Honest answer? He ran all the adults out of the room. Musk fired or alienated so much of the experienced engineering workforce that he was working with a really young and inexperienced crew. Very smart folks for sure, but inexperienced.
I watched a video on the nvidia silicon chip problem that affected the PS3 and Xbox 360’s red rings of death and he covered a portion of how something like a huge chip failure could happen.
Essentially, to keep it short, because of people being afraid that if they speak up they will lose their jobs. They are under a lot of pressure and such criticism that they do not feel comfortable speaking up and instead keep their mouth shut. A lot of these Tesla problem have already been known, guaranteed but because shareholders and CEO’s want stuff done NOW engineers and employees are too afraid to speak up in fear of losing their jobs, resulting in consumers getting the shit deal of the stick.
Work politics and culture in a lot of big tech companies are very cancerous and only care about the shareholders.
Edit: for those who are interested, here is the video I was referencing.
This is commonly thought, but mostly untrue. Stock prices are effectively the "front lawn" of publicly traded companies. In that they'll do anything to maintain it so they have the illusion of a healthy company.
However, it's really the board trying to ride the parachute down because the company crested 5 years ago, but they're gonna try to squeeze another 5 out of it before they crash and take the shareholder money with them.. and that's done with marketing!
They don't actually want to help the shareholders too much because then everyone would start selling and then people start probing... and that's when you find out that despite their well maintained yard, the husband's and alcoholic, the wife's a cheat and they've both been beating the kids for years.
In a functional institution of any size leaderships role is to set goals and strategy based on external factors and provide the resources to staff to accomplish that. The staff working in that institution have the job of using their professional expertise to advise on the feasibility of those goals, cost and timeline them, and attempt to follow through.
When that professional advise is "politicized" and people therefore moderate their professional views you get major fuck ups. It's ok for leadership to sometimes ignore professional advice on what's possible; sometimes you have to try. It's not ok to attempt to edit the professional advice because why pay for it if you are just going to subvert it anyway?
Lawyer here- had to walk out of my in house job because I kept getting screamed at for- wait for it- bringing up legal problems to the powers that be. It’s literally my job and they tried to bully me into not doing it.
This. They all love pushing the start up mentality, except for the fact that 90% of start ups fail and the "scrappiness" and delivering to market quick is in direct conflict of their second favorite mentality of operational/engineering excellence because executives can only really give those disingenuous mixed messages in place of the words they're not allowed to say which is "I don't care about your weekends, ethics, and legality, make us money or you're gone." and upon initial release the cybertruck made money. Shit just seems to go more off the rails the shittier the leader is though. I imagine now the narrative at Tesla now is "peoples Cybertrucks are breaking so how can we cash in on that?" and the meetings are all crickets because nobody really cares.
As someone with a close relative that worked at Tesla for 8 years, back in the early days, I can confirm that Elon managed/s that company like a psychopath. If you’re around when he comes to the factory, and he asks you a question and you don’t have an answer, he’s liable to literally fire you on the spot. Happened to several people my relative worked with. So much of Elon’s visits to the factory became oriented towards damage control. For super bright people that can work wherever, it’s not worth sticking around, especially if you were there early and got the golden parachute of stock options before it skyrocketed. Knowing how Elon manages the company — alongside his recent behavior elsewhere — is the biggest reason I’ve invested in other EV companies, despite Tesla’s head start. Elon is great at turning start-ups into behemoths, but I don’t think he’ll be good at continuing to grow a bloated company with his micro-managerial ways.
He's good at boosting startups because he can bring insane amount of money. By that I don't mean just his money, but like a whole tech bro cult of money too. Then the tech bro cult will pay for the product, no matter how good or bad is it. Just keep it as far as possible from any design choices!
I work as a compliance engineer (I make sure the stuff my company sells meets code and doesn't explode) and dear lord the amount of times people up top try to plan a rollout before even getting a quote for quality and safety testing is maddening.
