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Tesla reviewing contractors, firing everyone not vouched for by an employee

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Re: Tesla reviewing contractors, firing everyone not vouched for by an employee

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wonder if that means it should be easily repairable? :)

Maybe, but that would violate the DMCA. :P

And good luck finding the proprietary parts. My friends motorcycle displays used encrypted handshakes to connect to the rest of the engine - ostensibly to prevent theft, but incidentally delivering lock-in.

Re: Tesla reviewing contractors, firing everyone not vouched for by an employee

#102
post #4

As a contractor myself, this sounds like a great idea. If there aren't multiple people at an organization that can vouch for you, there's a good chance you're dead weight - or at any rate, there are no checks in place to prevent you from becoming so.

My Dad liked to tell a story. The parts of the body were arguing about which was most important. The heart pumps the blood, the brain keeps everything working together, the lungs bring in air etc... Then the anus closed up!

Even if no one vouches for the butt hole in department C they can still be necessary. Something to keep in mind before making sweeping changes without regards to the details.

Re: Tesla reviewing contractors, firing everyone not vouched for by an employee

#103
post #88
post #31

The bigger concern I have is that it encourages extreme nepotism — people vouch for people from their schools and prior jobs, and so risks introducing systemic bias against people from different backgrounds. Obviously gender and race are heavily represented in this kind of thing, but even basic stuff like west coast vs east university nonsense can start happening.

It sounds to me like you are mixing the concepts of trust , accountability , tribalism and pathological cronyism . Personal vouching for other people generally is the best guarantee for performance in absence of better criteria. Trust is not a bad thing. Trust does not alone degrade accountability . But you need to have a second accountability mechanism in place. Trust, but observe is the classical zen guidance into…

No you’re missing the point. It isn’t “trust is bad” it is that trust necessarily excludes people from different backgrounds.

If a bunch of your engineers (or whatever) went to Stanford, they people they trust are also much more likely to be from Stanford, because those are the people that they know. The same holds for any university.

Then as time goes by the organisation becomes increasingly dominated by Stanford(or whichever) because the follow on hires also recommend people that they know — eg Stanford and the likes.

Now you have ensured that if someone cannot - for any reason - get into one of the feeder supplies, typically because going to those colleges requires a huge amount of money, or they’re super prestigious (the fancy UCs say) which have strong correlation to wealth (if you’re poor you can’t support the costs involved in getting a successful application).

So now you end up where large groups of people, for reasons outside of their control, and irrespective of talent, cannot get a job at your company.

At no point does anyone say “I don’t trust X”, it is simply the requirement that you have to /know/ someone to get a job there. Even if people are not trying to be assholes it is required nepotism. Even if you’re trying not to be biased, your hiring pool has already shrunk to match the backgrounds of your existing engineers.

If you want you could probably make a dumbass simulation of this, and I suspect if you start with X colours it will devolve to a small number fairly quickly.

Re: Tesla reviewing contractors, firing everyone not vouched for by an employee

#104
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In terms of driving experience, most Ford cars I've driven (Contour, Focus, and Taurus, probably all from early 2000s; they are probably better now) handle like boats; turning radius comparable to an oil tanker, unresponsive brakes and gas, etc. So there are tradeoffs among all makes and models within those makes.

All the things you mentioned are design decisions not build quality related.

This is exactly what I've meant.

Ford doesn't compete with Land Rover, Mercedes and BMWs but deliver a good value-for-money nonetheless. Compare that to a Cadillac Escalade from GM: Worse quality than a Ford, priced at Mercedes level.

Re: Tesla reviewing contractors, firing everyone not vouched for by an employee

#105
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, a startup founder seeing a problem and having a clumsy, heavy handed, poorly thought out reaction is super refreshing. Hadn't been this refreshed since like, Friday.

you know he founded PayPal, right? Which sold to eBay for $1.5b His first company was acquired by Compaq for almost half a billion. He’s listed by Forbes as one of the top 25 most powerful people on earth. Tesla is a 15 year old company. I feel like “startup founder” should not the operating phrase here.

Not to diminish his achievements but...

> you know he founded PayPal, right?

Confinity (Levchin, Thiel, Nosek, no Musk) launched PayPal in late 1999. X.com (founded by Musk) merged with Confinity in March 2000. In no way can Musk be considered a "founder" of PayPal.

> His first company was acquired by Compaq for almost half a billion.

Zip2? $340M. Nowhere near half a billion and that was in 1999 at the height of the ridiculous tech bubble.

The man's done a lot of stuff - there's no need to embellish them.

Re: Tesla reviewing contractors, firing everyone not vouched for by an employee

#106
post #103
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds to me like you are mixing the concepts of trust , accountability , tribalism and pathological cronyism . Personal vouching for other people generally is the best guarantee for performance in absence of better criteria. Trust is not a bad thing. Trust does not alone degrade accountability . But you need to have a second accountability mechanism in place. Trust, but observe is the classical zen guidance into…

No you’re missing the point. It isn’t “trust is bad” it is that trust necessarily excludes people from different backgrounds. If a bunch of your engineers (or whatever) went to Stanford, they people they trust are also much more likely to be from Stanford, because those are the people that they know. The same holds for any university. Then as time goes by the organisation becomes increasingly dominated by Stanford(or…

I don't really understand the argument that employers should recruit absolutely fairly. Humans are always biased. If there was some AI based solution that would deal jobs absolutely fairly it would negate this, but there isn't, so the only alternative to smart human based hiring is dumb bureaucracy based one.

The large scale discriminatory criteria of gender, race and age should be accounted for but beyond those constraining who you should vouch for sound extremely constraining.

I understand the argument, and I think the effect you suggest is plausible - I'm not just convinced it's such an effect that could or should be accounted for (mainly because I have no idea what process beyond blind bureaucracy could do this).

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