Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

themindsetapp.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 133 posts

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

#51

Post by guntars »

freedomfries wrote: post #41
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…

If you are working 7 hour work days, then I am coming for your company and for your job. It will happen sometime in the next 10 years but you will be unemployed and replaced by much more productive and engaged fellows.

Until the more productive and engaged fellows start questioning what exactly are they working overtime for or simply burn out, then they're replaced by fresher more productive fellows and the cycle continues. Best way to break it is to have balance from the beginning, not after you burn out a few times and form the company culture that supports it.

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

#52

Post by gregknicholson »

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…

> 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.

I like this. Crucially, it's not “ignore the rule”; it's “fix the rule”.

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

#53

Post by stormking »

freedomfries wrote: post #41
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…

If you are working 7 hour work days, then I am coming for your company and for your job. It will happen sometime in the next 10 years but you will be unemployed and replaced by much more productive and engaged fellows.

Yeah sure, another one of those who claim to "work" 80 hours per week ...

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

#54

Post by PhasmaFelis »

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.

There isn't. No one knows why.

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

#55

Post by maltalex »

notatoad wrote: post #26
bagacrap wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

“New” is a bad way to refer to something. It loses meaning once the new thing isn’t so new or has been replaced by something newer.

Say a document talks about “the new windows UI” and there were like 5 different versions of “new ui” during the lifetime of the project. Which version is the document talking about?

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

#57

Post by tehlike »

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.

Probably this is how he can manage this situation.

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

#58

Post by PhasmaFelis »

freedomfries wrote: post #41
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…

If you are working 7 hour work days, then I am coming for your company and for your job. It will happen sometime in the next 10 years but you will be unemployed and replaced by much more productive and engaged fellows.

No. They'll be replaced by people who still produce 7 hours of work a day, but take 12 hours to do it, because people like you think butts in chairs are the same thing as productivity.

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

#59

Post by gregknicholson »

simplicio wrote: post #10
bagacrap wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think pretty much every industry and field quickly develops it's own stock of acronyms, nicknames, jargon etc. This can feel alienating to "outsiders", which is why people don't like it, but I think its pretty necessary (and inevitable). If you're working with a set of concepts, processes, software everyday, developing a shorthand way of talking (and thinking) about them is a big timesaver both in terms of communic…

> If you're working with a set of concepts, processes, software everyday, developing a shorthand way of talking (and thinking) about them is a big timesaver both in terms of communication and mental effort.

For internal processes, this is fair enough. But anything that will be exposed to an end-user should be simple without shorthand.

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

#60

Post by gizmo686 »

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…

Its more than just the CEO (or other high ups), even lateral communication is not without cost.

As an engineer, my time is limited. I simply do not have time to immidietly deal with every problem that anyone wants dealt with.

The general rule we settled on where I work is to ask the relevant project manager first. If the project manager gives the okay, you can talk directly to the relevant engineer. Otherwise, your request will go on a list and be dealt with "at some point".

Of course, in an emergency, you can still go straight to the relevant person. And everything is always an emergency...

Post reply on HN