>Tesla seems to get a lot of work out of its employees because of how appealing the company’s mission is, but this seems like a recipe for burnout.

Even moreso it was Musk's personal brand that made his companies so desirable to work for. A brand that he has spent the last few years torching to the ground on Twitter. He'll still be able to pay senior folks enough to stick around for a while. But the new grad pipeline is most likely drying up at this point.

He's gone from "building cool shit, but holy crap the hours are long" to "long hours for a toxic edgelord who has consistently over promised and under delivered" in the span of a decade.

From what I have heard from friends at Tesla, 40 hours is literally the minimum. A particular friend told me that they put 60-70 hours easily every week and so do their teammates.

But they get to build cars! Very expensive cars! That fundamentally alter which limited resource we start wars over!

It's getting very tiresome to see big oil/right wing talking points repeated on HN constantly. You can go read the Tesla impact report here: https://www.tesla.com/impact and see that they're doing their best to eliminate conflict minerals in their battery chemistry.

I mean, you can also hit up the Shell website and read all about how good they are for the environment, driving the transition to clean energy etc.

I know you're taking the piss but I worked for a Shell subsidiary for 2 years very recently and they actually take all the "green" stuff very seriously despite the fact their core business accounts for 2% of global co2 emissions. It's very bizarre and much of the internal "greenwashing" dialog reads like a catholic confessional.

With that out of the way there is a difference between corporate PR greenwashing and literally changing battery chemistries to not contain as many rare earth minerals.

>That fundamentally alter which limited resource we start wars over!

Sodium?

https://www.unige.ch/communication/communiques/en/2022/un-no...

It's the same at SpaceX. Everyone I know who has worked there said the pay sucks and the hours are long and the only reason to do it is a passion for the industry.

Musk seems to be modeling his companies on the video gaming industry.

I wouldn't say it's the industry, but the mission. You can earn more and work less at practically any other major aerospace company, and also get hired more easily. But instead of working on a goal of getting humans living on Mars, you're working on a goal of maximizing quarterly gains for shareholders.

You're still maximizing value for shareholders, it's just wrapped in baloney about a Mars mission.

As a European i am astonished that this is even legal, especially in factories where dangerous machines are in every corner.

The same culture that embraces this is the same culture that will take risks to start a new electric automobile company. It's give and take. If the workers at the factory are hourly they're also being paid overtime to do this work. My parents worked at Honda in Ohio and often worked more than 40 hours/week because they would get paid overtime. Safety incidents happen because that's just life, but most issues are attributable to drugs/alcohol, and people being scumbags.

Instead of banning something, I think we need to make sure we're allowing people to seek employment options that work best for them with sensible safety practices of course. Being able to work overtime, for example, afforded my parents a great life and a reasonable "retirement" age. You might say, well they could get paid more and join a union, etc. and while I don't care too much about unions one way or another, Honda employees routinely reject unionization because they're really happy with their employment arrangement. I bet Tesla is similar.

Speaking for Honda, many people go straight from high school to work on the factory floor. They work overtime, and they have to do a good job, but if you go and ask the employees or the town of Marysville everyone is pretty happy with the arrangement. Again, I'm not sure why Tesla would be dissimilar except that it's popular so it makes the headlines.

In the case of office workers, software engineers, or others who are salaried, well they're professionals and they're paid a lot of money.

The first reaction to seeing something like "xyz is happening at Tesla" shouldn't be to ban something that you don't understand.

I was not talking about tesla, i was talking about working 60 hours in a risky environment, but hey why not work 120? Or better, sleep in the factory eat there and pay for it?

>My parents worked at Honda in Ohio and often worked more than 40 hours/week because they would get paid overtime.

Yes that's normal, sometimes you have to do overtime, but 60 hours at a regular basis is something else.

You’re now accidentally describing the Shanghai factory

"accidentally" ;)

FLSA exemptions are great! And if an employee is not exempt you can just misclassify them, they probably have no way to know they're not exempt, and if they complain you can completely coincidentally not-at-all-in-retaliation fire them because at-will employment bebe.

This general attitude is why Europe has barely produced any great new companies in decades.

Disagree with that statement but I get the sentiment.

Look at Asia and how many new companies they produced despite overworking themselves to death.

The problem with Europe is not mainly this but that we truly do not have a common market.

