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
Once, I had to specify HMI of air traffic controllers for a simulation. The controllers have described their hmi in meetings, then I have sent them the document to review, then I went to an ATC center to watch controllers. I was amazed by the number and importance of differences between my reviewed document and reality. Many details that seem obvious for the final user may cause drastic changes for the developer.
> 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
This is not how things work in big companies. You should have contacted you boss, discuss with him of the improvement suggestions and your plan, so that he may contact the sales boss, and present it to him, emphasizing the performance improvements that could be brought, and, after two of three long and boring meetings, start to schedule a volunteer program where you would monitor specific parts of someone's job. All of this will require weeks (or months) of political discussions, carefully crafted powerpoints, subtle emails that will attempt to balance political interests of each parties, and, if you are smart enough to put key managers ego on a pedestal, your project may succeed (and of course you're probably never going to be credited for that)
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.
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
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.
Exactly. The sales manager most likely perceived me as a threat. If I come in & automate her job she could be out of work. Like a bank teller afraid of being replaced by an ATM so they get in the engineer's way & cause drama.
Instead she could have politely introduced herself as the sales manager, asked what I was doing & offered to help, like write up a report of what the problems were. I would have thanked her & gone back to coding at my desk while I await her report. I didn't even know she existed, let alone intend to threaten her.
By the way the employee didnt complain. They were happy to have someone fixing their companies app. The sales manager was watching from afar with dissent. Plus I tried asking the programming manager about the app first, so he could follow company hierarchy. He was too busy playing video games on his PC & just shrugged his shoulders. My choices were basically slack off like him, snitch on him to the CEO, or go get the answer elsewhere. The latter seemed most appropriate.
He didn't do that. He asked permission to do it. It takes a particularly shitty mindset to respond to that by sneaking around behind someone's back and complaining to his boss.
The manager's response is the sort of thing that would lead to him "working for a different company", according to the doctrine set out in Musk's email.
I'd imagine he has an impressively comprehensive team around him ensuring he doesn't need to focus on anything other than his work.
That said, working over 14 hours per day 7 days a week is implausible to me. Maybe in short bursts but I doubt he does that for any stretch of time.
The Elon Musk PR machine & cult of public enthusiasm is a massive business asset. When you're in the business of selling dreams to investors and employees pushing themselves to the limit this type of 'fact' is going to get thrown around.
'Work' can include things like travel and lunches. Both of which can be downtime but are classed as 'work'.
Overall its hard to believe considering he also has Space x and other investments and im suresomeone is streching the truth. But I dont doubt the guy lives and breaths his work.
some executives never stop working, even when not on site they consider time spent solving problems in their head or sitting at their computer/tablet/etc as work.
myself I have been around some six to six executives who even at parties talk shop. hell we used to joke that when one went on vacation it only made his emails longer
The lights in comrade muskovices office never go out. He is watching out for us, as we sleep!
I sometimes wonder, whether such a hyped personality could be completely synthesized. Just a actor and a really good propaganda show. And if all those morons going along for the ride, would learn from that being revealed.
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.
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.
In my personaly anecdotal experience, it eventulally leads to burnout, health and relationship problems. After doing two startups and working way too much for way too little, I now strongly believe in a healthy work-life balance. Hell, I’m looking at reducing my worked hours (for less pay) because I now value my non-work free time much much more than I did before.
Yes you have to find balance. It might be 100 hours one week & 10 hours the next. I work just as much as everyone else over time, it just comes in bursts of creativity. Some light bulb goes off & then I can't sleep until I have my idea working.
Ah, bursts of creativity/activity I can understand and do myself. I suppose my point is more that its not sustainable to work such long hours, not that it can’t be done successfully every so often without long term problems :)
I also find that sometimes “my time” looks an awful lot like work in the sense that I might do very similar things (hey, I enjoy programming!), the difference is that one is done on my terms, when and how I want and I do it to relax, have fun or otherwise do something I want, while the other is something I do because I have to.
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.