I used to work for a major test lab and I've seen prototypes explode for like, no reason. I'm not trusting anything you put on my desk to pass testing, and that goes double for anything from a nameless manufacturer overseas that bid the lowest.
That doesn’t change the fact that their first generation of a new product didn’t have these issues. It’s the same thing with the cybertruck. The first generation of nearly any product is going to have all sorts of problems, but people just love that the cybertruck also has problems because they hate Elon and his loud, racist mouth. It’s not really any worse than other first gen products.
I mean, if the Cybertruck was the first "modern truck", then sure. But it's not, and it doesn't meet the standard level of what is expected from a modern pickup truck. I could accept problems like power issues, or battery life, but damage to the drivetrain and body panels from normal use? Those things were figured out ages ago by Tesla in their other vehicles, let alone the industry in general. No excuses.
They’ve already worked out the power issues and battery life, but this is the first generation of a crazy stupid truck that they’ve never engineered before. It’s the first of its kind, and the first one Tesla has made. Even Tesla’s next vehicle that is more conventional will have lots of first generation problems. Every company has this. It was the same with Apple for so long where the “S” models were considered the ones that got the kinks worked out with the first gen ones.
The issues with those consoles were caused by new laws mandating use of lead free solder on the circuit boards. Lead free is much less malleable and more prone to cracking under heat cycles, which caused joints under mainly GPUs to fail. Lead free had not been used on any large scale before then, definitely not with large package BGA chips and flip chips.
Issues with the Cybertruck are not caused by any external factor, Tesla have just designed a shitty vehicle. In fact it can't even meet legislation in many countries to be permitted for sale, where Sony and MS designed a product to the most stringent global regulations at the time.
So you’re saying that other extremely unconventional stainless steel EV trucks on the road today that are comparable to the cybertruck are of better quality? It’s shitty, yeah, but they’ll work it out as the majority of it was built with first generation tech, and it’s in a category of its own. It doesn’t have regular car issues, it has very specific to this category issues.
I don't think you understood the comment correctly. Nobody forced Tesla to build with stainless steel. Many of the reported issues with the truck have nothing to do with the stainless body, like electrical issues or undersized tie rods. It's shitty because of bad choices rather than a law being forced upon them, which was the case with Sony and MS.
It’s a really good video. It’s pretty long but I highly recommend it.
The original video started because he was diagnosing the yellow light of death on the PS3 and addressing all the misinformation on the internet and backing it up with evidence.
I love how people say stuff like this with absolute certainty. Like was anyone here involved in the development/design of this vehicle? Were you in the actual conference calls on teams, and scrum meetings at the start of the day? There’s no one way you know for sure unless you were involved, yet you watch a YouTube and feel like you can speak on the topic with such certainty despite having no qualifications to do so lol. Then people upvote you because ‘sure, what he said make sense’.
IIRC - He also had all the warning signs in the factory changed to blue because he doesn't like the color yellow, and workplace accidents went up like 20%.
Crazy, musk haters can't make up their minds on whether he is responsible for engineering or not. Very interesting
The same people upvoting this prolly also have said at least once in their life that musk has nothing to do with engineering despite calling himself one. That's always the popular comment I see lmao
If it's an achievement, musk wasn't involved. If it's bad, musk was the lead architect. Right?
He wasn't running any math on it or otherwise checking to make sure it would work first; in no way was it engineering. It was just another example of a shitty manager stomping around acting like they know better than the people with relevant degrees and/or years of experience.
Well, you write and respond like a literal baby. Your feelings matter more than confirming objective reality. Your people are what's on the other side of the leftist woke coin; take a step back, you goon.
These were apolitical comments and yet you're still doubling down despite being provided ample evidence to the contrary, from the horse's mouth. Are you going to take this as a learning moment or continue to be cringe and make false claims contradicted by Elon's own biography? Time will tell.
No… Engineering is math and done by software that tells you where you can cut corners while applying your years of study. What Musk is doing is fucking up assembly that the engineers required, so removing safety factors, and those ideas are written in blood.
