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

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

#31

Post by Mononokay »

Judgmentality wrote: post #5
mikevm wrote: 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…

Some of these I really like, and some of them are well-intentioned but seem disconnected from reality. - Communication should travel via the shortest path necessary to get the job done This sounds like a great idea, however it can lead to things like the CEO pinging engineers to fix problems he doesn't fully understand. I've seen this happen often, and it's really annoying how often we have to tell the CEO he can't d…

To be entirely fair, Musk is an engineer, so that in general wouldn't happen, I'd imagine.

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

#32

Post by sowbug »

angersock wrote: post #22
manigandham wrote: post #21

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?

Less rework. Moving shorter distances. Reordering steps to defer work until it can be done more cheaply. Batching similar operations to reduce tool changes.

I'm sure there are many more ways. Source: I made this up. I don't work in the auto industry.

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

#33

Post by mabbo »

> Our car needs to be designed and built with such accuracy and precision that, if an owner measures dimensions, panel gaps and flushness, and their measurements don’t match the Model 3 specs, it just means that their measuring tape is wrong.

It's cute lines like this that make the fanboys love Musk. Myself included.

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

#34

Post by yoshuaw »

tprice7 wrote: post #27
isuckatcoding wrote: post #15

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?

Just guessing here, but perhaps it might be the bit where it's claimed he works 100 hours a week?

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

#35

Post by tyingq »

mikevm wrote: 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…

Great excerpts. Reposting them as more hn-mobile friendly.

"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 should drop rapidly once the urgent matter is resolved.

– 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.

– Don’t use acronyms or nonsense words for objects, software or processes at Tesla. In general, anything that requires an explanation inhibits communication. We don’t want people to have to memorize a glossary just to function at Tesla.

– Communication should travel via the shortest path necessary to get the job done, not through the “chain of command”. Any manager who attempts to enforce chain of command communication will soon find themselves working elsewhere.

– A major source of issues is poor communication between depts. The way to solve this is allow free flow of information between all levels. If, in order to get something done between depts, an individual contributor has to talk to their manager, who talks to a director, who talks to a VP, who talks to another VP, who talks to a director, who talks to a manager, who talks to someone doing the actual work, then super dumb things will happen. It must be ok for people to talk directly and just make the right thing happen.

– 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. reply

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

#36

Post by mikevm »

minimaxir wrote: post #11

This is blogspam of Musk’s email from the original source: https://electrek.co/2018/04/17/tesla-model-3-production-goal...

I wouldn't mind if a moderator would replace the original link with the one you provided.

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

#37

Post by [deleted] »

presidente20 wrote: post #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 h…

[deleted]

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

#38

Post by Robotbeat »

dkasper wrote: post #12
wmeredith wrote: post #8

I really like the tips themselves. Though, I must admit I do get a chuckle out of taking productivity tips from someone notorious for working 80 hours a week. Not that my accomplishments hold a candle to his. It's just funny in some part of my brain.

CEO is often an 80 hour per week job during critical phases. Acting as CEO of two companies in only 80 hours per week is pretty impressive.

Like 4 companies, actually (although admittedly the other two are low effort compared to Tesla and SpaceX).

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

#39

Post by tprice7 »

yoshuaw wrote: post #34
tprice7 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Just guessing here, but perhaps it might be the bit where it's claimed he works 100 hours a week?

THat's not one of the recommendations he gives. That's not even part of the email itself.

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

#40

Post by sowbug »

mikevm wrote: post #30
sowbug wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Since we have this discussion every time a top-voted comment does this, and nobody has ever suggested a solution that I've seen, I don't think it can be done. Just throw a > or two in there and we'll figure it out.
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