I mean technically if you are available to answer phone calls or emails, I think we should consider you are "working". I mean it is ridiculous to pay you by the hour at that point but if I didn't have to pay you by the hour, that's the criteria I'd use.
I think I read somewhere that somewhere in France or Germany some city or some department/province said you can't require your employees to promptly respond to emails outside of their work hours (I imagine they don't have "at-will" employment).
I'm on salary. But I've gotten numerous raises & bonuses. I "front" the work, then ask for raises later. If I don't get the raise, I move onto the next company. Eventually I found a job willing pay more for increased output & stuck with it.
Elon is cool and all, but his fanboys are making the whole thing really ridiculous. Btw, it might even be true, but can we falsify it? Exactly as in religion (to give it in Karl Popper's terms).
I recently analysed a load of my time tracking data.[1] I only managed to get up to 11h37m per day when I'm travelling for work. That includes flights as 'work'.
It does seem pretty unlikely unless he's counting Networking/social type events in the evenings and stuff.
The ability to work uninterrupted is a privilege. First time sink is family, spouses, partners, kids, friends and social obligations. Take 2 hours minimum.
Organizing food and eating - another 2 hours. If cooking add an hour to that so 3 hours for food.
For cleaning and basic home maintenance - minimum 1 hour. Personal hygiene - add an hour so total 2 hours.
Commuting if necessary - 1 hour minimum.
Add 8 hours or let's be harder and take 6 hours for sleep. That's a total of 14 hours that can't be negotiated leaving you with 10 hours for work.
Given the brain will not operate at that stretch you need distraction, so web, tv, books, games, movies - another 2-3 hours. So 7-8 hours seems to the the maximum any human being can work.
If you don't have family and friends and someone takes care of food and maintenance you can get an additional 4 hours. So anything beyond 10-12 hours seems physically impossible, and this is with 6 hours sleep, no family and all responsibilities taken care of.
I doubt food magically appears on your plate? You seem to have left out the 'Organizing food' part of the eating entry above which includes the time required to get the food.
You either have to source food from markets and cook it, have it cooked, eat at a restaurant or order out, for breakfast, lunch and dinner. All this takes time as does time to actually eat the food.
If you have a family multiply the time required. If you can do all the above in less than 3 hours it's worth sharing.
You don't think someone with the net worth of Elon Musk and his focus on productivity doesn't have assistants for that? Really!?
Even still, I source my own food, cook it, and eat it three times a day and don't spend 3hrs/day every day doing so (and those who know me know I cook pretty fancy meals).
Did you read the original comment? It rather explicitly states if you have people taking care of things you get more time. I really don't see the point of your continuous misrepresentation.
The point was about privilege and the average person. Obviously you will have more time if you have people taking care of things for you or are Usain Bolt with food like yourself, but this does not apply to the average person.
If they had the same privilege as Musk they too can work 14 hours a day so it's not noteworthy in any particular way.
Yes, I did read the original comment. 95% of the comment was made up numbers with one sentence thrown in for good measure:
> The ability to work uninterrupted is a privilege.
Yes, it is a privilege, but that doesn't negate that the rest of the post is completely false conjecture by one person.
> That's a total of 14 hours that can't be negotiated
If it can't be negotiated, then why do many people do it, especially ones who are more well off financially?
> 10 hours for work. Given the brain will not operate at that stretch you need distraction, so web, tv, books, games, movies - another 2-3 hours. So 7-8 hours seems to the the maximum any human being can work.
I'm not sure why I am even bothering to reply to that, but if you think that's true then honestly we aren't having an intelligent debate and so my time is being wasted.
> So anything beyond 10-12 hours [working] seems physically impossible
Or, you know, eat things that are quick to prepare. If I am at home[1] spend about 40 minutes per week on food shopping and can prepare a simple (perhaps boring) meal in 5 minutes and eat it in 10 or multitask while eating.
[1] When not at home, eg in the office, then I spend a lot more time getting/eating lunch, but its generally to get away from work so I would spend the time away from work anyway.
