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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31347 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

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Removing unnecessary people is in fact the key to Elon's efficiency. In the biography, he is cruel to his staff and it seems to be effective. He is constantly firing key staff the moment they start to rest on their laurels. No one is irreplaceable.

Furthermore, his denial of praise seems to motivate people to perform at a level that would otherwise be impossible. It's the same sort of philosophy employed by Asian tiger moms and the band director from the movie "Whiplash". Never say good job.

At some place like the Department of Education, the cuts would be deep. People don't choose that job unless they are in it for an easy paycheck. But, deep in the bowels of the department, there are probably still some young people who would relish the chance for rapid advancement once the cruft has been removed.

Removing unnecessary people is in fact the key to Elon's efficiency. In the biography, he is cruel to his staff and it seems to be effective. He is constantly firing key staff the moment they start to rest on their laurels. No one is irreplaceable.

How many times does Elon fire someone, regret it, ask for them back, and they come back? He fired a lot of Twitter people and it mostly still works, but I can't see shit without logging in and that smells like a load shedding strategy to me.

No one is irreplaceable, but that doesn't mean that you can fire anyone and everyone with no impact on operations.

But, deep in the bowels of the department, there are probably still some young people who would relish the chance for rapid advancement once the cruft has been removed.

Certainly. The trick is to not fire those guys too.

He fired a lot of Twitter people and it mostly still works, but I can't see shit without logging in and that smells like a load shedding strategy to me.

I wonder if it was also to try to get people to get an account, instead of merely lurking? That would raise engagement with the platform. (I know people who have done so, though I've stubbornly stuck to what's left of nitter for now.)

How many times does Elon fire someone, regret it, ask for them back, and they come back?

I think it actually happens a bit. I read the book awhile ago, but I remember a case of this exact thing happening. The person had gone to another company and was bored so came back despite Elon being a dick.

The trick to Elon's efficiency is to cut all the dead wood and half the live wood, going all the way to failure, and then adding back the necessary parts. And... it works.

It's the same sort of philosophy employed by Asian tiger moms and the band director from the movie "Whiplash". Never say good job.

The tiger-mom kid who was a violin virtuoso wound up quitting the instrument because of the pressure, which is one argument against a Whiplash-style approach.

Yeah, probably a bad idea to try this with your kids since replacement cost is high.

But enforcing it on everyone else, that’s fine?

I’m sympathetic to Elon’s management style, and I give it credit for a lot of his results, but I would be miserable working at SpaceX. Suddenly importing that culture to the nation’s largest employer would be a disaster. The civil service isn’t supposed to be populated by rockstar engineers doing the impossible. It’s not supposed to be high-risk, high-reward at all.

The government is rarely in the business of visionary promises, so the upside is capped. It doesn’t have long tails for compensation, so it’s not going to attract top talent. There’s not much room for out-of-the-box solutions, so the potential savings are mostly careful execution. There’s a case for handing that over to Jeff Bezos or the ghost of Sam Walton, but Elon Musk? Not my first pick.

Top people at SpaceX will cash out tens of millions of dollars if it goes public at its current valuation. The most he can offer at the Department of Education is what, $150k and a nice pension?

The most he can offer at the Department of Education is what, $150k and a nice pension?

Yes, but he could offer status. The low-level drones are stuck behind 12 layers of bureaucracy. They can't advance until someone retires. Or... is fired.

Change offers opportunity. J Edgar Hoover was head of the FBI at age 29.

Possibly not even the pension if people stop trusting the government to live up to it's long term financial obligations.

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