So that Elon Musk email leaked over the weekend and by yesterday it was everywhere. The gist, if you somehow missed it: he told Tesla staff that anyone doing remote work needs to be in an office a minimum of 40 hours a week, and if that's not happening, "we will assume you have resigned." Not "please," not "we'd love to see more of you," just a flat ultimatum sent out at what I assume was 2am his time given the guy's posting schedule.
I've been mulling this over since I read it and I don't think it's really about productivity at all. It reads like a guy who is bored of hearing the phrase "hybrid work model" and wants to be the one company that just says no. Which, fine, it's his company, he can run it how he wants. But the framing bugs me. He's basically saying if you're not senior enough to have an office you don't get input, and that pretending to work is somehow easier at home than at a desk in Fremont. I'd argue the opposite is true for a lot of jobs. Pretending to work in an open office with someone reading over your shoulder is a whole skill set I perfected around 2015 and never want to use again.
I work remote, mostly, and I'm not going to pretend I've never had a slow Tuesday where I did two loads of laundry between Slack messages. But I've also had slow Tuesdays in an office where I did nothing but refresh Hacker News and pretend to take notes in a meeting that could've been an email. Location isn't the variable that matters. Whether the work itself is well-scoped is the variable that matters, and no email full of capital letters is going to fix bad scoping.
What actually got me was the follow-up bit, where he said if people want to do remote work they should go work somewhere else, and added something like "this is not a remote-easy environment" for exempt employees. Fine, be honest about it up front then, during the interview, not eighteen months into someone's tenure when they've already moved, bought furniture for a home office, maybe switched their kid's school district. That's the part that feels genuinely careless to me, not the office preference itself.
I'll say this too: I don't think this is going to age particularly well, and I say that as someone who has zero stock in either direction. The labor market right now still has enough leverage on the employee side that a mandate like this mostly just filters for who's desperate enough to stay. Whether that's the pool of people you want building a car company is a separate question I don't have to answer, thankfully, because I don't run one.
Small tangent since I'm already ranting: my own home office setup right now is a card table and a monitor propped on two hardcover books because my desk hasn't shipped yet. It's not great. I'm not saying remote work is automatically better just because I prefer typing this from my kitchen in sweatpants at 11pm on a Tuesday, which, yes, is happening right now. I'm saying the decision should be made based on what the actual job needs, not on whichever executive had the most annoying commute that morning.
Also, quick unrelated note before I forget: WWDC kicks off next Monday, June 6th, and I'm curious whether we get real hardware news or just another hour of software slides with a soundtrack that sounds like a car commercial. My money's on the latter, with maybe a new MacBook Air teased at the very end because Apple loves doing that. I'll write something up once it actually happens instead of guessing further, since guessing about Apple keynotes is a game everyone loses eventually.
Anyway. If your company is about to send you a version of this email, I'd love to hear about it. I have a feeling this isn't the last one of these we see this year.