"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 should drop rapidly once the urgent matter is resolved.
– Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren’t adding value. It is not rude to leave, it is rude to make someone stay and waste their time.
– Don’t use acronyms or nonsense words for objects, software or processes at Tesla. In general, anything that requires an explanation inhibits communication. We don’t want people to have to memorize a glossary just to function at Tesla.
– Communication should travel via the shortest path necessary to get the job done, not through the “chain of command”. Any manager who attempts to enforce chain of command communication will soon find themselves working elsewhere.
– A major source of issues is poor communication between depts. The way to solve this is allow free flow of information between all levels. If, in order to get something done between depts, an individual contributor has to talk to their manager, who talks to a director, who talks to a VP, who talks to another VP, who talks to a director, who talks to a manager, who talks to someone doing the actual work, then super dumb things will happen. It must be ok for people to talk directly and just make the right thing happen.
– In general, always pick common sense as your guide. If following a “company rule” is obviously ridiculous in a particular situation, such that it would make for a great Dilbert cartoon, then the rule should change. reply
You have to put a lot of faith into your workforce to allow so much freedom in their operation.
Rules of the game change very often, sometimes super liberal like "ya ran out of disk space? Just rip it off someone who doesn't need it" then blaming you for the chaos and rushed decisions because a developer made the error of exiting a meeting before listening to an important point by field ops which they could not have foreseen.
If your company is running with scissors you need every individual to be a top performer who knows exactly what they are doing at all times. That is hard to guarantee when you start scaling up your headcount.
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 runs on 28 volt direct-current". Not conducive to more efficient meetings.
Acronyms and codewords serve a purpose in any context that involves repetition.
If I were Mr Musk I'd be less concerned about the mental burden of acronyms and more worried about the physical strain and injury on the shop floor. But the latter can't be 'fixed' with an e-mail missive.
> "light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation"
Acronyms have their place, and can be more descriptive than, say, project Glorfindel.
- 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
- Communication should travel via the shortest path necessary to get the job done
This sounds like a great idea, however it can lead to things like the CEO pinging engineers to fix problems he doesn't fully understand. I've seen this happen often, and it's really annoying how often we have to tell the CEO he can't do this (extremely important people have already quit because of it).
I love the idea about walking out of meetings though, and just minimizing them as much as possible.
Isn't it just another part of the job? Obviously a person doing the actual work is supposed to explain what is and isn't possible, no?
How many CEOs will respond well when an employee does push back against their directions?
There are good reasons that most companies don’t operate this way.
Even if every employee would be good at everything that anyone in the company does — which obviously isn't and cannot be the case — communications aren't this wholly rational process that benefits the company proportionally to how it benefits the agents, and it's unlikely that "factor of ten better precision" could be born as a result of important design decisions taken by some random pairs of lowest-level workers in private discussions, without informing anyone else involved (simply because they don't really understand how anyone is involved/affected by their clever decision).
Long story short, even given all this not-entirely-serious image of Musk, I'm kinda surprised to hear so naïve statements from him. He's in business long enough to know already that some idealistic visions just don't work in the real wordld, and it's one thing to tell them to your buyers and inverstors, and another — to your actual employees.
For a CEO, VP, or other "executive" type, practicing seagull management is time inefficient for them in any regards. They should be delegating tasks, and trusting their reports to handle the issue.
Of course, sometimes one must become the executive who gets in the weeds as Musk is doing, but that is because the reports have failed in some crucial aspects and one must unfuck the situation.
As an engineer, my time is limited. I simply do not have time to immidietly deal with every problem that anyone wants dealt with.
The general rule we settled on where I work is to ask the relevant project manager first. If the project manager gives the okay, you can talk directly to the relevant engineer. Otherwise, your request will go on a list and be dealt with "at some point".
Of course, in an emergency, you can still go straight to the relevant person. And everything is always an emergency...
Therefore, there is no evidence, just suspicion he is not doing the actual engineering work himself.
However, at my current job we frequently have little meetings here and there post-standup for clarification, discussions, analysis, of issues, etc. Frequently they do not apply, but I do not find myself willing to leave despite explicitly being told I do not have to be there.
It's hard to walk out of a meeting, when you know how it looks, because your manager is the one to handle everything from vacation requests to promotions. Building up "social credit" greases the wheels later on when you are the one who needs something. Unless your manager is a proponent of the policy, you're fighting the tide.
Maybe I'm not picking a good term / elucidating properly, but the second type of "social credit" is the fostering of a favorable view, building good rapport with your manager. Your manager does not put you in a meeting for shits-and-giggles, either because there is a real need or as some impotent display of power. For the latter, when you walk out you're making some strife and come salary review time, vacation request time, etc. it can bite you in the ass.
This can and will have a chilling effect on the efficacy of the "Fuck Meetings" rule. However, it does make clear the culture and expectations of the organization, so hopefully those managers would eventually shape up or ship out.
I get what you're saying and not sure what the right word for it is. Basically, it's showing them 'respect' or whatever for their position so that eventually when you have to have something that matters to you signed off on, you get it. I think social credit is a decent phrase though there might be a better one out there.
There is 0 chance in any scenario that a net benefit would come out of that.
Media queries seem straightforward enough.
This is par for the course in most other forums.
(The mobile formatting issue wouldn't happen but for a few rare crazies who attempt to hijack the wrong syntax.)
| "Touch UI" | "Mobile UI" | "Everywhere UI" | "Fisher-Price UI" |
... or my personal favorite...
| "Mega-Bloks" |
For your example, just call it touchscreen mode.
For internal processes, this is fair enough. But anything that will be exposed to an end-user should be simple without shorthand.
Say a document talks about “the new windows UI” and there were like 5 different versions of “new ui” during the lifetime of the project. Which version is the document talking about?
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 results in process being changed, not just ignored.
Sometimes jargon is a needed thing, if you have many many subsystems and objects in play, you may need jargon rather than a long form description of what the thing does "alternator" versus "alternating current power generation device".
Sometimes meetings are the last resort when all other communication mediums have failed, and often in that case a long meeting is the only possible solution, while regular meetings should never be considered beneficial, putting a kibosh on all meetings will do more harm than good.
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.
is this widespread or just symptoms of top heavy companies? while I nod my head at most of what Musk relayed far too much seems to be just speaking to head nodding supporters. Many of know this, the question is how to communicate it to those who need to understand they are the issue
I like this. Crucially, it's not “ignore the rule”; it's “fix the rule”.