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Comment by imgabe | Hacker News Reader

If you're designing a car, are you not ever going to go down to the production line to see how your design worked out?

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.

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I feel like you didn't read what they said. There's a ton of things in any large corporation that need to be handled that need software or corporate admin work. Inventory management, logistics, people management software, end user servicing management, Tesla.com, general IT work, HR work, etc. I could go on and on.

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.

Not sure what are you so angry about. All of these jobs were done remotely during pandemic and out of sudden they just can't. This has zero logic to it. And is all about someone being emotional control freak.

I'm not angry about anything.

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.

Would argue quite the opposite. Technology companies, TSLA standing out, have done exceptionally well. In fact having the pandemic as a tailwind instead showing they're able to adapt and capitalize on technology to be even further productive.

profit-wise maybe, but if you look at the massive global production shortages and supply chain issues, it’s pretty clear that the pandemic working situation was not the ideal way to produce things.

That's a pretty simplistic view of an extremely complex issue. For one, factories shutdown. This wasn't caused by people wanting to work remotely, but due to covid outbreaks in the factories and government mandates. Second, the supply issues were already starting pre-covid. It was clear we were heading into an IC supply crunch 3 months before Covid emerged in China.

those shortages and supply chain issues are because people make systems that are near peak efficiency, not peak robustness, and when you engineer for peak efficiency, it always means you're brittle in the face of unpredictable failures.

That things weren't worse is a sign that the world adapted to the new working situation very effectively.

The question is not "can these job be done remotely". The question is "can these job be done more efficiently remotely perpetually".

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.

> If you're designing a car, are you not ever going to go down to the production line to see how your design worked out?

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.

Cars also involve software, design, marketing materials. None of those things require physical presence any more than those jobs did when they were remote during the pandemic. Many of those roles were successfully performed remotely before and after the pandemic.

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.

Automotive engineering isn't a three-dudes-in-a-garage startup where "the shopfloor" calls "the design engineer" for "that part" because "there's a production limitation" and he needs to fix his design. It works nothing like that.

Elon from the very beginning wanted engineers to work as close to factory floor as possible. E.g. at SpaceX you can stand up from your cubicle and walk max couple of hundred of meters and have a look at the factory floor.

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.

From my experience (not as an automotive engineer, but as someone who did work with automotive engineers), it actually does work like that.

This super contrived example (which I'd bet even still isn't as frequent as you think) doesn't require 40 hours in office, which is also most likely not in the same physical location as an actual factory.

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.

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