171–180 of 251 posts
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> I think somebody needs to do something about this NDA situation, it’s getting out of control in SV Not just in SV, it's all over the world. IMHO the right of protection for whistleblowers should be made a basic human right, in order to protect people worldwide who are afraid to speak out.
The founding fathers should have written something about this right into the constitution...
Don't know about Tesla, but have heard horror stories about SpaceX here in LA. 60+ hour weeks, butts in seats, whole depts fired/walkouts, sweatshop conditions, etc. Some folks are still not aware that these practices lower productivity. shrug
Work hours are very long at SpaceX but they tell you that up front.
Don't know about Tesla, but have heard horror stories about SpaceX here in LA. 60+ hour weeks, butts in seats, whole depts fired/walkouts, sweatshop conditions, etc. Some folks are still not aware that these practices lower productivity. shrug
Worked at SpaceX in LA on software. It was generally quite pleasant but you do put in a lot of hours. No one asks you to work overtime or work extra hours - it’s just a fun environment and you like your coworkers so you stay at work longer than you should. Most people who were there longer than I was ended up finding a healthy work / life balance that they could sustain... I don’t think the new folks do this because…
Would love it if you could shed some more light on this point :)
Was it that you were using an old programming language or something? It's hard for me to believe that the space industry didn't present some pretty awesome opportunities to use your brain. Sometimes building CRUD apps with the latest X framework is just too damn easy.
The real problem for Tesla is that their destiny is probably to be the next BMW - a good midrange luxury car maker, about #12 in the world on volume. That would be fine except for the excessive market cap. Tesla's market cap exceeded GM's at one point. The stock has to come down a lot if Tesla ends up at BMW's scale. Even with Tesla's most optimistic production estimates, Tesla will make far fewer cars than BMW in th…
Tesla doesn't do well at the things a non-novelty luxury car maker needs to do well, and EVs are only luxury cars now due to novelty.
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Worked at SpaceX in LA on software. It was generally quite pleasant but you do put in a lot of hours. No one asks you to work overtime or work extra hours - it’s just a fun environment and you like your coworkers so you stay at work longer than you should. Most people who were there longer than I was ended up finding a healthy work / life balance that they could sustain... I don’t think the new folks do this because…
> I left because the space industry moves at quite a slow pace compared to the rest of the software world and I was tired of working on one small piece of software while the world was changing around me... Would love it if you could shed some more light on this point :) Was it that you were using an old programming language or something? It's hard for me to believe that the space industry didn't present some pretty a…
The real problem for Tesla is that their destiny is probably to be the next BMW - a good midrange luxury car maker, about #12 in the world on volume. That would be fine except for the excessive market cap. Tesla's market cap exceeded GM's at one point. The stock has to come down a lot if Tesla ends up at BMW's scale. Even with Tesla's most optimistic production estimates, Tesla will make far fewer cars than BMW in th…
The market cap is a bit of a mystery, but they've got some options for making money even if they stay around BMW levels in terms of auto production volume. There's no reason they can't compete well against in the automotive space against LG Chem, who makes batteries for cars like the Nissan Leaf and makes batteries, the entire powertrain, and the infotainment system for the Chevy Bolt. In the event their autonomous t…
BWM appears to be going all-in on 3D printing--which makes sense given their volumes. At practically every conference where non-hobby 3D printers appear, BMW is always a real customer of those companies.
To my mind, BMW is the most dangerous company to Tesla.
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Even in that situation, if you’re a paycheck-to-paycheck worker, how much boat-rocking can you endure? On some theoretical future date according to the law you can get back at your employer, great: in the meantime, maybe you got fired and now you can’t feed yourself? We’ve seen plenty of companies that shrug off large fines and such. Whatever the rules, it has to reach the point of being seriously unprofitable to dis…
Not to mention the further stigmatization that results from being a whistleblower- having your name in published sources associated with calling out an employer may impact how quickly you can find a new job. Future employers also like seeing $LARGE_CORP experience on a resume, where I've seen colleagues stay at a job they didn't like only for the prestige attached to this line item. For a worker without this safety n…
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Alabama produces a million cars a year, in factories that are actually high-tech unlike Tesla’s. You think they are clamoring to bring in an automaker struggling to produce a handful of cars with double the industry injury rate?
In a word, Yes. The median salary in Alabama is $41,657, these would be high paying jobs relatively speaking. The only upside is their stated unemployment rate is sitting around 3.5%.
> It was difficult to find employees to go on the record. Like a lot of tech companies in Silicon Valley, workers signed non-disclosure agreements. NDAs usually are put in place so workers don't share any trade secrets or proprietary technology. So some workers were scared to talk to us because of this NDA they sign for working at Tesla. Damn, so workers were afraid to speak up and spread the injury info because they…
NDA situation is getting out of control in the United States. Almost every employee at every company signs an NDA when they start working. Oftentimes NDAs and other employment documents (Non-Compete clauses etc) are chock full unenforceable information. Most people agree because there's no ability to negotiate these documents, because they don't understand the clauses or because they don't know they're unenforceable.
It doesn't matter if parts of a contract are unenforceable, because the rest of it still is, so you may as well put as much bullshit in and hope nobody notices.
In New Zealand, this is a big problem with rental contracts. Landlords and real estate agents will put a bunch of clauses that they know are unenforceable in the contract and hope you don't notice. Most people will think that they are enforceable though because they're in the contract. Usually I know better, but rather than bring it up with the agents at signing time, I've found the easiest thing to do is to just ignore the clauses, and when they try to enforce it, I tell them to pound sand.
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Yes but short interest is still dwarfed by traditional long positions. All the money wrapped up into long positions can also drive press.
Tesla has one of the largest communities of shorts, and a normal community of longs.