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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

#121

Post by rinze »

tyingq wrote: post #120
dingaling wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" 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.

They won't use any tech that has acronyms.

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

#122

Post by sjwright »

germinalphrase wrote: post #106
sjwright wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes sense to me. A formalised quoting mechanism is a recipe for everyone quoting everyone else, resulting in 50-70% of the words on screen being redundant and pointless. This is par for the course in most other forums.

I'm sympathetic to what you're saying; however, quoting is still happening – just in a manner than leaves 50-70% of the text annoyingly difficult to read on mobile.

Absolutely. But by providing no formal mechanism, quoting is used extremely sparingly. Which is good.

(The mobile formatting issue wouldn't happen but for a few rare crazies who attempt to hijack the wrong syntax.)

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

#124

Post by vlehto »

neilk wrote: post #76
mabbo wrote: post #33

> 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.

This really didn’t make sense to me. Every 10x increase in precision surely causes a huge jump in price. I don’t know anything about mechanical engineering but this is one of those things that is true across disciplines. This blog seems to confirm that guess.[1] 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 no…

I know something about mechanical engineering and doing away with needlessly tight tolerances is one of the most efficient ways to cut costs.

If the cars are designed so that there is some genuine need or benefit from general extra tight tolerancing, then the issue is way way worse than merely tolerancing out of ignorance. In that case the design work is going to result in high workload in assembly in addition of high workload in fabrication.

I sincerely hope it was just a cheap marketing stunt aimed at consumers.

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

#125

Post by neoz »

tbabb wrote: post #75

Many good tips, but IMO the "...or else!" style threats are poor leadership. Examples: "All you contractors better shape up or you'll be fired on monday!" or "managers will be insta-fired if they enforce chain-of-command communication!" 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…

+1. Really well said!

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

#126

Post by colordrops »

matte_black wrote: post #117
colordrops wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Why are you under the presumption that he did no domain specific engineering at Tesla and SpaceX? And let's not go in circles and repeat your previous arguments please.

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

#127

Post by yaccz »

dingaling wrote: post #108
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…

" 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…

This article is missing context. Musk was talking about acronyms that are made up within company and are not really neccesary.

Read more eg. here https://gist.github.com/klaaspieter/12cd68f54bb71a3940eae5cd...

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

#128

Post by bsder »

alkonaut wrote: post #114
bsder wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> What did the auto unions actually accomplish in the last 3-4 decades?

Survival.

When you are the target of a very well-funded propaganda campaign to delegitimize your very existence, what do you expect?

People in the US are so stupid that they denigrate the very unions that stood in front of guns and bullets in order to get them the 40 hour work week, child labor laws, pensions, and health care to name just a few accomplishments.

It's beginning to turn (see the recent teacher walkouts--most of which are illegal in the eyes of the law, by the way), but it's very slow.

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

#129

Post by matte_black »

colordrops wrote: post #126
matte_black wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone has a computer science degree but never writes code are they a software engineer?

Why are you under the presumption that he did no domain specific engineering at Tesla and SpaceX? And let's not go in circles and repeat your previous arguments please.

lack of any specific examples?
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