We cant pool resources and talents into one place and launch a pan-european project. Europe is still countries actively engaging in competition among themselves.

HSBC, Airbus, Deutsche Telekom, AXA, Shell, Nestle, Barclays, Metro, L'Oreal, BP, Michelin, AstraZeneca, Air France, Christian Dior, Philips, Anheuser-Busch, Vodafone, Lufthansa, Volkswagen, Siemens, Allianz, Bosch, Unilever, Maersk, Renault, Saint-Gobain, Bayer, Nokia, Ericsson, BT Group, Accenture, Madrigal Elektromotoren GmbH

They are all older then a decade (some more then 100 years), he's not wrong that europe has massive problems making "big new company's", however the conclusion that it has something todo with the ~absence of exploitation is probably wrong ;)

Europes business landscape is distinctively different. In Europe you have many small global champions (mostly specialized in something that only they can produce well) and only few Mega-Corporations compared to US or Asia.

I think this is a better diversification than concentrating all GDP into a few big player.

> Madrigal Elektromotoren GmbH

Wait, isn't this a fictitious company from breaking bad?

Yeah I thought someone would get this (the only fake company on here).

Accenture came out of American firm Arthur Andersen which went bankrupt because of its involvement with Enron. It was incorporated in Bermuda, then moved to Ireland about 10 years later.

How many of those were founded in the last few decades?

Also, not really sure how state sponsored airlines and telecoms are a great counterargument to Europe's failure to innovate.

You do realize that by including companies from the 19th and early 20th century, you're agreeing with him?

"but europe didn't make facebook!"

What is eggregious about a 40hr work week at the office?

Minimum 40hr work week.

Thats how it is in most salaried jobs in FAANMG.

I've worked two FAANGM jobs as a salaried engineer and or manager, rarely put in over 40. Draw boundaries, stick to them. Long hours mean the company is underfunding your team, and there's no reason you should be picking up their mistakes.

I don't recall any FAANMG CEOs writing threatening emails to employees mandating them to work more than 40 hours. Do you have any examples?

Who's mandating more than 40 hours?

Did you read his emails?

> Anyone who wishes to do remote work must be in the office for a minimum (and I mean *minimum*) of 40 hours per week or depart Tesla. This is less than we ask of factory workers.

40 hours minimum means you only need to be there 40 hours, like most salaried full time jobs.

You're just sticking to semantics. It's well known all his companies require you to work more than 40 hours. Combine that with these emails, it's easy to understand what the expectations are.

The "at the office" part.

The office is a complete anachronism, entirely unnecessary for knowledge work.

It is born of industrialized times before modern networked knowledge management and communications software. It is kept in place by bad managers. It was long ago studied and shown that remote work makes good managers' teams perform better and bad managers' teams perform worse (likely because good managers manage for results while bad managers just micromanage for poor indicators of work like how much time you spend in your chair looking miserable).

The commute is an utter and complete waste of time and society's resources. Simply not commuting buys 1-4 HOURS EVERY DAY. Even if not a minute of this time is given to the employer as extra work, the employee will be significantly more productive having not spent 0.5-2 hours fighting traffic just to sit in the cheap office chair.

Smart employees have figured this out and properly demand to do better work. Smart managers also know that there are huge competitive advantages to remote work.

1) Employers can now tap a talent pool as large as the country or even globe, instead of only a 2-hour commute to one of their offices.

2) Remote work is a key competitive advantage, seen as a key benefit by the best employees, and will allow for lower salary costs.

3) Remote work can dramatically reduce real-estate costs. IBM figured this out decades ago when it started doing significant remote work and having check-in portable offices.

4) Remote work will force you to have better management, who manage for objectives instead of irrelevant manager-ego-boosting indicia of work.

5) Remote work has been proved to be at least as, and in some cases more productive than office work.

So, what is egregious about it is that it is now widely known as a bad practice.

Imagine the reverse - remote work has been the norm and now managers were proposing to the boards that they build multi-billion dollar buildings, and require every employee to get up and drive in the worst traffic to this site, to sit and work in the exact same condition every day, and zero of those conditions enable better work product (i.e., the equipment is not better than what employees have at home, etc.). Both the boards approving such spending and the employees being asked to do this new waste-of-time commute would universally say

"W T F !?!"