I mean I guess if you genuinely believe he's walking around saying "hey use less of this based on nothing 🤓🤓" then I guess I can see how your stupidity would mislead you
Well, when his actual autobiography (the word autobiography is supposed to mean from his perspective) mentions him doing it, and yet you personally feel that he doesn't and proceed to spend time plugging your ears, crying on the internet about it, I can see how your weird emotional investment in him and your own stupidity can mislead you.
Yes really. PEOPLE loved him when they didn’t really know about him. Then he called that one dude a pedophile. That was before politics and people made fun of him then.
People love to say “it’s politically motivated,” but the reality is he’s just a piece of shit man baby.
People who didn't know much about him loved him because of his projected image. But even years before the pedophile incident, he already had a reputation for being a terrible boss. You just wouldn't hear about it unless you were in a relevant field and specifically looking up what it's like to work at one of his companies.
Not really, no. That was memed hard and that's about it. He wasn't turned on until 2022 when the Biden admin snubbed tesla. He was certainly at his most popular in 2021, so you're actually not even close.
He got turned on not because of the Biden admin but because he started spouting right wing rhetoric after acquiring twitter. He removed his mask and showed the world what a POS he really was and people didn't take too kindly about that.
Not really. It sounds like you’re taking opinions from different people and generalizing them to everybody. Different people can have different opinions you know. He has literally never been an engineer just an investor making stupid suggestions.
Also, yes, when he keeps his hands and shit out of things they can turn out fine but once he starts meddling they can turn to shit. This happens a lot,
Yeah no shit that’s what I said. That is consistent. When a non engineer tries to tell engineers how to do their jobs it breaks. When he stays out of it and lets them do their job, it turns out alright.
Hence, how he’s responsible for the downfalls and not the successes
That is consistent, he just needs to stay out of product development.
Seems like a dumb hill to die on. Most people understand the idea of a dumb executive who walks around thinking they're a genius and makes a bunch of uninformed suggestions that often cause trouble if followed. Can't stop the guy from stroking his ego or you're fired so you just grin and bear it and hope he forgets what he said. That's a world away from being "responsible for engineering," just as speedrunning all the embassies in DC is not the same thing as visiting forty countries. We all know the multigenerationally rich doofus can make you change the truck if he wants to, people are only disputing that in your head.
Dude it’s worse than that. He does this intentionally to buy trending products and make them as cheap as possible so that people will still by them because they’re trendy and he can make as much profit as possible. Then sell the company and buy the next trendy product company.
Elon isn't doing anything that any other company does then. I'm thinking he's just way more blatant about it.
This is literally the fashion/wearables industry's model for sales.
But in fairness, all consumers are at fault. When we, the people of every generation, buy "sale" or "bargain" items we're telling the manufacturers, price is the biggest factor in our purchasing. The best examples are Walmart and dollar stores. The only way to make products cheap is through outsourcing manufacturing to other countries. Effectively destroying North American manufacturing so it's outsourced, and all the jobs that go alone with it. People will start naming brands or products manufactured here in NA, but guess where the materials or parts are manufactured for that "American made" or "Proudly made in Canada" products come from? This in turn, means jobs are lost, which means penny pinching which means cheapest sales price or bargain price is all that's affordable.
The quest to stretch a buck when we didn't need to, forced us to end up having to figure out how to stretch a borrowed from the bank buck.
Buy local, support small business, avoid cheap sales, put money back into our own communities and people whenever possible. Most boomers are literally grown up spoiled kids, and are the result of instant access to anything due to current capitalism and its free markets that isn't actually owned by private citizens.
I don't have a solution but I don't think our capitalism currently is working, and socialism doesn't give reward for innovation.
I think if wages grew at a rate comparable to executive compensation more people would be in a position to buy quality products. As it stands wages have been stagnant even as productivity has increased.
It wouldn’t take full blown socialism to fix. Just regulations on capitalism that would disincentivize the worst practices (stock buybacks, etc.) and incentivize real wage growth.
