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TESLA and Elon Musk - anything not elsewhere

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bob
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Re: TESLA anything

#76

Post by bob »

Elon Musk asks all Tesla employees to come back to the office or quit
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busterbunker
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Re: TESLA anything

#77

Post by busterbunker »

Someone asked about Apple. They are still waffling. I have a buddy who played the odds and ditched Stupidcon Valley for Oahu so he could go surfing. I backed him. He's not worried. He's swatting remote-work poachers like mosquitos.
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Lani
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Re: TESLA anything

#78

Post by Lani »

Working from home means more time working for some of us. For some dumb reason, I checked my emails tonight at 8:30pm. Someone needed my help with a work matter. I wrote back that we can talk now since we're both on our computers anyway. And we did.
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Re: TESLA anything

#79

Post by bill_g »

I'm available 24/7/365 because of computers, the internet, and remote access to customer systems. It can be exhausting at times.
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neeneko
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Re: TESLA anything

#80

Post by neeneko »

Oddly enough, I'm kinda tired of working from home and really miss going in. Sadly, my particular group will never work on site again, so if I ever want to see a coworker's face I'll have to start a new job.
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pipistrelle
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Re: TESLA anything

#81

Post by pipistrelle »

neeneko wrote: Thu Jun 02, 2022 10:49 am Oddly enough, I'm kinda tired of working from home and really miss going in. Sadly, my particular group will never work on site again, so if I ever want to see a coworker's face I'll have to start a new job.
We’re hybrid so we see just enough of each other. 😛
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MN-Skeptic
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Re: TESLA anything

#82

Post by MN-Skeptic »

Management loved cubicles. They proclaimed open floor plans with cubicles encouraged collaboration. In reality, the noise and interruptions made it harder to perform tasks which required concentration. You spent more time and made more errors when you couldn’t shut out the world around you. I remember staying late many times just so I could get something done without interruptions. I would have loved to have worked from home 3 days a week. I would have been much more productive.

Management often has no idea what’s necessary to get individual jobs done.
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June bug
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Re: TESLA anything

#83

Post by June bug »

I can’t figure out why, but I’m starting to wonder if Muskrat wants to destroy Tesla.

The Twitter “deal” and his own tweets seem designed to piss off Tesla’s most likely customer base: environmentally conscious folks who skew at least a bit liberal.

Now it looks like he wants to decimate Tesla’s workforce as well.
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Re: TESLA anything

#84

Post by raison de arizona »

1) Every place I know that has come down with an edict to return to the desks every day has faced a wave of resignations. Every one.
2) Every person I know that has gone to work at SpaceX or Tesla has lasted under a year and regretted it. Every one.
“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” —John Adams
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neeneko
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Re: TESLA anything

#85

Post by neeneko »

pipistrelle wrote: Thu Jun 02, 2022 10:55 am We’re hybrid so we see just enough of each other. 😛
Before we lost our space, we were a hybrid system too. I was the only person who went in pretty much every day, so I was the constant fixture, but everyone else sorta came and went according to who knows what. It worked really well for me... though in extreme cases, I think I would go 3-4 months not seeing a single coworker.
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neeneko
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Re: TESLA anything

#86

Post by neeneko »

MN-Skeptic wrote: Thu Jun 02, 2022 12:34 pm Management loved cubicles. They proclaimed open floor plans with cubicles encouraged collaboration. In reality, the noise and interruptions made it harder to perform tasks which required concentration. You spent more time and made more errors when you couldn’t shut out the world around you. I remember staying late many times just so I could get something done without interruptions. I would have loved to have worked from home 3 days a week. I would have been much more productive.
Huh. Every place I've worked with cubicles, most of us just wore headphones. There were still in person interruptions, but they were no worse than slack/IM/email/phone/whatever. Crow, I would encourage people to actually come see me rather than using those.
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neeneko
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Re: TESLA anything

#87

Post by neeneko »

June bug wrote: Thu Jun 02, 2022 1:31 pm I can’t figure out why, but I’m starting to wonder if Muskrat wants to destroy Tesla.
I think part of it is, he isn't a very good businessman.. or at minimal he is now rich enough that he doesn't have to care and can just screw around.

Also, I think his main market at this point is affluent technolibertarian types, not progressives, and they utterly eat up his behavior.
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raison de arizona
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Re: TESLA anything

#88

Post by raison de arizona »

My wife's work flies her out to various places every month or two for in-person meetings with team members, regular work days. These last about 2-3 days. At my work, we have gatherings that really aren't regular work days, more of team building events I suppose? With a little trying to squeeze some work in between events. Their goal is to do the whole company (100+) four times a year, but they are hitting more like twice a year. These last 3-5 days. My team also, independently, has in-person events lasting 2-3 days. The goal there is about two per year, we've hit one.

