71–80 of 133 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This is why everyone in countries like France, Germany, Sweden, etc. is unemployed.
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
One hopes he has read this, a classic slate star codex post on leadership: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1209794.html#cutid1 Sincere questions for Musk would be: How are you supporting your management team when you've asked their subordinates to bypass them with good ideas for exposure, leaving them only to provide risks and bad news their subordinates didn't want to bring forward? How do local team leaders take ris…
Can you also share the slatestarcodex link if that was a different post?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I worry that many of these well meaning deregulations may not scale indefinitely, both as the company grows and the working population evolves. I understand the premise, but many of the processes and red tape, while admittedly frustrating, probably did not arise out of desire for limitation. You have to put a lot of faith into your workforce to allow so much freedom in their operation.
If your company is running with scissors you need every individual to be a top performer who knows exactly what they are doing at all times. That is hard to guarantee when you start scaling up your headcount.
This is toxic tone. Waving a baseball bat at your team shows— and instills— a mutual lack of trust. Simply lay out the standards of behavior clearly and frequently, and outwardly show that you trust in the team's good faith and desire to adhere to them. Most of the time, if you have hired well, you'll be right.
Discuss individual shortcomings frankly, but do it behind closed doors. Dispatch corrections behind closed doors too. Simply calling out a mistake and making clear what's expected is often enough to incite a change in behavior. It's much healthier for culture, it's much better for retaining knowledge and talent, and it's much cheaper than hiring and firing with a hair trigger. If the person doesn't respond to corrections, or is acting in bad faith and not merely making a mistake, THEN you fire without hesitation. And you do it quickly, quietly, and without drama. Those kinds of cases are (ideally rare) pockets of toxicity, and they are the last kind of picture you want to paint in your team's mind of their workplace by broadcasting it across the company.
Examples:
BAD: "Any manager who attempts to enforce chain of command communication will soon find themselves working elsewhere."
BETTER: "If you find your management is stifiling the free flow of communication, either intentionally or inadvertantly, please escalate this upward and we will support you, and get your team pointed in the right direction."
What you're trying to do:
- communicate to employees not to put up with stifiling managers
- communicate to managers that stifling communication will make them look bad and get them reprimanded
- encourage problem areas to actually be identified and corrected
- make everyone feel good about all of the above so that the actually want partake in it
- make it socially safe to change course
BAD: "All contracting companies should consider the coming week to be a final opportunity to demonstrate excellence. Any that fail to meet the Tesla standard of excellence will have their contracts ended on Monday."
BETTER: "Most large supply chains are ripe with waste and overspending, often brought about by backwards incentives to inflate costs. At Tesla we do not put up with this, nor cynically accept it as inevitable. Avoiding this kind of behavior requires the Tesla standard of good faith and efficiency at all levels. If you suspect cost inflation or task bloat, please call it out immediately and escalate it. We'll be paying close attention to this over the next week."
What you're trying to do:
- dispel complacency about cost bloat and gouging
- reinforce the requirement / community standard to be honest and efficient
- make people feel comfortable / emboldened to fight bad-faith behavior
- let bad-faith contractors know you are watching them
- make everyone feel united by this goal, instead of mistrustful and cynical about each other
If you're walking down a road and you see a man angrily beating his horse, who's wrong? The man or the horse? Leaders that threaten fire and brimstone beyond the natural consequences of failure conjure the image of the horse-beater, for me. If you resort to flogging your labor, then the shortcoming is yours in failing to understand how to motivate and empathize; how to make the horse want to do the right thing on its own.
> 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.
And in the same email he says they’re going to ruthlessly cut costs. Is there some supply-chain advantage that arises from super tight tolerances that I’m not seeing? As far as I can tell this raises costs, and makes you more vulnerable to supply-chain disruption since fewer suppliers can keep up.
He offers no justification, other than some hypothetical obsessive Tesla owner being impressed.
[1] https://metalcutting.com/your-tight-tolerance-could-be-serio...
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?
Here's a simple example I learned from my dad, cutting firewood, that consistently surprises people. If you're not familiar with cutting firewood, it usually comes tree-length, and you've got to work it down to the length that fits in your stove with a chainsaw. You want it to all be the same length, within an inch or so, so that it stacks more consistently, and erring shorter is better than longer. Some people eyeball it. Some people take a tape and a crayon and mark every cut out. Some people even take a tape and measure every cut. But the easiest way is to cut a small pinky-thick stick the right length; then you go right along the pile with your measuring stick, cutting as you go. Simple, but it saves a ton of time and effort over the course of a day.
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…
Yes, communication should travel thru the shortest path, but it needs to go thru channels at some point, once the initial contact is made, otherwise the layers in the reporting structure are never aware of any extra hours spent reporting a problem. In this same vein, avoid manager-telephone-game when possible, but still keep everyone in the loop.
Common sense is great, provided it results in process being changed, not just ignored.
Sometimes jargon is a needed thing, if you have many many subsystems and objects in play, you may need jargon rather than a long form description of what the thing does "alternator" versus "alternating current power generation device".
Sometimes meetings are the last resort when all other communication mediums have failed, and often in that case a long meeting is the only possible solution, while regular meetings should never be considered beneficial, putting a kibosh on all meetings will do more harm than good.
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.