"... working alongside them. If I had not done that, SpaceX would long ago have gone bankrupt." Wrote Elon Musk to SpaceX employees, quoted in "Elon Musk to Workers: Spend 40 Hours in the Office, or Else/In emails to workers at SpaceX and Tesla, Mr. Musk said they were required to spend a minimum of 40 hours a week in the office" (NYT).
Annie Dean, the head of distributed work for Atlassian, an Australian software company, [said] “This mind-set is regressive and discounts the last two years of collaborative, digital-first work”....
It is unclear if Mr. Musk will adhere to his own rules of spending 40 hours a week in Tesla’s and SpaceX’s offices. He is rarely in the office and often travels, said two people who have worked with him and who spoke on the condition of anonymity....
From the comments at the NYT: "I’m always amused when people describe non-local work as 'phoning it in' and 'not real work.' It’s about as amusing as Musk — who has no experience in manufacturing — claiming that his micromanagement on the factory floor is why his companies didn’t go bust. Plenty of automakers support full time remote work now; they’ll happily poach Tesla’s most capable people."
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51 comments:
So Annie Dean, who nobody has ever heard of, knows more than Elon Musk, richest man in history, how better to run a company.
Sure...
“This mind-set is regressive and discounts the last two years of collaborative, digital-first work”....
Why isn't the WFH mindset racist, as it primarily benefits white people?
The Toyota Method has been well established for many years and imitated by other industries. It doesn't require 40 hours a week. Just that the senior executives know what is going on in the shop floor. I doubt many NY Times readers know anything about manufacturing.
Unimaginable, having to work 40 hrs, 5 days a week in a place of business.
What next, paying tuition for schooling?
So that commenter thinks that autos can be build from home and not a factory floor?
The corrupt a-hole left are furious Musk left the corrupt leftwing plantation. the knives are out.
First, they came for Trump. NOW, they come for Musk. And throughout, the male, female, and youngest victims of sociopolitical machinations. The braying will not stop until people... persons take a knee, beg, good boy.
The first African-American...
You can’t run a manufacturing plant from home. My clients are heavy industrial manufacturers - they’re corporate offices went hybrid since covid. It’s causing major rifts with the plant workforce who view their executives sitting at home while the workers bust their butts. Musk isn’t wrong on this. And I’m guessing this is an opportunity for him to get rid of some poor performers without a bunch of lawsuits.
I understand the lure of remote work, but I think Musk gets-it.
There's a lot of information that passes over the cubicle walls especially in an engineering organization.
I've worked at home since 1987 but I was doing solo software in collaboration with some smart math or physics guy via email. No software design and review crap. Typical week was probably 100 hours, but then it was a hobby too.
I don't understand the anti-Musk people, things like "no experience in manufacturing". Musk has built the most successful space launch company, which has superseded NASA for space access; an electric car company whose cars are generally viewed as the most prestigious car of that type you can get; a satellite internet network that is already operational, sufficiently robust to be used in a literal warzone, and promises to bring high speed internet to rural areas out of reach of conventional methods. On top of that, he has some other more speculative ventures.
He's a strange person, but the people who think he doesn't know what he's doing are probably underestimating him.
That commenter couldn't be more wrong. Leadership showing up on the factory floor on a regulator is so important in a manufacturing plant. Those kinds of leaders typically like making stuff other than just money. The worst corporate top level managers really only care about making money and keeping the stock price high. If they can do that without making any products they would prefer it. Management by metrics is what they do and it's just terrible if you like and care about making stuff.
Musk is innovative and successful because he enjoys and is interesting is making stuff rather than money. He knows the money will be there if he keeps his focus on the fun part.
This mind-set is regressive and discounts the last two years of collaborative, digital-first work
BUT, what IF; he wants GOOD work? Not just digital-fist work?
Plenty of automakers support full time remote work now; they’ll happily poach Tesla’s most capable people
His Most Capable people? The ones that work at least 40 hours a week? Or the ones that phone it in?
