It is not news that many engineering jobs have demanding deadlines. Apart from the overwhelming quantity of the tasks, the urgency to make accomplishments and meet goals is present in almost any work in engineering. Especially when there are stakeholders and clients to please.
While cost is an important consideration, time is more valuable because it cannot be bought. Under circumstances that there is not so much time to finish a project, engineers are forced to stay in the workplace and render overtime work.
There are cases that that will not be enough. Sometimes, engineers have to work on a project the moment they wake up until the last minute before they sleep. Because there are deadlines to meet.
For this, they are obliged to sleep at the office.
Is this a good thing? No, as it does not really offer that work-life balance. Working long hours is already a punishment, more so dedicating all of the engineers’ time in a day all for work only.
But is it necessary? Yes, if you ask Elon Musk. Because he has been doing that now for his electric car company.
Reports say that Musk’s Tesla has fallen behind on the company’s production goals for the $35,000 Model 3. By September, the target was more than 1,500 electric cars. However, they were only able to manufacture 260 of them in the third quarter.
Wanting to closely monitor the production process and operations, the CEO decided to sleep at the Gigafactory in Nevada if necessary. He shared in the company’s quarterly earnings call that despite having a cold, he still pushed this to keep up with the company’s production goals.
Photo by Automobile Magazine
This is what the Musk leadership is like: always on the go.
“I always move my desk to wherever – I don’t really have a desk actually – I move myself to wherever the biggest problem is in Tesla. I really believe that one should lead from the front lines, and that’s why I’m here,” he said during the earnings call.
Moreover, Musk shared that he has been overseeing the rewriting of the software in the past four weeks, and spent late night and early mornings on the floor of the factory repairing the processes for battery production.
And how he is up for a new goal: produce 5,000 Model 3s every week. A little ambitious considering their production rate right now, but according to him, this will happen in March.
Source: Entrepreneur
