
An email from Elon Musk to employees: “Communication Within Tesla” - tdurden
https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/this-email-from-elon-musk-to-tesla-employees-descr.html
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sctb
Previously:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15149238](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15149238)

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joshribakoff
I got "in trouble" at this one company for just doing my job. I walked onto
the sales floor and asked a sales person if I can silently watch over their
shoulder so I can learn about how the companies CRM was used. The sales
manager felt I infringed on her team and complained to the lead programmer who
in turn begrudgingly "warned" me not to do that ever again. I think I lasted
like another 6 weeks there before putting in notice and leaving to a smaller
company. All I wanted to do was identify ways to improve the crm, which was
part of my job. But the team who made the software had no access to the team
using the software

~~~
Jazcash
As good as your past intentions sound, if somebody I didn't know from another
department just came and sat next to me to watch me work, without me knowing
it would happen beforehand, I'd put in a complaint too.

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Infinitesimus
Your behavior in that case will be less than ideal. It will be better to talk
to your reportee and the individual and understand what's going on if you
weren't in the loop. This could have easily been the birth of a strong
partnership between sales and the dev team to understand how people both
really use and demo the product.

Assume positive intent. This business of putting in complaints behind
someone's back (bear in mind OP asked for permission!!!) is just childish

~~~
thanksgiving
Something like this has never happened to me but I'll give you a less extreme
example.

My manager explained the situation to me but it still doesn't make sense in
hindsight.

There exists two companies in the US headquartered in two different cities.
Some bankers buy both. Now the reason I bring it up is I wanted some fairly
simple information about some configuration on one of the services that a team
that came from the other company, based in a different city. First thing I try
is message the person on Lync (imagine a shitty msn messenger). No response. I
know you're online! I talked to my boss to see who else might be able to
answer my question. He tried to get in touch with the other guy and cc'ed his
boss. Radio silence.

A week later the other boss sends a forward. The other boss explains he had
been on vacation for a week and didn't check his emails. The forward also has
the answer from the other developer from a week prior.

We are not talking super secret missile launch codes. It is a fairly boring
detail but the developer didn't hit reply all to the email, sending it only to
his boss.

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hacker_9
_" Musk works about 100 hours per week at the electric carmaker"_

7 / 100 = 14.3 hours a day. Or 100 / 5 = 20 hours a day. Does he not require
food then? Or any non-work activities? Talk about hyperbole.

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joshribakoff
I often start at 7am and go until 10pm. My girlfriend makes me food and brings
my caffeine. I have no time for "non work activities"though. I'll be in bed
watching Netflix but really working on my laptop. Even when I have to goto the
grocery store my mind is always on work. Being a remote employee, the line is
blurred. If I'm out and about but all I can do is daydream about a new
algorithm, I consider that working.

~~~
cr1895
I mean this without any intention of belittling or suggestion that you should
do otherwise, but why? Not that you need justify anything to me, of course.

It's so fundamentally opposite to my experience, and I'm curious about what's
driving you to work like this.

~~~
joshribakoff
Because its fun. I can't sleep because I'm excited to code. It interests me
more than most other activities.

~~~
moretai
How did you get "100 hours a week"-excited to code? The only thing I am
waiting for is this shit to click, but for the last five years, it hasn't
happened. And I dreadfully want it to.

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CADTroy
I am definitely in favour of the notion of avoiding "management silos" but I
would echo the sentiment left at the end that it seems to be much easier said
than done in practice.

"you can talk directly to a VP in another dept., you can talk to me, you can
talk to anyone without anyone else's permission." I imagine someone in such a
high position would then receive an influx of e-mails to the point where it is
counter productive as they cannot address each one on top of the already ~100
hours of work?

I have never worked in an organization where this was the explicit rule
established by the leader but maybe someone can shed some light on whether
this practice has worked for them, or the challenges that comes with it?

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nkoren
Almost a decade ago, I invited Elon to speak at a conference I was helping to
organise at Oxford. Would've been very on-topic for him, but he declined with
a pithy one-line reply. Was a solid enough opportunity that it was probably
worth wasting a minute of his time. Had I come to him with something more
trivial, I suspect the response would have been pithier and less polite.

The impression I've gotten is that Elon likes to work with smart people, and
that part of being smart is being able to make good calls about when to
escalate something and to whom. Escalating an issue too high (or too low) is
probably not a mistake one gets to make very often.

It would be impossible to impose a discipline like this on a bunch of worker-
drones. But amongst reasonably intelligent people, with honest leadership at
the top levels, it seems achievable.

~~~
CADTroy
Yes I agree, after thinking about it a bit more and reading all of the
responses I get the impression that this model works best if you are hiring
people who are capable to make these judgement calls, and those who can't will
likely not last very long within the company

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lazyjones
Perhaps I just fail to see the stroke of genius in that policy, or it works
better in car companies than web publishers, but as CEO I actively fought this
kind of communication wherever it proved harmful.

For example, the sales & marketing department got in touch with the IT and
content departments directly on occasion in order to circumvent strict
policies on usability and fairness vs. paying clients (i.e. they wanted
special treatment for some customers when they bought expensive ads). Also,
the IT folks complained that they couldn't keep their schedules because other
departments kept asking for small favours that delayed their projects.

Sure, you can always fire the people responsible for harming the company this
way and hope everyone always shares exactly the same goals and values, but it
doesn't seem very practical to me when there are (naturally) slightly
conflicting interests within the company.

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DenisM
At this point you are using policies and procedures to fix misalignment of
goals. Seems like something has gone wrong way earlier? I am trying to keep
sales and support directly plugged into engineering, with latter being
responsible for establishing, policing, and communicating proper scope. It
educates sales of what's possible, but also educates engineering of the real-
world impact of their action and inaction. We're a still a small company
though, I don't know if I can keep it that way.

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dingo_bat
> By far the most common way is chain of command, which means that you always
> flow communication through your manager. The problem with this approach is
> that, while it serves to enhance the power of the manager, it fails to serve
> the company.

Is this common at a lot of companies? I've only worked in one company and
despite its many flaws I've never hesitated to contact the relevant person
directly for anything, regardless of hierarchy and geography. I do make sure
to keep my manager in the loop for anything that will take up a significant
portion of my time. So he knows I'm not slacking off :P

~~~
losteverything
<Is this common at a lot of companies?

Everyone I've been in: Fortune 5, small biz, govt monopoly, r&d lab, retail

One example: a legal department vs. Sales&marketing. Legal believes they can
veto marketing decisions. A fuzzy plan to use CPMI was initiated by marketing.
Legal said "you must stop"

Marketing said "buzz off, you Legal, are in the 'advice' business. We exercise
our right to ignore it."

Several members in sales marketing kept in close contact with legal... Before
and after... And were quickly transferred.

Btw, the decision went to the BofD who naturally gave no reason to stop.

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Vinnl
One other Musk policy that sounded really well (I haven't experienced it
actually implemented yet, but I try to keep myself to it) is to avoid non-
common acronyms:
[https://twitter.com/davejohnson/status/602951117413216256](https://twitter.com/davejohnson/status/602951117413216256)

Starting at a company and having to come to grasp with tens of acronyms before
even knowing what the thing they stand for does seriously harms your ramp-up
speed, I think.

~~~
abecedarius
Yep. It's particularly bad at NASA; when I started there the first thing I did
was to start compiling a glossary, because emails (etc) were full of so many
acronyms that might be defined in many different documents. Maybe they've
gotten better -- Emily Lakdawalla posted the other day a photo labeling Mars
rover parts like "secondary thwack arm" and "rabbit hole".

If you give things short vivid names you'll be less tempted to acronym them.

