Musk Firing Supercharger Team Was Badly Handled But Might Have Been Correct
Supercharger division is a steady state deployment business now, not a Silicon Valley fail fast-to-succeed startup
A great deal of digital ink has been spilled on Tesla laying off a lot of its Supercharger team recently. I’m not in the business of commenting on Tesla and Musk’s every twitch and tweet, so I don’t have fourteen hot takes already. But I have a hypothesis and it involves camels, sponges, spectators, and transitions.
Like a lot of people who grew up outside of the affluent trust-fund set, I have a broad variety of experience to draw on from my career. One of my many part-time jobs to pay for education, rent, and food was being an officer in the Canadian military reserves. An early professional job was running logistical deployments of telecommunications and computer systems for one of Canada’s major banks, the largest of which was 32,000 devices over 1,400 physical locations in 10 months.
Another part of my career was assisting corporations’ information technology divisions to undergo the spasms of transformation that they require every eight to twelve years with major changes in mergers, deployments of major new systems, or adoption of new technologies and paradigms. Another…