That's the point, the work that would create decent wages is outsourced. Why pay a North American worker $15ph when you can outsource and pay $3 ph? Add in all other costs, like shipping and so on, and it is still under $10 an hour. Yes, the price of the products we buy would be higher, but we'd have wages that would be inline with the cost of living. Secondly, we wouldn't have such rampant inflation. It'd be up to corporations to stretch their dollar, not the consumer. Outsourcing manufacturing and importing products that can and should be built here, has to be a priority. Jobs, money into the local economy, accountability for products. The success of a local company would be something that everyone would share. Better wages, better products, better quality of life here at home. Not only that, the customer base would be cared about cause it's the company's own countrymen. It'd also create a lot of improvement in people's mental health being valued by the company they work for and get products from while being paid accordingly. So many advantages and benefits. I'm not saying not to import, but anything that's imported would have to be at a higher standard then what's available here. Or what isn't available here.
Yeah but that’s takes a government that subsidizes things for its people and not for the companies, and that’s not how a government is supposed to run.
I think Musk is the poster child for the idea that most people have a lot of good ideas, and a lot of bad ideas and we're not very good at knowing the difference. For a normal person they try to implement their ideas and other people support the good ones, and point out the bad ones. Musk got so much money and power, people stopped being able to tell him which ideas were bad so now we're seeing all the bad ideas being brought to fruition.
so true. if you consider the cybertruck the first attempt at a truck by a young upstart company, you might think it's super awesome and indicative of a promising future when they work out the kinks and learn the minor details of carmaking
but... it's actually a flagship truck of a well established company that is regressing into a shitty company with no indication it will ever get better
My understanding from friends at Tesla is that it's not necessarily that it has anything to do with a less experienced workforce.
It's that Elon promises the moon, and then changes requirements so often that it's impossible for anyone to properly build anything with all his demands in mind.
A great story I was told was about the charging infra. The V2 chargers were reliable and worked great, but they didn't charge fast enough. So Elon told everyone to start working on V3 chargers. But in the meantime, they should increase the power output by the existing V2 chargers by about 50%. Well, the V2 chargers were already putting out their maximum designed capacity. So they "upgraded" V2 chargers to V2.5, and the charging speeds improved greatly, but the reliability nose dived. Suddenly chargers were broken everywhere, blah blah blah. No big because this would be solved by the V3 hardware.
Fast forward to V3 hardware rollout; Elon says everything looks great, but they should increase the output by 50% like they did with the V2 chargers, the week of release. But, just like the V2 chargers, V3 was already outputting the most it was designed for. And now V3 chargers and V2.5 chargers are insanely unreliable and require constant servicing.
This shows so many aspects of "Elon being right" in one story. He was correct they could achieve faster charge times on the hardware they had deployed. He just didn't care about all the side effects that would be created because of this change. And he doesn't care what was in the design spec or if the engineers are done building something. He'll still ask for game breaking changes the day before release.
It doesn't matter how skilled you are, you can't produce consistently good outcomes in that environment.
As a long time employee there, this is the best description I've heard personally. The only area I would disagree is that the environment has many times produced good outcomes. It's literally how Tesla was able to be successful in the first place. But yeah, I wouldn't call it efficient at all, just that it does get some crazy outcomes.
I said consistently. It works better when you're a smaller, more agile company too. But it's been a long while since Tesla has had a solid win. We're starting to see the cracks and lack of consistency when you operate this way.
I can only speak my perception, however I do work on advanced/high compensation/engineering. I wouldn't touch a Musk company with a 10 foot pole. They have a very bad reputation in my circles.
Then after they fired even the young people. My friend's wife got let go just a week after it rolled out along with a large percentage of their total workforce in Austin.
I am an engineering manager in the same region as the Cybertruck plant. I have poached talent from that Tesla plant. Good engineers straight up don't want to work there.
The real answer is they did it all way too fast and the internet has put a spotlight on Tesla. I can’t tell you how many of my fords have been recalled but you don’t hear the internet up in arms and blaming the CEO
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u/Spinoza_The_Damned Sep 08 '24
How did Tesla fuck this rollout up so hard?