Oh! OH! i Know! I KNOW!! The ones that are REALLY REALLY GOOD, at coordinating Zoom meetings!
Serious Question followup
IF you don't have to be 'in the office, at least 40 hours a week'.. WHY should you be in the States?
Plenty of Asians are More than willing to work remotely.. And for Far Less
oh! oh!! Super serious Follow up follow up question!
HOW do you go about organizing a labor union.. If the workers are in China? Or India? Or Mars?
I’m always amused when I see people of lesser accomplishments critiquing those of historic accomplishments. I don’t care about electric cars but Musk’s innovations in space travel and satellites is ground breaking.
I noticed the lack of upper management on the factory floor fifty years ago and put it on my checklist of why US manufacturing was in decline. Thirty years ago I added garbage education to the list. Having management visit, talk to workers, and seeing what is going on is a big plus. Management isn't all about vision, shuffling paper, sales, and moving money around. Those are all important, but at some point efficiently manufacturing a quality product matters.
Heh. So many people know all about everything. But only one person built Tesla and SpaceX.
This really is a complex issue that doesn't refine well to simple meme's or generalized rebuttals. For instance, I don't believe the commenter knows a thing about manufacturing if be believes it occurs with people working remotely. Sales, Marketing, even parts of Engineering may be remote, but the manufacturing, even a heavily robotic production train, runs because people are the factory floor. On the other hand, Musk will lose a great deal of talent by holding his stance and it does ignore the general economy that has shown production gains from remote work (well gains in mid to late 2020, but where those gains sustained? I don't think so, but what to blame? A new Administration? Or reality that remote only works for a short time?). Finally, many people in Aerospace, and that's the industry Musk wants to be in, know the story of Kelly Johnson and the Skunk Works. Their success was Johnson's push to put Engineering as close to the manufacturing production line as possible.
However, on the simple side, as a worker that prefers to work from home dealing with a large company trying to get people back in the office; I think Musk has the right approach. I was hired expecting to be where my employer wanted me 40 hours a week, which was mostly in the office or at least at a vendor or partner location. Working from home was allowed, but not to be anticipated as a regular activity. Employers using 60/40 work rules and other half measures are not finding success, see Apple as an example. If an employer wants employees back in the office, then follow Musk's clear stance.
If you see a contradiction between my preference and my advice; it is because while I'm an experienced professional with knowledge gained from OJT and a good work ethic, I may be more productive from home, but I recognize that the replacement workforce working from home won't get OJT at home and may not develop a good work ethic. You think we have inflation and supply chain problems now, wait a generation and see what we have from a stay at home workforce. We might have great YouTube/Instagram content running on good software, but I haven't seen the farm that's fully automated and managed by remote employees, and the family farms are nearly gone.
Talk is cheap. If Musk's critics don't like the way he runs Tesla, they should buy it or start their own space company.
This is similar to another article I just read in which some nobody was trying to rake Bradley Cooper (a non-Jew) over the coals for wearing a nose prosthesis to play Leonard Bernstein in a movie, or indeed for not hiring some unknown actor who is authentically Jewish to play that lead role. To which I say: Make your own damn movie about Leonard Bernstein and cast whomever you want!
What folks don’t get is that unlike Facebook or Twitter, Tesla and SpaceX make real, physical products. So thousands of employees HAVE to be in the factories to do that. So why should their manager be exempt?
This is about fairness and equality.
Yes software companies and auto manufacturing are very similar, she’s do they find these quotes. I have a friend who is c-suite at a large cable company, they have been back in the office more often than not for more than a year. The reason is that the blue collar guys all have to show up so management should too. Smart move
“No experience in manufacturing?” Wow.
"who has no experience in manufacturing"
Wait, what? He built two companies that manufacture a lot of stuff and he has "no experience"?
Musk gambles that people who want to play on a team will come to Tesla and pajama-boy engineers will flock to GM et al.
Althouse! Might there also be a gendered subtext, if women more than men want to stay home?
