Why Musk is winning
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I've worked for three corporations in three separate industries(retail, food service, and manufacturing). At all three, I've seen the same three tightly interwoven problems: lack of communication, lack of coordination, and poor management.
I suspect what happens over time is people are expected to get promoted, or they're great kiss asses, so they do, in spite of making terrible managers. It's a sad reality, but yeah, some people are great workers, but terrible managers, just the way things go.
What then happens is those terrible managers realize they're shit at their new position and hide the fact by keeping garbage employees on as a cover, while pushing the people who are actually good at their jobs extra hard so they still keep their numbers in an 'acceptable' range that keeps the hire ups off their asses.
The problem persists over time as the company expands, and eventually you end up with a company full of workers who are lazy as sin, managers who are incompetent/lazy, and all the people who are worth a shit being driven off or quitting from the extra workload dumped on them by the shit heels they have to deal with.
If Musk has any sense, he'll go back through the old employees who quit long before he came on board and see if any of them are worth bringing back...
This is really a problem with the one size fits all pay structure almost all businesses use. Where instead of paying based on work or productivity, you are exclusively paid based on seniority and "how many people are under you."
So someone who dominates the job will get paid the same as the stoner barely coherent for his entire shift. But the company wants to reward him for his years of work and make sure he is paid enough to want to stay, so he is forced into management as that's the only way to accomplish that task short of literally telling him to wait for years. And there his skills are now far less used because he is now 50% working and 50% mangerial bullshit, instead of dedicating himself 100% to his task.
Its one area where I've seen the cubicle/tech industry actually do better. Where some companies will hand out bonuses, both pay and benefits, for quick and effective launches of new products. My buddy who used to work for TMobile would get visa cards with thousands of dollars every time his group pushed out a patch before the deadline.
The problem is this doesn't work.
Measuring fine grained productivity goes one of two ways:
what they actually measuring is ass kissing and wasting time faking productivity, or
the company turns into a burn-and-churn environment that burns out the people doing the work, once again the advantage goes to people in unmeasurable roles
You're right when it comes to office jobs, but that's less applicable to something like factory work. Also contractors seem to work out just fine getting paid for product. We're seeing more gig work by people who don't want the typical office BS.
I was going to add blue collar and laborers but they are pretty damned good at faking productivity too. Then they get a union and don't even have to fake it.
Well I'm sure glad in the current model ass kissing, faking productivity, and mass burn out aren't common issues regardless. Plenty already reach management doing only the first two in a huge chunk of industries already meaning we are already doing it with extra steps.