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Comment by lapcat | Hacker News Reader

Remember when Marissa Mayer eliminated WFH at Yahoo?

Seemed to work out well for them.

Do you really think Yahoo would have avoided its fate if it had continued allowing WFH?

I don't think it was a good decision, but Yahoo had/has way more issues with its business than whether or not it allows employees to WFH.

No, but it's one of those decisions that most normal people could easily recognize as a bad decision. It clearly didn't have any positive impact on the company and most likely had a negative impact. Just a CEO doing pure nonsense, causing a huge impact to the company based on ego over data. As opposed to making actual positive decisions. There was no reason for yahoo to fail other than a huge series of poor leadership decisions.

Yahoo is an internet company. Tesla makes cars.

Even for IT workers, I guess that sometimes you need to test on the actual hardware, and the factory is where most things happen.

I am not saying that working from home is impossible, or that banning it is a good thing, but you can't really compare Yahoo and Tesla.

Those producing cars in the factory have never worked from home. The discussion is only about R&D, legal, finance whatever. And most of those don't differ significantly between Yahoo or Tesla.

It's an incredibly unpopular view on HN, but I don't think we can categorically conclude yet that WFH is always equally good as working in-person for all white-collar jobs that have good prerequisites for WFH.

For me personally, the train has left the station and I would not expect to ever consider a non-WFH job again in my career.

But that's a completely different question than asking whether companies that require physical attendance can in some cases out-compete those that don't. I think we have a tendency to project our wishes onto this debate, and not make an honest attempt at figuring out the truth.

Thanks for the intellectual honesty, it seems to be a rare thing in the WFH discussion.

Actually, I would be surprised if anyone thinks, that WFH always beats working in an office. But that doesn't mean, that there are not a ton of jobs where it does, or just part time, even if the job requires a lot of on-site presence.

But a company shouldn't have to mandate in-office work permanentely and for all. It should be obvious from the job profile and the working conditions, when it is advantageous to be in the office rather than at home.

A measurable amount of Tesla’s profit margin comes from pre-selling a $10,000 software package that does not yet exist.

Is it really the case? Surely the development of this software package has its own very significant expenses, considering how much effort such a thing must take. What exactly are the annual revenue from selling this package and the expenses spent on working on it?

Depend on which profit margin you’re using, but gross profit margin is revenue from a sale compared to COGS and wouldn’t include R&D

My point was, if the company is getting $10k extra per sale but actually for example spending a total of $12k per sale, then arguing with these sales seems pointless if they're actually worsening the company's situation. At this point it seems far from certain that this is a net benefit for the company, other than perhaps as an investment in its future (but long-term investments in your future don't prop up your current profits).

> but long-term investments in your future don't prop up your current profits

This is exactly why gross profit margin typically excludes R&D, because the measure is usually used to see “is this business profitable on a per-unit basis”. That is, would you make profit if you decided to stop the long term investment.

The net gain from investing the car buyers money instead of investors/banks money must add up...

I don't think that's the case; they do an accounting thing where they store the money and don't register all of it as profits until they deliver a set of benchmark features.

So some of it is recognized as profits right away because the car drives into a tree autonomously in a parking lot, or grinds the wheels against a curb when asked to self park, or when it slams on the brakes randomly when going under an overpass while the lane keeping cruise control is enabled. Each new feature allows them to claim more of that $10k as profits, but they still haven't gotten their FSD delivered out of beta so they don't get all of it.

I really like my tesla, BTW. It doesn't quite live up to the promises but it is quite lovely for everything I use it for.

If you seriously believe this I have a bridge to sell you LOL. Elon has a history of shilling FSD and FSD payments at let’s say… opportune times in history when Tesla was at risk of running out of runway.

I'm not sure what you mean by "runway" in this context. I think you may be working off of old memes - Tesla has been profitable since 2020.

2020 was 2 years ago.. history older than 2 years ago is not "old" in any sense of the word, and if it was.. does that matter?

Do Tesla office workers work at the same place as factory workers? I guess it's possible but it feels pretty unlikely.

If someone in software dev is in an office at a different address from the factory I don't see how Tesla having a factory is relevant.

Working every single minute at the factory regardless of role also seems more like dogma than anything actually based in facts. It's the (cargo) cult of work rather than wanting productive employees.

Maybe a software company should have 1/5 days in office (for meetings/dicussions/onboarding/...) while a manufacturing company might need 4/5 days for desk workers to be on site. But to say 40h of 40h should be at a desk doesn't seem like a sensible treshold.

Right now my time is 6PM and I'm at my office desk. Because I'm home. Granted, I'm writing on HN waiting for some tests, but if I had been at my office, I would have taken a 2h lunch and left at 2 or 3 this afternoon ...

I feel like someone can eliminate WFH AND have it not be intended as a "soft layoff".

Whatever Yahoo's issues were they were going on for a LONG time. Even when they HAD WFH...

Wasn't it kind of the same thing in all the likelyhood? Their troubles became apparent shortly after, they were likely trying to get rid of employees people without making layoffs apparent.

It was proven through data that most people at yahoo that were “working from home” weren’t working. It was indisputable.

I keep hearing references to this study that precipitated the famous “no more WFH Fridays” decision but I can’t actually seem to find it. Do you have a link?

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