Working from home has been wonderful for my husband these past two years... but when you work from home (or from wherever other than a communal-work setting) you indubitably miss out on serendipitous synergies and opportunities for collaboration. You can't "run into" someone via DM.
Yes, you can still experience unexpected synergy - with the person you happen to be talking with about other matters. But not with the person who was walking past when you were talking with the person you're talking with.
It's been my informal observation, as I've watched my husband and my mid-20s son each start new jobs during COVID, that my husband has an easier time; he has a career's worth of experience to draw on already.
My son, OTOH, is not being mentored. He's not meeting coworkers for lunch, or networking. There are no happy accidents for him. In his brief career so far, he's mostly worked from his apartment, and now, as his office is dipping a toe into returning to in-person work, he's kind of irritated that his immediate supervisor likes to be in the office more than the currently mandated 2 days a week, since that implies that he ought to be there too, so he has to commute more often - but I'm glad.
Perhaps Mr. Musk's lack of manufacturing experience is the very reason for his success. He and his corporation are not weighed down by the B.S. that has caused some U.S. auto manufacturers to fluctuate between mediocrity and failure for so long.
Except you can't put the wheels on the car remotely.
"It is unclear if Mr. Musk will adhere to his own rules of spending 40 hours a week in Tesla’s and SpaceX’s offices."
What idiot thought this was worth publishing? No one who has held a real job works less when traveling for it.
"I’m always amused when people describe non-local work as 'phoning it in' and 'not real work.' It’s about as amusing as Musk — who has no experience in manufacturing — claiming that his micromanagement on the factory floor is why his companies didn’t go bust. Plenty of automakers support full time remote work now; they’ll happily poach Tesla’s most capable people."
So far the only major auto manufacturers not to declare bankruptcy are Ford and Tesla. Ford got a massive bailout in the 2008 aftermath. If Musk had acted like a GM or Chrysler executive Tesla would have needed a bailout or gone under. With hands on leadership they're here and growing.
"Annie Dean, the head of distributed work for Atlassian, an Australian software company, [said] “This mind-set is regressive and discounts the last two years of collaborative, digital-first work"
I've been working remotely since 2018. It has cost me a lot in the way of opportunity. I'm happy with where I'm at and what I'm doing so that's okay. I don't want to be a director. We're a limited Atlassian customer for the next few months. I wonder if this attitude is why their services don't stack up and are being transferred to another vendor. .
Deep thoughts from a NYT reader:
It’s about as amusing as Musk — who has no experience in manufacturing
In the past 100 years there have been zero successful new car manufacturing companies.
Henry Kaiser failed and had LOTS of manufacturing experience as well as LOTS of experience running successful companies. The Kaiser failed in a couple years.
John DeLorean had LOTS of experience in manufacturing and running a car company. The DeLorean failed in a couple years.
General Motors Corporation started a new company, Saturn, that failed in a few yearsw though GM kept it on life support long after it was clinically dead.
GM couldn't even keep successful brands like Pontiac and Oldsmobile alive.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands of car brands have disappeared over the past 100 years.
Yet, Elon, who has no experience in manufacturing has been able to succeed.
Elon, who has no experience in manufacturing, was able to start a spaceship manufacturing company that appears to be the most successful space venture ever.
Elon, who has no experience in manufacturing, was able to start a satellite internet company and is manufacturing hundreds of satellites a month.
The Boring Company seems to do OK though I don't know much about it and it might not be "manufacturing company".
He also makes flamethrowers.
But yeah, he has no experience in manufacturing and obviously doesn't know what he is doing.
And can we know the name of the NYT commenter and what she (he?) has accomplished in her life and what qualifies her (him?) to give Elon advice?
Every time I think the NYT and its readers can't get any stupider, they do something like this. It is hard to get stupider than this but I fully expect someone to top this.
