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.
- 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.