Also, the studies I've read indicate that WFH increases production by 20%+. I know in my case, it becomes less of an "I work from home" thing and more of a "I live at work" thing, and that is hard to combat. I try to leave my computer in a room I'm not going to enter and walk away from it by 6pm every day. It's hard when you think of something you can knock out "real quick" at 8pm though, and the tools are right at your fingertips.
“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” —John Adams
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neeneko
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Re: TESLA anything

#89

Post by neeneko »

raison de arizona wrote: Thu Jun 02, 2022 1:46 pm Also, the studies I've read indicate that WFH increases production by 20%+. I know in my case, it becomes less of an "I work from home" thing and more of a "I live at work" thing, and that is hard to combat. I try to leave my computer in a room I'm not going to enter and walk away from it by 6pm every day. It's hard when you think of something you can knock out "real quick" at 8pm though, and the tools are right at your fingertips.
Something I have been _trying_ to do is shut off my work computer when I am done in the evening. It has been a struggle to disconnect like that.. esp when my boss treats this job like a hobby so he often will not start work till the evening and starts shooting off emails.
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much ado
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Re: TESLA anything

#90

Post by much ado »

This is worth reading. At least it was for me...

Slate: When I First Saw Elon Musk for Who He Really Is

Excerpt...
I’ve never known how this story would play out, and many of the twists and turns over the years have been total surprises, but a single intuition has never left me: Musk’s trajectory is unsustainable. It was only a matter of time before impunity and arrogance caused his mask to slip, and then the world would be ready to learn that Tesla’s runaway valuation was underwritten by memes, corner-cutting, information control, and outright deception.
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Re: TESLA anything

#91

Post by Shizzle Popped »

When we moved to Seattle I shifted to remote work with the same company I had been working for. I had a desk in a local office but network traffic flowed through a somewhat substandard local network, back through a regional data center and then to corporate, which is where all the resources I needed were located. It took me 15 minutes to get logged on and ready to work and latency for database access was a nightmare. I quickly learned that VPN access from my home fiber internet connection was faster and more reliable and started working from home in the afternoons. Technically, I was required to work from the office at the time but the office I worked in was noisy and my boss let my slipping out in the afternoons slide and we never told anybody. Then I hurt my back to a point where even with massive amounts of meds I couldn't sit for more than 20 minutes at a time. My boss told me to work from home and I never went back to the office again. I got far more done working from home than I ever did in the office and it saved me a half hour or so commute each way which I actually spent working most days.

Around that time corporate went to a collaborative work environment. I didn't know how bad it was until my first trip back. Their idea of a collab environment was 50 to 70 people in a space with rows of tables, 6 to a table facing each other. It was a nightmare of noise and chaos with no quiet spaces and only a handful of small enclosed conference rooms. People found anywhere they could to get away. Tables in hallways were quieter than the area you were supposed to work in. Most managers let people work from home 2 or 3 days a week and nobody said anything about it.

Around the time we were talking about moving back to the midwest because of our parent's failing health my company decided to eliminate all remote workers. I retired early. Then the pandemic hit and nearly the entire workforce went to remote work over a period of 10 days and only went back to the office a couple of months ago. But they came back with a change. Except for essential personnel nearly the entire workforce is officially on an 80/20 hybrid schedule with only 20% of the time in the office. I've been told by friends that this has largely been ignored in the IT department where almost nobody comes into the office. The IT department at corporate has a complex of eight, four-story office buildings that are barely used now. If you drive by on a weekday the parking lots are nearly empty. There's no sign that they're ever going to ask people to come back.

If I was still in the workforce and my employer wanted me to work in the office all the time I'd tell them to pound sand and find another job. When I first started working remotely the technology was still a little dicey but by the time I left it was pretty seamless. Even the people at corporate rarely hiked across campus for an in person meeting and almost all meetings were done virtually. For most jobs there's no need for people to be in the office all the time. IMO, forcing people back into the office is a sign of a shitty manager who doesn't know how to handle people if he or she can't be watching them all the time. Elon Musk reminds me of an old boss that put his desk right at the only entrance to the IT area so he could watch his employees come and go, and give them a load of crap if they were gone too long for lunch.
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raison de arizona
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Re: TESLA anything

#92

Post by raison de arizona »

Shizzle Popped wrote: Thu Jun 02, 2022 4:55 pm If I was still in the workforce and my employer wanted me to work in the office all the time I'd tell them to pound sand and find another job.
Skilled workers are in high demand and telling an unreasonable employer to pound sand and finding another job in this market is relatively easy. We've made offers to more than one prospective employee in recent months that were rejected, as they were entertaining offers from multiple employers and picked whichever they decided best suited them. It isn't an employers market.
Elon Musk reminds me of an old boss that put his desk right at the only entrance to the IT area so he could watch his employees come and go, and give them a load of crap if they were gone too long for lunch.
I had a boss/owner once that would leave early on Fridays after lunch. Lots of folks took this as the sign to bounce, and did. He would then roll slowly back through the parking lot around 3-4pm to look at which ones stayed and which were gone. Raises and promotions had this roll-through factored in.
“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” —John Adams
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Re: TESLA anything