John LGKTQ Henry
If anyone could succeed based on their experience
— claiming that his micromanagement on the factory floor is why his companies didn’t go bust. Plenty of automakers support full time remote work now; they’ll happily poach Tesla’s most capable people."
Elon Musk spends a lot of time on the manufacturing floor and the NYT deep thinker calls it micromanagement.
I suppose it could be. He could be out there telling everyone how to do their job.
OTOH, he could be out there observing, talking to people, asking them what they need to do their job better, making sure they have the resources they need, running interference between the people on the line and micromanaging supervisors and managers and 100 other things. None of which are what I think of as "micromanaging"
I've been in 1000's of manufacturing plants over the years in all industries. The most successful ones are those where the boss comes down on the floor and learns what is really going on.
Quantitative reports and meetings are all well and good and necessary. Overdone in a lot of plants but necessary. But they are no substitute for "Management By Walking Around"
Or as Yogi Berra said "You can see a lot by just looking around"
People hire me at fees that would make a Philadelphia lawyer blush to walk around on their plant floors, see what is being done right and what could be done better. Most of this I learn by just talking (and listening) to people.
Just what a good manager should be doing. (Shhh.... don't tell them. You will destroy my practice)
John LGKTQ Henry
Well, who knows what will happen to Tesla, SpaceX, or Ford?
I do know that good leaders go and see what the troops are doing. I also know that I have never personally been on a Zoom call where I wasn't playing solitaire off to the side. We know what Jeffrey Toobin pulled.
Morale, leadership, fraud prevention, passion for the enterprise--they all are bolstered by showing up.
The world belongs to those who show up.
Annie Dean, the head of distributed work for Atlassian, an Australian software company, [said] “This mind-set is regressive and discounts the last two years of collaborative, digital-first work”....
I'm sorry, but any reporter who quotes someone from Atlassian on quality service after this is just unbelievably full of shit.
Ms Dean, it must be said, possesses a set of balls that would put a bull moose's to shame to show up in public and make a statement like this. But, oh no, Ms Dean, remote work had NOTHING, I mean, absolutely nothing to do with Atlassian monumental fuck-up.
Elon Musk has "no experience in manufacturing". There are a lot of Teslas on the road that disprove that statemetn.
There's a lot of stuff written by people who have never been on a factory floor. For a while back in the 1980s I was counsel for a division of a Fortune 50 company that had acquired a number of small manufacturing operations. Sone of the operations did business in the Middle East and we did quarterly audits to ensure compliance with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and the anti Arab Boycott of Israel laws. As part of that I'd have paralegals do a document review at the remote locations. The paralegals were mostly recent college graduates. They were bright (many of them went on to law school). But they were resolutely upper middle class in background, and none of them had any idea that the world's work was not solely done by people sitting behind a desk. I had a rule that the paralegals had to go out on the factory or shop floor when they made these visits. When they came back they had to tell me what they saw--and also tell me if they'd seen a safety violation of any sort. (Unguarded machinery can be hazardous to hands, arms and legs).
The reason for the rule? I didn't expect that they'd catch any safety violations (although I went out of the factory floors at every visit I made), I wanted them to know that the world's work is done in many ways. Those Deplorables get their hands dirty and white collar kids (along with those sneering commenters at the New York Times) really never see them.
Direct human interaction is more efficient for the company and psychologically healthy for the employees.
"If I had not done that, SpaceX would long ago have gone bankrupt."
Come off it, Elon. SpaceX produces waste. Period. SpaceX exists to shoot valuable resources into outer space. Its only competition is NASA, an organization so incompetent it can't even waste valuable resources efficiently.
Working from how is quite good for task oriented jobs - which, if that's the case, can be automated away, or framed out to the lowest bidder.
People seem to perceive too much value in how much they are worth if they can work from home.
Regarding the Tesla/Musk comment, for all the people that actually do the leg work, neither Tesla or SpaceX would exist without Musk. His 'value' isn't about doing the mundane tasks that can be 'phoned in'.
