of that being a “sometimes” situation.
https://www.glassdoor.com/FAQ/Tesla-Question-FAQ200052-E4312...
“Insane work hours for everyone, no overtime pay”
“Starting hourly pay is essentially poverty wage in the Bay Area and you only get overtime pay after 10 hours, not 8 hours like you would think.”
“Occasionally is fine, but 12 - 14 hours a day five days a week is not safe especially considering we work with electricity”
Too many quotes to that effect to list them all. Universally they say: overtime starts at 10 hours not eight, there is a lot of it (i didn’t see any comment citing overtime under 60 hours), and it’s mandatory.
There are 19 other numbers between 40 and 60. How do you reach the conclusion that since it's more than 40, it must necessarily be exactly 60 all the time for every employee?
> “Insane work hours for everyone, no overtime pay”
> you only get overtime pay after 10 hours, not 8 hours like you would think.
It sounds like these are salaried positions and they are not entitled to any overtime pay. If they were talking about hourly positions they would be getting time-and-half from 41 hours on, because that's the law. The fact that they're getting any overtime pay at all in a salaried position is more than most companies do and is beyond what is required by law.
From the Department of Labor website:
> Nonexempt workers must be paid overtime pay at a rate of not less than one and one-half times their regular rates of pay after 40 hours of work in a workweek.
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/compliance-assistance/handy...
So, there's no way the overtime after 10+ applies to non-exempt employees.
> It’s below the national median.
For household maybe, I think median individual median is much lower. I know many college educated individuals who say they’d kill for $60k. Most of them are probably in the $35k-$45k range working office positions that require education for some reason.
And remember - $63k a year was just a number that the comment I was replying to floated. $19/hour is $38k / year - you only get above that by sacrificing over 40 hours of your life every week to the company, and Tesla doesn't pay overtime until +10 hours.
...for salaried employees, where they aren't required to pay any overtime at all.
non-exempt employees have to be paid overtime after 40 hours by law.
In the USA: Fremont, California - Lathrop, California - Grand Rapids, Michigan - Storey County, Nevada - Buffalo, New York - Brooklyn Park, Minnesota - Elgin, Illinois - Austin, Texas
> This is less than we ask of factory workers
Implies it's maybe not so optional
Non-exempt workers have to get overtime after 40 hours.
Tesla on the other hand is rapidly scaling up and constantly changing its assembly line and was doing work out of actual tents until recently (probably now as well).
What works for BMW is unlikely to work for Tesla .
Even if Tesla was stable their manufacturing processes and tech DNA are very different from BMW or other major car makers, more in-house vertical integration and electric driver train vs traditional ecosystem and conventional combustion engine.
AFAIK, Tesla does do that at plants that produce both. There have been no announcements of other models for Berlin, but it'd be shocking if it stays only producing Y. There will b similar flexibility when that changes, possibly for new models.
No, even that, logically, does not make sense from an efficiency standpoint (assuming productivity is equal). Besides, if i were a factory worker i'd rather not have the boss over my shoulder
Because Geneva Convention also applies to weaker/smaller or defeated countries. For the rest it’s something on the paper; like human rights.
Why shouldn't there be a binding UN convention that enforces work from home where possible to save us from climate change?
Codifying the long-term destruction of your own nation into law for the sake of a single issue is a bad idea.
Why shouldn't there be a binding UN resolution that enforces public transport, and bans the production and use of cars to save us from climate change?
Or here's another even more contraversial one (again, let's not get distracted) why don't we have a UN resolution banning the personal ownership of firearms?
I'm hoping you can see from these why UN binding resolutions would be pointless - they would simply result in the ultimate dissolution of the UN. (uxit?)