[lake_vincent]

Indeed. For example, Musk fancies himself a champion of "hard work" but what he fails to realize is that humans have not actually merged with robots yet, and we still have human needs.

If innovation and brilliant thinking are part of your brand, you actually get higher quality work, sustained over a longer period of time, if you actually back off on the whip-cracking and just give people what they need to produce great work.

You get slightly slower growth, but more area under the curve in the long run.

[ohgodplsno]

>For example, Musk fancies himself a champion of "hard work"

And Musk is the perfect example of "do as I say, not as I do", as he sends teams into a death march of insane hours, wherever he is, while he's shitposting on Twitter from his multi million dollar house paid for by company funds and pretending he's doing 120 hour work weeks

[jjtheblunt]

Maybe he realizes that, and is just a jackass.

[whatwherewhy]

Where are the nice bosses of top tech companies? Maybe that's how you build a big tech company.

[Goronmon]

I think there is a middle area between being a "nice boss" and being a boss who calls out internal engineering implementation concerns (rightly or not) on Twitter. And then fire people who disagree in a response.

[whatwherewhy]

Well, Gates is an asshole, Jobs was an asshole - where's the middleground? Maybe niceness leads to [business] mediocrity.

[eesmith]

Hewlett and Packard were relatively low on the asshole scale, at least for their employees. [1]

Early support for company health insurance, flextime, work-from-home, free coffee breaks, decentralized decision making, etc.

See the HP Memory Project at https://www.hpmemoryproject.org for some of the stories. ("Jim Catlin's Packard Story" and Packard's 11 rules, "Bill Hewlett and the HP Medical Plan" for their anonymous payment for medical bills for an employee's premature baby, etc.)

The padlock story at https://www.hpmemoryproject.org/timeline/john_minck/inside_h... is also pretty well-known, and used as an example of promoting institutional trust.

Packard's support for apartheid profits keeps him definitely on the scale.

[1] Probably better if you were a white male not as subject to the "mixture of machismo and misogyny" of early HP - https://www.hpmemoryproject.org/timeline/barbara_waugh/barba... .

[lake_vincent]

Just because the Great Pyramids were built with slavery doesn't mean that slavery is okay, or that there is not a better way to build a pyramid.

[bckr]

The pyramids were not built with slavery

[q-big]

> Just because the Great Pyramids were built with slavery

They weren't build by aliens with alien technology? ;-)

SCNR because we are talking about Elon Musk with his space obsession.

[whatwherewhy]

Don't be absurd, we are not talking about anything comparable to slavery.

I am asking - show me the person who found the better way.

[kevinventullo]

Were Larry and Sergey not considered nice?

[gavindean90]

I don’t think it’s nice or not thing but more a management strategy thing. Hard-driving can be great at extracting value from an organization but it isn’t as effective at exploring potential as other management styles.

[Consultant32452]

I suspect the world's wealthiest man knows how to grow a business better than either of us.

[youngtaff]

And farm government subsidies better than the rest of us

[ben_w]

At that scale, isn't that a required part of it?

(Thinking of how much the Artemis cost vs. total SpaceX subsidy here, but subsidies are everywhere and look suspiciously like legalised corruption and/or voter manipulation to me even when I like the thing being subsidised).

[rapsey]

To produce great work you also need some pressure. Otherwise people will get real lazy very quickly.

[htgb]

Counterpoint: open source software, of which there are many great works without anyone being forced or pressured into making it. There are many more ways of getting motivation than applying "some pressure". Indeed, people are inherently curious and motivated, but it can easily be suppressed by environmental factors. In particular "stick and carrot"-type reward systems.

For a (much more) elaborate expansion on this, see the book Drive by Daniel H. Pink.

[jasec57322]

All this musk-style motivation 101 BS is direct from the CIA's manual on domestic espionage - frustration from within.

The means define the ends. If you treat people like shit, or as morons who need BS pressure techniques, you'll get a demoralised company.

Treat people well, set them clear targets and say it without fluff when they're slacking. If you can't tell somebody they're not good enough, you cannot help them to be good enough. None of this psychobabble BS where you're constantly second-guessing in a failed attempt to retain them on the rat-race for the rest of their life. Stop building ratrace companies.

[nonrandomstring]

> Stop building ratrace companies

They build rat-races because they are all still rats at heart. Endemic crisis of leadership and vision bred men who cannot think outside the maze. No amount of climbing extended their horizons or released them from slavery to money and the misery it brings.

[Smoosh]

> released them from slavery to money and the misery it brings

Good point. I often wonder what motivates a billionaire to keep making more money. For most it seems like ego, greed, and inability to rethink their life. I suppose they climbed so high by being relentless and not stopping. This is what makes the example of Yvon Chouinard so interesting.

[rapsey]

You are putting words in my mouth. Pressure can be as simple as a deadline.

[rapsey]

The vast majority of open source done in peoples free time is unfinished and at best of limited use. The serious projects very often have payed developers. The good ones done by unpaid developers have some pressure in terms of expectations by their community or the developers put pressure on themselves to achieve some self goal.

[mfuzzey]

You are quite right that open source done purely in free time usually takes much longer to be "finished" but that is more a question of the time available to spend on it than absence of pressure.

OSS projects that have paid developers often manage to avoid much of the pressure that occurs in closed source.

Some OSS projects like the kernel manage to harness companies as way of funding full time developers without giving them too much say in details or deadlines. A feature ships in Linux when it is ready and accepted by the maintainers and Linus not when some manager says it has to ship.

Of course this works far better for large projects that are essentially a "commons" like the kernel, less so for open source projects where most of the developers work for a single company.

[systemvoltage]

OSS projects are also prone to leadership issues and tend to have "good ol boys" clubs. It's utlimately human nature, OSS or not. See Linus Torvals or some of the things that went on in Rust community. Also, StackOverflow mods that volunteer their free time have so many issues. Wikipedia editors and Reddit moderators. Same.

Putting a OSS lipstick isn't doing any favors to understanding the human nature and how to create a good governance model to keep people happy. I suspect this is never going to be "solved", only solved in one person's views or ideological bias.

[dzhiurgis]

We barely recently got decent open source computers (but not smartphones), now try to imagine a GPL car...

That said it wouldn't it be cool have some sort of open source VW Bug. Stainless steel cyberbug, EV for the people. Low tech, curb lasts whole century, ubiquitous parts.

[randmeerkat]

> That said it wouldn't it be cool have some sort of open source VW Bug. Stainless steel cyberbug, EV for the people. Low tech, curb lasts whole century, ubiquitous parts.

AWS would just fork it, package it as a SaaS, give nothing back to the project and it would then slowly atrophy and cease to exist.

[lake_vincent]

Exactly, which is why I am advocating precisely for giving people what they need. Some people need pressure to perform optimally, others don't. Some people need to put in 80 hours of work per week, others don't. It is simple and humane to approach it this way.

[systemvoltage]

I think motivation is more important. Solving problems should be fun and engaging activity. There are always bad apples literally in every single company no matter how good or faithful their culture. So, there is no way around it.

To give Elon credit, he does try to motivate people. Sleeping on the factory floor, doing more work than his subordinates, inspiring people about grand goals and "anti-bureacratic" philosophy – all contribute to motivation. He sent out an email to Tesla employees that literally said "If a rule becomes a Dilbert joke, then change the rule".

I am trying to steelman Elon's way of governing and personally know several people at SpaceX that are not dying from overwork, but actually happy. I also have a few friends who couldn't stand SpaceX and quit within the first year.