I also believe that EVs would be nowhere near a viable product without Elon Musk. He has upset not only the EV market (for the good) but the Auto market as a whole because of his going against the grain and not doing what the market wants, but doing what the customer needs.
Anyone who is questioning Musk's work ethic is being purposefully ignorant or lying.
By this point, Musk has a great deal of experience 8n manufacturing.
There are a LOT of bad managers in the world who insist in having their employees around all the time. The ability to assign goals, objectives, and measurements of performance is a general weakness. It was made worse by all remote work.
A good manager can set expectations and completion times, and adjust to the employee's capability, then leave them alone for them to get the work done. If the manager feels they can do it by being on their own for hours, days or weeks, that is their decision.
The manager should be expected to perform similarly for their manager.
There are too many job in the modern corporation that provide no value, but many of those exist due to outside influences.
I have written before, and will no doubt write it again after today:
If your job really can be done from home, it can be done from Mumbai at 1/4 to 1/10 of the cost of paying you.
To prove that Musk has manufacturing experience you might, commenter, observe the odd Tesla on the roads. The presence of the boss motivates.
Young people entering the workforce via Zoom aren’t going out with the boss for beers nor learning what one learns through osmosis in a busy office. And if the boss is in three days a week try four. If he gets in at 8 try 7:30. If he leaves at 6 work til 7. This is really not hard.
Let's all explain how we know more about business than the richest man in the world and more about manufacturing than the guy who makes rockets and mass-production hypercars.
I'm an accountant. In my last job, most of the people who could work from home did when the pandemic started. Some in sales had been doing so already. Since our billing process was not paperless, I kept going in to work. Soon it became clear that there had been no real plan for employees working from home to maintain all their responsibilities, and the various things they could have done in the office were offloaded onto other departments, Accounting taking a lot of the responsibilities of salespeople and project managers.
In my opinion, those who worked from home were allowed to do so by the people who showed up every day, from the skilled labor who actually created the product to the accountants who filled in the blanks those at home couldn't do.
Also, I remember a young woman was hired just as the pandemic started. She worked in the office for a couple of weeks, then immediately started working from home. I saw her a handful of times in the next two years. It became really hard to actually think of her as a coworker. She was just someone processing jobs somewhere.
That's not really the case at my new job. I think it's because I'm walking into a new milieu after the pandemic has abated, and the responsibilities of those working from home are now thoroughly defined, as are mine. That said, I just met two coworkers who primarily work from home today after being there almost a month. They seem nice, and I'm sure they feel more efficient not coming in, but really thinking of them as comrades? Not really.
Finally, the person most responsible for training me had been working from home for three years. She comes in two days a week to work with me. Frankly, it's not enough. She's a good teacher, but I could use the in-person time, even though I'm picking up the job quickly.
I meant this to be more fiery, I guess. But I think I feel more forlorn. Companies can talk about teamwork and collaboration, but I barely feel like people working from home are on my team. They seem more like hired guns who happen to be on the health plan to me.
Come off it, Elon. SpaceX produces waste. Period. SpaceX exists to shoot valuable resources into outer space. Its only competition is NASA, an organization so incompetent it can't even waste valuable resources efficiently.
Now that (not what SpaceX does) is rubbish — as well as displaying a huge parochialism. Yes, SpaceX competes with NASA — which it has left completely in the dust in that regard — but SpaceX also competes with the Europeans and the Russians, among others (such as Indians, et al.). Until fairly recently Russia has been a formidable competitor in the space launch business, and the Europeans (ESA) too. But in the last half dozen years SpaceX — by means of its economical pricing — has basically totally destroyed Russia as a competitor in that industry. Now SpaceX is proceeding to do likewise to the European space industry.
Nor are these worldwide (heretofore dominating) competitors reacting at all vigorously enough to hope to catch up to SpaceX — at best they're taking desultory measures to begin (many years in the future) to equal SpaceX's workhorse, the mostly reusable Falcon 9 rocket. No major space player is seeking to match SpaceX's newest, most revolutionary technological generation now under development known as Starship.
