Who leaked the email ?.
Elon Musk reveals his productivity rules in a letter he sent to Tesla employees
111–120 of 133 posts
Re: Elon Musk reveals his productivity rules in a letter he sent to Tesla employees
#112Quoting 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…
Thanks. The entire text is also not completely visible in a resized browser, you have to horizontally scroll to read the entire text.
Re: Elon Musk reveals his productivity rules in a letter he sent to Tesla employees
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
OK, what reason do you have to suspect he is not doing the actual engineering work?
He has a BS in physics.
And decades of experience building up engineering firms from almost nothing. Perhaps I'm in a different environment than you, but I know more than one top-tier engineer that didn't even graduate high school let alone get a 4 year degree in physics.
Re: Elon Musk reveals his productivity rules in a letter he sent to Tesla employees
#114Were the rumors true that workers were unpaid for this "process upgrade" shutdown?
This is generally Standard Operating Procedure in a manufacturing facility. Semiconductor plants often shut down over July 4th or Christmas for maintenance. You were compelled to take vacation when that happened or you were on unpaid leave. In practice, where I worked, most managers generally worked it out informally if you didn't have enough vacation days.
Wow. So not only do workers not have a reasonable number of vacation days (say 20-25 for a new employee), they also arent free to choose when to use those they do get?
And this is in an industry (auto) that actually has organized labor in the US?
What did the auto unions actually accomplish in the last 3-4 decades?
Re: Elon Musk reveals his productivity rules in a letter he sent to Tesla employees
#115Earlier 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…
" Don’t use acronyms or nonsense words for objects, software or processes at Tesla. ” Autopilot, Supercharger, or even name of Tesla Inc. itself. Your number-one choice for AC electrical coils? And what do they say when discussing LIDAR sensors, for example? "We need to select a vendor for the laser-imaging-detection-and-ranging sensor". "Well Bob I propose the Bosch laser-imaging-detection-and-ranging sensor which r…
- Autopilot and supercharger are pretty easy to me (they do pretty much what they say)
- they didn't invent the LIDAR, and it is the widely used name for this device so if course they must use it. This recomandation just advise not creating new acronyms inside the company. (A better example would be the BFR but that's kind of a joke) Better to choose a small name than an acronym
Re: Elon Musk reveals his productivity rules in a letter he sent to Tesla employees
#116Doesn'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…
I guess it’s all a matter of taste. Looking at the current state of affairs I would love to be part of the work. A need to improve production greatly while cutting costs (for the products) means it’s a time where there is a lot of investment in the process. New machines, new flows and lots of things that need to be made. I have a background in the semiconductor industry and the times like these, the make or break periods where fantastic. Work turned into a sport and you and everyone else came together like an underdog team that had a shot at the World Cup! Sure working 70 hours a week and sometimes a critical 24 hour day isn’t healthy. But there was never any management pressure to do this, that was us taking it upon ourselves because try as they may, management couldn’t drag us away from the line.
Looking forwards Tesla will settle into a much gentler pace, and it will become the same old incremental production cycle plant mentality thats shared by so many. But right now it must be amazing to be on the floor, even if it is exhausting.
Re: Elon Musk reveals his productivity rules in a letter he sent to Tesla employees
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
He has a BS in physics.
And decades of experience building up engineering firms from almost nothing. Perhaps I'm in a different environment than you, but I know more than one top-tier engineer that didn't even graduate high school let alone get a 4 year degree in physics.
If someone has a computer science degree but never writes code are they a software engineer?
Re: Elon Musk reveals his productivity rules in a letter he sent to Tesla employees
#118Earlier 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…
" Don’t use acronyms or nonsense words for objects, software or processes at Tesla. ” Autopilot, Supercharger, or even name of Tesla Inc. itself. Your number-one choice for AC electrical coils? And what do they say when discussing LIDAR sensors, for example? "We need to select a vendor for the laser-imaging-detection-and-ranging sensor". "Well Bob I propose the Bosch laser-imaging-detection-and-ranging sensor which r…
Laser is an acronym as well...
> "light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation"
Acronyms have their place, and can be more descriptive than, say, project Glorfindel.
Re: Elon Musk reveals his productivity rules in a letter he sent to Tesla employees
#119Quoting 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…
> 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.
This is where ticketing systems come in handy. They both track the work performed as well as the time spent - many (Zendesk and Service Now at least) have a timer that starts when you open the ticket in the web client, and records that time whenever you submit an update. The mantra is "if it's not in a ticket, then it didn't happen".
Between a kanban/scrum planning system and the ticket system, your people managers should be drowning in data about what you're doing and how long it's taking. Zendesk has a full section of its site to analyze metrics, and at my last job individual engineers discussed their metrics daily.
This eliminates the need to CC your manager while obviating that whole communication. The hard part is keeping everyone in the system, and constantly pulling people back from email to tickets. Having a pretty web interface helps a lot.
Re: Elon Musk reveals his productivity rules in a letter he sent to Tesla employees
#120Earlier 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…
" Don’t use acronyms or nonsense words for objects, software or processes at Tesla. ” Autopilot, Supercharger, or even name of Tesla Inc. itself. Your number-one choice for AC electrical coils? And what do they say when discussing LIDAR sensors, for example? "We need to select a vendor for the laser-imaging-detection-and-ranging sensor". "Well Bob I propose the Bosch laser-imaging-detection-and-ranging sensor which r…
A bit pedantic, but Telsa isn't using Lidar.