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Elon Musk reveals his productivity rules in a letter he sent to Tesla employees

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21–30 of 133 posts

Re: Elon Musk reveals his productivity rules in a letter he sent to Tesla employees

#21

How does this increased productivity benefit the workers? Are they getting any personal upside for working harder, I wonder?

Productivity is about efficiency, not working harder. Getting more done in a normal work-week benefits everyone, and I'm sure all those employees would prefer a company that is in business to continue paying their salaries, bonuses and increasing their stock value.

Re: Elon Musk reveals his productivity rules in a letter he sent to Tesla employees

#22

How does this increased productivity benefit the workers? Are they getting any personal upside for working harder, I wonder?

Productivity is about efficiency, not working harder. Getting more done in a normal work-week benefits everyone, and I'm sure all those employees would prefer a company that is in business to continue paying their salaries, bonuses and increasing their stock value.

How does more get done in a normal workweek but by greater exertion of workers? This is literally factory work.

Sure, a few of the proposals are aimed at fixing sloppy management...but where do you think the extra cars come from?

Re: Elon Musk reveals his productivity rules in a letter he sent to Tesla employees

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Productivity is about efficiency, not working harder. Getting more done in a normal work-week benefits everyone, and I'm sure all those employees would prefer a company that is in business to continue paying their salaries, bonuses and increasing their stock value.

How does more get done in a normal workweek but by greater exertion of workers? This is literally factory work. Sure, a few of the proposals are aimed at fixing sloppy management...but where do you think the extra cars come from?

As already answered, you get more done by being more efficient with the given effort. It doesn't matter whether it's factory work or CEO level. Increasing productivity usually leads to a decrease in net effort by workers.

If you want an example, look at the epitome of production line efficiency that is the Toyota Production System: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Production_System

Re: Elon Musk reveals his productivity rules in a letter he sent to Tesla employees

#24
post #2

Quoting from the article: Btw, here are a few productivity recommendations: – Excessive meetings are the blight of big companies and almost always get worse over time. Please get of all large meetings, unless you’re certain they are providing value to the whole audience, in which case keep them very short. – Also get rid of frequent meetings, unless you are dealing with an extremely urgent matter. Meeting frequency s…

This is the exact opposite of the last corporate workplace I was in. Ceaseless meetings (programmers often spending the whole day away from their desk), pointless meetings, jargon, all decisions must be approved by the manager, all communication flows through the manager.

Re: Elon Musk reveals his productivity rules in a letter he sent to Tesla employees

#25
post #2

Quoting from the article: Btw, here are a few productivity recommendations: – Excessive meetings are the blight of big companies and almost always get worse over time. Please get of all large meetings, unless you’re certain they are providing value to the whole audience, in which case keep them very short. – Also get rid of frequent meetings, unless you are dealing with an extremely urgent matter. Meeting frequency s…

This is what code-quoted non-code HN text looks like on a narrow screen: http://imgur.com/LYwZWbT

Re: Elon Musk reveals his productivity rules in a letter he sent to Tesla employees

#26
post #4
post #2

Quoting from the article: Btw, here are a few productivity recommendations: – Excessive meetings are the blight of big companies and almost always get worse over time. Please get of all large meetings, unless you’re certain they are providing value to the whole audience, in which case keep them very short. – Also get rid of frequent meetings, unless you are dealing with an extremely urgent matter. Meeting frequency s…

The part about nonsense words is great (one of my pet peeves) but how do you accomplish that in practice? Everything has to have a name. For example, when you're developing Windows 8 what would you call Metro Mode? "Alternate touch optimized desktop UI" is a bit of a mouthful.

how many new UIs was the windows team developing at the time? shouldn't "the new UI" suffice?

Re: Elon Musk reveals his productivity rules in a letter he sent to Tesla employees

#27

I’m a fan of Elon as much as much as any other person but I think a lot of this only works for someone like Elon. Workaholism isn’t fun nor is it healthy. Maybe for single people it can work but if you give a damn about family or friends it will slowly destroy your life.

Which one of the recommendations given here do you think would entail workaholism?

Re: Elon Musk reveals his productivity rules in a letter he sent to Tesla employees

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Productivity is about efficiency, not working harder. Getting more done in a normal work-week benefits everyone, and I'm sure all those employees would prefer a company that is in business to continue paying their salaries, bonuses and increasing their stock value.

How does more get done in a normal workweek but by greater exertion of workers? This is literally factory work. Sure, a few of the proposals are aimed at fixing sloppy management...but where do you think the extra cars come from?

If you don't think any factory has processes that can be improved, I'd like to know which factories you've worked at, and are they hiring?

Re: Elon Musk reveals his productivity rules in a letter he sent to Tesla employees

#29
Doesn't sound like a great company to work for. Insane production targets coupled with 'by the way we're examining all costs under a microscope'.

The part about the midnight oil doesn't even make sense and seems to celebrate excessively hard work which I can't believe is a good thing - the studies I've seen seem to point to anything more than a 7 hour day being counter-productive.

Additionally some of the things he has written seem to smack of inexperience. Yeah hierarchies can be annoying but presumably they are there to serve a purpose (after all he set it up!).

Can't disagree with what he says about meetings though!

Re: Elon Musk reveals his productivity rules in a letter he sent to Tesla employees

#30
post #25
post #2

Quoting from the article: Btw, here are a few productivity recommendations: – Excessive meetings are the blight of big companies and almost always get worse over time. Please get of all large meetings, unless you’re certain they are providing value to the whole audience, in which case keep them very short. – Also get rid of frequent meetings, unless you are dealing with an extremely urgent matter. Meeting frequency s…

This is what code-quoted non-code HN text looks like on a narrow screen: http://imgur.com/LYwZWbT

Woops. Sorry about that. Don't know if there's a proper way of quoting text on HN.
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