Getting back to NASA, after spending tens of billions of dollars and more then 2 decades of time, NASA's top of the line SLS rocket system approaches its maiden flight — a system which NASA's inspector general has revealed will cost more than $4 billion (with a ‘b’) per flight — and it'll fly (if it ever does) only once a year at most.
Meanwhile, SpaceX's new Starship is roughly equivalent in (huge) launch capability, but is designed to be completely reusable as well as fly very frequently — perhaps daily, certainly weekly — at a cost of an estimated $2 million per flight. That's a cost factor per launch 2,000 times less than SLS's extraordinary price tag.
"If your job really can be done from home, it can be done from Mumbai at 1/4 to 1/10 of the cost of paying you."
Yeah, they thought of that already. But I don't want to move to Mumbai.
"Companies can talk about teamwork and collaboration, but I barely feel like people working from home are on my team. They seem more like hired guns who happen to be on the health plan to me."
You're not supposed to feel like they are on your team. You are supposed to be their "ally". That means you do the work, they get the rewards. It's called "Diversity", and it's our strength. Not sure what our weakness might be.
The people working from home are only "more productive" because people working in person have consistently done parts of their jobs for them over the past two years in order to keep the company / college going during the crisis. This is producing a very unhealthy class system; clueless stay-at-homes don't even realize that their "can you do me a favor?" requests of the front-line workers are end up using up cumulative hours of those peoples' time. The communications and coordination problems, the issue with no one really concentrating during Zoom meetings so that they take twice as long and get half as much accomplished as in-person meetings (you're not effectively multi-tasking; you're just distracted), and the incredibly amount of wasted time with unanswered phone calls, people not in offices and so not able to physically found, and basically thoughtless behavior (urgent emails sent at 4:53 to admins) that wouldn't happen face-to-face is a massive productivity drag. The alleged increased productivity was during the first couple weeks when people were repurposing commuting time; it is long gone, and the costs are becoming overwhelming. Although faculty had the option to teach from home Fall 20-Spring 21, I have stayed in person the whole time, so I've seen first hand how poorly the students are served by remote learning and how much better the in-person people--faculty, staff, and students--have performed even with the stupid, ineffective masks. You'd think with all the remote work and the time freed up from commutes that, at the very least, you'd have seen a massive boost in scholarly productivity. You have not seen a massive boost in scholarly productivity. Remote teaching is a variant of the old Soviet line of "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us," "We pretend to teach, they pretend to learn, and everybody gets a degree." When something can't go on indefinitely, it must stop.
My father was a manager in a factory. Sometimes when I was a kid I was embarrassed by that fact. But, once I started working at the factory during summers I stopped being embarrassed and became proud. The supervisors of the departments that reported to him were his great support and I saw he never hesitated to recognize their work. And individuals on the factory floor would tell me over the 3 summers I worked there how much they liked my dad and how he listened to their issues and concerns.
Having someone in authority show up DOES make a difference. I think Musk is doing the right thing.
(I mentioned to my dad once about someone saying he was a good listener and he chuckled and said mostly that was all he could do because it was a union shop and he could rarely make any independent decision without making sure of what was in the contract. But, as an aside those summers made me a hater of unions then and I am still today.)
I guess if you go to the trouble of moving your company from silicon valley to Texas, you have to show that you mean business.
"If your job really can be done from home, it can be done from Mumbai at 1/4 to 1/10 of the cost of paying you."
Nah, if that were the case it would have already been done. There's a decided loss in productivity out of Indian companies. Good workers from India are living in the US on H1Bs.
The new hotness has been eastern Europe and Russia for software development, but then Russia invaded Ukraine so those spreadsheet models are looking dicey right now. I mean it's only 400 miles from Warsaw to Kiev.
Brazil was hot for a while (same time zone(s) as the US), but everybody was jumping from job to job so there was no stability. And lots of organized crime taking their cut.
paminwi
That's what good leaders do.
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