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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

#81

Post by Shivetya »

Aloha wrote: post #78
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…

I'd agree with most of this.. but.. 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…

I am not sure how widespread it is, but I have encountered far too many manager/directors who put forth meetings in order to boost their presence if not stoke their own egos. executives holding a company hostage effectively for 90 minute meetings so they can tell their direction, strategy, and more, and witnessed development staffs with far more time in meetings the producing deliverables.

is this widespread or just symptoms of top heavy companies? while I nod my head at most of what Musk relayed far too much seems to be just speaking to head nodding supporters. Many of know this, the question is how to communicate it to those who need to understand they are the issue

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

#82

Post by matte_black »

Mononokay wrote: post #31
Judgmentality wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He’s an engineer on paper, probably not in practice.

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

#83

Post by spyspy »

DerSaidin wrote: post #68

– Don’t use acronyms or nonsense words for objects, software or processes at Tesla. I like to minimize use pronouns like "it" or "that" in a technical discussion. Communication becomes so much clearer by expanding "it" into something more descriptive and explicit. Also minimize number of words, and complexity of words.

I notice this a lot in RFCs within my company. Teams will put out architectures for new systems that contain massive amounts of acronyms and jargon for the system they're building and/or replacing it's insanely frustrating. It doesn't help when the last system was named something completely arbitrary and is being replaced by a new system with an equally arbitrary new code name. ("Flywheel has served us well for years but due to limitations on the XCGA middleware we believe Project Kegerator is the future...")

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

#84

Post by ythn »

27182818284 wrote: post #72
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

Yes, I've been visiting HN for ten-ish years and yeah some love to the front-end would be good. I wonder if there is a fear to make any updates because any updates are seen as not keeping with the minimalistic roots. I hope not. I don't think anyone wants an extreme change, but letting the '>' character quote things a bit better would be a good change.

There are alternate front-ends that use HN's backend you can use. Such as:

https://vue-hn.now.sh/item/16893581

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

#85

Post by harrisi »

allthenews wrote: post #65
tyingq wrote: post #35

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.

This is a genuine question: is Tesla not a company that has already "scaled"? I don't know their employment numbers but in terms of product that is both used and known by the general population, they seem big enough to have already have these points tested in a scaled environment.

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

#86

Post by stan_rogers »

allthenews wrote: post #61
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

Every time! Even in landscape! On a tech central website! What gives? Is there some kind of weird technical limitation?

Not as such, no, but the rendering of HTML from that markup is nested in 
. The user agent is supposed to render it as the pre-formatted text it claims to be, complete with line breaks and returns as entered. It is meant for code, not for blockquotes.

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

#87

Post by colordrops »

matte_black wrote: post #74
allthenews wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agreed, the benefit of having some bureaucratic processes is that it makes them way more tolerant of low competency individuals within the system. There’s filters at many levels that prevent someone from fucking things up too badly. 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 scali…

Heavy bureaucracy also drives away creative highly talented individuals and also creates pockets for non-productive employees to thrive, so it's questionable whether the positives outweighs the negatives. Depends on the level of fault tolerance that a corporation must achieve for their goals.

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

#88

Post by colordrops »

matte_black wrote: post #82
Mononokay wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

He’s an engineer on paper, probably not in practice.

What evidence do you have of that?

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

#89

Post by Merad »

antris wrote: post #18
Judgmentality wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> it's really annoying how often we have to tell the CEO he can't do this Isn't it just another part of the job? Obviously a person doing the actual work is supposed to explain what is and isn't possible, no?

How many average workers are willing to push back when the CEO tells them to do something?

How many CEOs will respond well when an employee does push back against their directions?

There are good reasons that most companies don’t operate this way.

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

#90

Post by internetman55 »

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…

wow, i like these!
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