He obviously never heard of Power Naps. Welfare offices in Massachusetts had a cubicle set aside with a cot in it since the 1980s. Being a billionaire I guess a full bedroom at the offices were the first thing to come to mind for him.
BTW, I’m not sure what the politically correct term for Welfare offices is now. That’s what the employees, clients and everyone else called them back then.
I guess bedrooms in the office is slightly better than spiking the water with amphetamines…
Stop giving him ideas. He has people who read anything with his name associated with it.
Reinventing things that already exist is totally on-brand for Musk.
Perot underestimated the value of hostages.
Just to refresh my memory, I looked him up in Wikipedia (I was already a registered voter for over a decade before his candidacy for president), and I really really do not remember him saying this:
I only heard about the visas yesterday, and it sucks mightily.
I do have to say that most of the folks I worked with at EDS and Perot Systems were white, male US citizens. We women were told by our class manager - also a woman, go figure! - that they found women like to leave the company after 5 years to have babies.
Perot did have hostages, though. At least for the first 3 years with EDS. We had to sign a promissory note that we’d repay $3,000 (a large sum in 1982) for the training we got if we left the company before 3 years.
Yeah, Perot was a mixed bag but would have been a horrible president. He was awful to work for. Too used to having to snap his fingers and people would just do his bidding.
That tweet is the first time that I encountered “goblin mode”. I assumed that it meant being “extremely hardcore” (in the Musk sense) and working round the clock.
JFC this is horrible, all of it!
Thanks for the inside story. I had no idea about those promissory notes and it seems somehow illegal. Then again, since you and I have both worked in Texas, we know that Texas is a very “business-friendly” state.
Yeah there seem to be a few differing definitions wandering around.
My techie son says “crunching hard” when he means:
Whatever happened to having real private offices with couches in them?
I didn’t think goblins were into coding. (Maybe Visual Basic?)
eta: D&D goblins are usually cannon fodder, so there’s that.
I might imagine that the use of goblin mode here refers more to the inevitable lack of showers and intake of junk food that would result from these conditions but yeah it’s not quite how that word is used usually.
I’m reminded of another company where they sent the new employees to a sort-of “boot camp.” They’d go there for orientation and the company had its own dorms etc. I don’t know if they actually broke down the new hires and built them back up, but (26 years later) I’ve still never encountered so many type-A personalities in one setting (and I work near, though not in, DC - this was in Austin, which is supposed to be “laid back” but I think their HQ was in IL).
The buildings’ insurance agreement may not allow this either.
And rightly so. There are reasons we have building codes. The twitters are full of asshats complaining that “it’s okay if they sleep and shit on the street, but not if Elon (they’re on a first name basis, of course) provides decent beds.”
The Ghost Ship fire wasn’t even that long ago. It’s insane how quickly people forget.
That final sentence ends, “…80 to 100 people who were there, 36 were killed.”
While technically true, the reality of this is not nearly so dire. I worked in the US on H1Bs for a decade (the six years you’re allowed, plus four years of extensions due to green card processing delays).
During that time I lost my job more than once. There are two scenarios:
You get a new job right away because it’s tech and everyone is hiring all the time. Even in the doldrums of the 2000s this was rarely an issue.
It takes longer to find a job and thus your new employer has to get a new H1B from scratch. This can take up to six months (which is what happened to me once). However INS does not kick in your door and deport you. Nothing happens. You keep living your life in the US and when the new visa comes in, you have to redo an “official” entry. In my case it meant flying to Vancouver, getting off the plane, walking over three gates and getting back on a plane back to San Francisco.
I’m not defending Twitter, Musk, or tech companies at all here. I fled that whole industry and my only regret is not doing it sooner. I just want to be clear though that tech employees have a lot of privilege with regard to visa status and are not under serious threat of deportation the way migrant farm workers and other groups are.
For H1B visa-overstayers, INS really gives no fucks.
Tech companies figured out that the second biggest line item on their overhead (after salaries) was square footage. Thus the “open concept” office was born with a cover story about “communication” when really it’s about cramming warm bodies into the tightest possible space. The executives never gave up their offices, of course, and they pocketed the extra profits from rent reduction.
Many tech companies start out with the execs on the floor with the rest of us, in a show of solidarity. It never lasts though. They decide they need an office because they need quiet and focus for their jobs. Gee…. yah think? Then they take over a conference room. This happened at literally every single tech company I worked for in 25 years in the Valley.
How many lines of Building Code per day does the City of San Francisco generate? Can we be sure it is enough to earn Elon’s respect?