#93

Post by Dave from down under »

I’m all for work from home - about 15 years ago I was advocating it.. but was told too hard.. then along came COViD and it was everyone go home, here is how you remote in…
We still needed people in the office for physical work (mail in/out basically) - so there was a roster.
Now return to office is happening.. 2 days a week. Not there yet..
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Re: TESLA anything

#94

Post by keith »

MN-Skeptic wrote: Thu Jun 02, 2022 12:34 pm Management loved cubicles. They proclaimed open floor plans with cubicles encouraged collaboration. In reality, the noise and interruptions made it harder to perform tasks which required concentration. You spent more time and made more errors when you couldn’t shut out the world around you. I remember staying late many times just so I could get something done without interruptions. I would have loved to have worked from home 3 days a week. I would have been much more productive.

Management often has no idea what’s necessary to get individual jobs done.
:yeahthat: ... in spades.

One time, in my glory days, I was hacking the ancient IBM Fortran IV runtime library to get it to read large records and multi tape volume files (that is: census tapes) which it was too stupid to do. The result had to be able to work with the SPSS stats library. So to test it, I needed to play with some simple SPSS routines and some data. It so happened that we had some statistics gathered that had never been used for anything beyond giving management a warm fuzzy feeling that we could push paperwork around. We had people record the times they were working on individual programs, and of course I could get the source code line count from the source library - all rudimentary, but my goal was to test my hack, not really get useful statistics. Anyway, I used SPSS to make a report on that data and how it changed over time (lines of code over time). There was a marked decline at a given date that I didn't expect, so I showed it to the boss. The date was around the time the department was reorganized from 2 to 4 person rooms to open plan. He couldn't believe it (and there are a lot of problems with my approach that wouldn't prove anything other than that my code worked), so he actually asked the team working on the census tapes to plan a study and see if there was anything to it (they had PhD's in statistics and what not after all). I never heard back what the result was, but I got a room to share with the other Systems Programmer. Everybody else kept working in cubicles.
Has everybody heard about the bird?
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Re: TESLA anything

#95

Post by Suranis »

I have a theory that its middle management that's pushing return to office, as they have no idea how to do anything bar office politics. So with no office to manipulate their weaknesses are horribly exposed.
Hic sunt dracones
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pipistrelle
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Re: TESLA anything

#96

Post by pipistrelle »

Suranis wrote: Fri Jun 03, 2022 1:02 am I have a theory that its middle management that's pushing return to office, as they have no idea how to do anything bar office politics. So with no office to manipulate their weaknesses are horribly exposed.
Nope, wasn't us. And we don't have that much clout anyway.
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neeneko
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Re: TESLA anything

#97

Post by neeneko »

Suranis wrote: Fri Jun 03, 2022 1:02 am I have a theory that its middle management that's pushing return to office, as they have no idea how to do anything bar office politics. So with no office to manipulate their weaknesses are horribly exposed.
I have a related but less negative take on this. Management tends to be made up of extroverts, it is a personally type that tends to open up such doors to advancement. So they see the world through an extroverted lens,.. they get a lot of benefit from human interaction and tend to assume that everyone else does to, that it is simply human. So they honestly believe that being in person, that the benefits of being energized by socializing with coworkers outweighs the downsides. They see the office through a far more social lens.
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Re: TESLA anything

#98

Post by raison de arizona »

Ending remote work as a method to reduce staffing while avoiding layoffs. Winning? It's all about marketing with this guy.
“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” —John Adams
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raison de arizona
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Re: TESLA anything

#99

Post by raison de arizona »

Recruiters at major companies like Amazon are going after Tesla employees angered by Elon Musk's return-to-office demand: 'If the Emperor of Mars doesn't want you, I'll be happy to bring you over'
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon- ... and-2022-6
“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” —John Adams
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Re: TESLA anything

#100

Post by jez »

I don't understand the demand that people be in an office. I realize that there are some jobs that would require you to be onsite. Being a Network Admin is one that I can think off the top of my head.

I'm a tech writer. The people I work with are in all time zones we have offices in, including India. I am, luckily, classified as 100% remote because that is how I was hired and how my HR paperwork reads. Corporate is starting to "encourage" people to go into the office on a hybrid system. 3 days one week, 2 the next or something similar. I have one friend in the company that got a different job that allowed her to stay remote because she didn't want to go into an office any longer.

I know that I am much more productive at home then I ever would be in an office. I get distracted too easily and everything I need to do is done via Teams or Skype meetings.
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