I found the best thing to do was to ignore the interrupts and carry on until they kick you on the street. Then watch from a safe distance as all the stuff you were holding together shits the bed.
Towards the end of my time there, a “fixer” was brought in to shore up the team that I was working on. The “fixer” also became my manager when they were brought on.
The “fixer” proceeded to fire 70+% of the team over the course of 6-8 months and install a bunch of yes people, in addition to wasting about $2,000,000 on a subscription to rebuild our core product with a framework product no one on the team knew. I was told to deploy said framework product on top of Kubernetes (which not a single person on my team had any experience with) while delivering on other in-flight projects. I ignored the whole thing.
I ended up deciding I was done with Tesla and went into a regularly scheduled 1:1 with my manager (the “fixer”) with a written two-weeks notice in hand, only to be fired (with 6-weeks severance, thankfully) before I was able to say anything about giving notice.
One of the best ways to get fired in my opinion.
Here, labor unions are quite widespread, and very effective at negotiating reasonably but firmly. As a result, I can depend on 3 months severance _guaranteed under law_ after 6 months at a job. (After 3 years, it goes up to 4 months, and then from there up to a max of 6 months.)
It puts the responsibility for risk of instability, errors in planning hiring / capacity, etc. firmly where it belongs: with the employer.
(And no, the economic sky is not falling here as a result. Quite the opposite.)
When did it start falling apart?
Why hasn't the same happened to SpaceX? (Gov contracts, too big to fail, national defense, no competition yet, etc.?)
And honestly, why hasn't anyone domestically put up a decent fight against Tesla? Best I can think of is Rivian, and those have their own issues.
Becaues they were ~first to market - and honestly, as a tesla driver for the last 6 years - It's the best car I ever owned (including Toyota, Mazda, and domestics).
6 years ago, for the effective price of a Honda Accord, I was able to get a car with excellent AWD for NorEast winters, perfect weight distribution (previously drove a Miata for comparison), could beat ~95% 'super cars' in a straight line, and it got 140MPG.
6 years ago. And I've had 0 maintenance outside of tire / air filter changes since. There was nothing anything remotely like it on the market, and it still holds up today. That's incredibly compelling.
Then PedoDiver, and it's been downhill from there... I'll likely get an R3X when it comes out.
Tom Mueller was a VP of propulsion at TRW Inc., which, among numerous other things you know from textbooks, made the Apollo LM descent engine, as well as early Space Shuttle TDRS data relay system sats. Calling Mueller a guy interested with engines having issues with his bosses is like referring to Craig Federighi as a guy interested in designing his own laptop.
I guess now that everyone knows about Elon, and Elon himself probably becoming more paranoid from both age and after SpaceX years and exposure to Twitter infoflood without adequate mental immunity, on top of most people who'd be in position to meet him not being as smart and quietly lunatic as literal Old Space trained rocket scientists, the scheme of temporarily impinging ideas upon Musk so to securely attaching the funding for your own thing do not work so well anymore.
And Americans in general don’t want electric cars for some reason. I’m happily driving my Buzz and charging on my solar panels instead of paying 5 bucks a gallon on diesel. The propaganda here is strong and people buy it.
So, the initial good direction my have been despite him, and still successful mostly thanks to the big load of money he brought him instead.
Of course the quality has fallen faster than the price over time, but initial impressions still hold on for a long time in general.
I think SpaceX's success is mostly down to throwing money at the problem. The US had tons of graduated aerospace engineers with limited places to go, and places they could go directly in aerospace fields were already committing their funding to established programs. SpaceX startup would of been a dream job for the top aerospace engineers because it was all fresh ground but with a far larger budget than 99.9% of startup aerospace companies. They weren't offered to build one piece of a rocket that may or may not get sold to NASA or someone 15 years down the line, they were offered to work on and put their mark on a completely new rocket design that was going to at the least be test launched. And im sure their early successes helped boost recruitment even further, combined with government contract to keep the money flowing.
We probably don't see many rising EV companies in the US because you need an ass-ton of capital to start an automotive company, and most people holding enough capital to do so know that try to sell cheap consumer cars that most people want is not really the highest margin business. Selling a few hundred or even a few thousand cars still leaves you with a mountain of capital requirements in front of you that your margins are going to have a really hard time climbing. And if you don't climb fast enough, good luck fighting established auto makers and their lawyers with every cent tied up into trying to scale and engineer.
To be fair, I've experienced that in a good 50% of my employment career[0] and I've not once worked for any of his companies.
[0] Ignoring the "servers are melting" flavour of "drop what you are doing" because that's an understandable kind of interruption if you're a BAU specialist like me.
During the first 24 hours of the Model 3 pre-order launch, Elon tweeted that we would support another 3-4 currencies than we had built and tested for. The team literally found out because of his tweet and had not planned for those currencies. That wasn’t the first time that sort of deal happened where we found out about a feature because of one of his tweets.
Thankfully I've never (yet) had to experience "planning by management tweet". That does sound like absolute bullshit to deal with.
They then shuttered the whole thing some months later: https://www.npr.org/2024/05/01/1248397756/walmart-close-heal...
Which is to say, these things are real warning signs about the company.
In the case of Musk's companies, here we are discussing a major failure and firings.
I have experienced management assigning people to multiple projects, vaguely acknowledging a time split. The moment the actual work starts people have to go 100% on all projects. This is normal.
Didn’t have kids or friends at the time and was going through a breakup, so I was okay with throwing myself at the job for a while. Once my situation got better, all those hours didn’t make as much sense, so I started looking for another job. The very next job was an immediate pay bump of 20% for half the amount of work.
These days, I clearly restate what is being asked (per my understanding), what I’m currently working on, if the thing is being asked is more important or not, and if the requestor is willing to delay the original timeline by the amount of time the interrupt will take plus context switching time.
Most often, the answer is no.
It would be ridiculous for a CEO, or really anyone who's not my manager, to ask the team personally to do anything. If they had an important task they'd have to trade-off something else from the immediate backlog, by going through the product manager.
Even in small companies you generally have a PM in front of a team.
You may not like Elon - I got it, but let's not pretend he is running xAI/Tesal substantially different from competitors.
Hate this. My boss: “Hey, why is it doing that. Who did this?” You did, you clueless idiot. You asked for it.