The original comment is about privilege and the average person. It explicitly states if you have people taking care of things for you, you get more time.
That's why working interrupted is a privilege, as other people take care of necessities for you. Elon musk working 14 hours is not anything special if he has people doing things for him, the average person does not have this privilege and anyone with similar privilege can do the same thing.
In the past I've seen articles claiming Musk works while spending time with his kids, while they are attended by nannies. I doubt he sources his own food.
I still question those numbers, and even more so whether or not he can work effectively for that amount of time, though.
> I still question those numbers, and even more so whether or not he can work effectively for that amount of time, though.
I agree completely with you here, the numbers are obviously padded vs what many normally think is "work". But the reality is that many actually work far more hours per day than they realize if the use a similar definition of "work" as what's used for Musk's number here. How many of us lay in bed thinking about a tough work problem? While quickly snarfing down food sitting at your desk, are you not reading emails or similar? Do you go to networking events and talk business? That's all "work" technically if you're being liberal with the definition (and honestly, it's not unreasonable to call that "work").
I doubt all that time is 100% focus - that number probably includes business lunches, driving to PR gigs (during which he might read something work related), etc.
If you count all that stuff then the average person is probably working more than 8 hours too.
The proportion of time Musk devotes to each company is derived from a description he gave at Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting in June 2017. "The Boring Company is maybe 2 percent of my time, Neuralink 3-5 percent, Open AI another couple percent,” Musk said. The rest is split almost evenly between Tesla and SpaceX, he said, but “slightly more Tesla—it’s like a drama magnet."
his job there is to think, talk and send emails. that's doable 16 hours a day (minus some disruptions) for average person and i don't think Elon is average.
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?
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.
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
I think he is expecting people to have some critical thinking to not starting to send emails to a VP just for the sake of sending emails to a VP.
Let's say you are implementing the UI for the car's dashboard and you think it would be super cool to have the color of the cars' model in the UI matching the exact color the customer chose for the car. Maybe you could cut all the middle points of communication and directly email the guys that handle the paint job to know the exact color values that they use to paint the car.
Of course that you wouldn't email Elon himself to do this, it would be pointless.
With one exception, I have only worked in companies where this has been the norm. It's never been an explicit rule. It seems to me that it happens naturally unless culture is built to prevent it.
The fact Elon decided to send an email might be an indication that one or more people implicitly or explicitly have punished others for communicating.
This is easy for the people in high positions -- the vast majority of these types of emails are simply forwarded to the appropriate underling, with only the implicit comment "please handle this".
Many senior managers are little more than human message routers.
I think you've missed the main point of this rule. The rule enables you to communicate across the hierarchy, instead of having to traverse it.
For example: you can work directly with someone at the same level as you in another department without having to traverse the hierarchy. This is actually the opposite of the problem you highlight, as traversing the hierarchy often creates choke-points in senior management as they have to co-ordinate everything going through them.
Of course, it's good to keep management informed of important issues, but that's what the CC line is for!
Just because he receives emails doesn't mean he'll answer them all. He probably tries to fill some quota of 10 emails a day or something, then moves on to other things. As an employee, you would hopefully have the common sense to not email him about trivial matters anyway.
The other rule that helps with this is to train employees to always put the conclusion at the top of the email. And it should fit in a short sentence. Give me the bottom line first and I can get through a lot of emails.
I very rarely need all the details someone thinks are important in order to make a decision.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
I often wish people would avoid most acronyms completely, especially in online discussions. Sure, you assume I know what some acronym means and it may be incredibly obvious to you, but especially when there’s a global audience, it can be very hard and not all acronyms are easily googled (looking at you, gaming community and game name abbreviations...)
I think its fine to use acronyms in a document if you always write it out fully the first timem or, better yet, have a glossary of acronyms used.
We've suffered a little from this and therefore put a lot of effort into stopping and using full terms, with all team members responsible for calling out use of acronyms. Anecdotally, seeing new team members being onboarded before and after the push, I think it's making a solid difference.
