[somethoughts]

I would say usually this is deftly handled at other tech companies (MSFT, AAPL, Netflix, Facebook, Google) by outsourcing all meal preparation, cleaning services, security, low level IT, contract manufacturing to other companies. That way there is not a separate class within the same company. This works most of the time to not create a press $*$!storm.

The challenge for Elon (and Bezos/Jassy) is that his two of his companies rely on physical labor and can't outsource the physical part but still need tech talent that could otherwise WFH.

I don't envy him or Bezos/Jassy...

If you don't say stuff like this you have folks even on the tech side who will protest (i.e. TBray of AWS VP).

"I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of COVID-19," he wrote.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-engineer-resigned-tre...

[kqr]

Classic bureaucrat response.

"People are getting annoyed by these implicit class differences in our organisation, what do we do?"

"Let's encode them explicitly in the contracts. Then we can blame it on the contracts and pretend it's out of our control!"

[rover0]

The jobmarket is "unfair", we all have different conditions and earn a different wages. Suddenly when Musk hates WFH he cares about fairness?

[somethoughts]

I think its important to realize that Elon's smart enough to realize that part of his job is performative - for his primary investors/faithful (i.e. Cathie Wood, Tesla Daily, Hyperchange, Ross Gerber).

They want Tesla to maintain that original "Elon sleeping under desks", all hands on deck, Tesla hunger of yore. To them - they probably were concerned about the design teams getting to soft from WFH and getting uppity.

[marcus_holmes]

Also a symptom of that management style is measuring input not outcomes.

A star worker for them is someone who works 16 hours a day, adds 10K lines of code and sleeps under their desk. Not someone who goes for a long walk in the park while thinking deeply about the problem, and then spends half an hour at the keyboard refactoring to remove 1000 lines of code and clear a major performance bottleneck.

Elon may be performing for his shareholders, but if he was actually smart he'd be informing them. It's notable how many of the actually-smart rockstar CEO's didn't seem to care what their shareholders thought.

[saagarjha]

Contractors are treated pretty poorly at those companies

[somethoughts]

Agree - definitely is still an issue - mostly noticing that introducing outsourcing and badge levels/colors seems to make it less press-worthy.

[Kbelicius]

> That way there is not a separate class within the same company.

No, you've now created an even "lower" class within the company.