Did the Tesla return to work happen?

By and large yes, people returned to the office however a lot are disgruntled and exceptions to work remotely largely depend on your manager and their ability to push that up the chain as Elon is meant to approve each exception personally. (in practice most of the full-time remote employees already had such exceptions but some newer hires during the pandemic weren't hired under that regime).

However a lot of folks quit but it has less to do with the remote work policy and more to do with a massive options cliff that occurred recently. Once the golden handcuffs came off a lot of folk figured it was time to move on, which is fair given the hell they went through to deliver 3 and Y + the 10x appreciation in their options.

My team at google, we originally told everyone to come and go as they pleased back in February. That seemed the most flexible and the most employee friendly, but when we surveyed the team they didn’t like having no guidance on when they should be in the office.

So we labeled three days “preferred in-office” and made it clear you could still work from home on those days if you wanted. People much prefer this system.

Maybe it was like in my company (big investment bank). The CEO wrote a global mail asking everyone to start coming back to the office - that was 3 months ago and the office is still empty, seems like everybody just kind of ignored it. :-)

Our company (~70 people) has gone to a 3 days in the office Tuesday through Thursday and wfh Monday and Friday . Initially we did pick your 2 wfh days but then I realized what makes being in the office good is being together. So orienting the in office days to be the same for everyone means we have a few days in the middle that people can be together and collaborate and on the edges Monday and Friday remote. It works pretty good - we make some exceptions for people far from the office and of course we have fully remote but I like it it’s created a good balance….

No comment on Tesla but the divergence between big companies and startups on the WFH issue is the first new tangible benefit to working at a startup over a bigco in a while. They never reformed the ridiculous tax treatment of ISOs and AMT. The bull market made RSUs and 500k yearly pay realistic at bigcos even for middling employees.

But bigcos don’t trust their own employees and have to justify their massive capital investments in office space. So there is a real, tangible benefit to startup life over cushy bigco.

There are alot of videos on youtube by ex-tesla agile consultant/teacher/lead 'joe justice' which go into how Tesla factories operate. Its all in the factory... an example he gave was for most people writing software, they are in the factory in a chair w/ a laptop beside the cars.

Edit: as someone pointed out, he was a consultant who worked for a short period. nonetheless, I still think the videos are quite eye opening to how they operate day-to-day (while navigating around NDA in explanations).

Yes. At least partially.

Careful with your wording! "Return to work" annoys the heck out of people who worked hard all pandemic. You probably mean "return to on-site work."

Musk forgot about it because he was too busy with Twitter.