SpaceX has has many firsts to its credit in space exploration, and has alone pushed humanity’s space-faring ambitions forward, but there’s little acknowledgement of how much effort it’s taken to get there.
Elon Musk once had installed cameras near the coffee machines when he discovered that interns were crowding around it waiting to get coffee. “(Elon) once caught some interns waiting in line waiting for a coffee at SpaceX,” investor Keith Rabois said on a podcast. “There was a line of interns piling up around the coffee machine,” he added.
As soon as Musk noticed the long line in front of the coffee machine, he sent a memo to the entire company. Musk asked why interns were wasting their time piling up around the coffee machine. “If you think you have nothing better to do than wait in line, you’re at the wrong company,” Rabois recalled Musk’s memo as saying. But Elon didn’t stop there. “I’m installing cameras to make sure we don’t have lines at the coffee shop,” Musk’s memo reportedly said.
Now most companies don’t bother very much about what their interns do — interns are typically at a company for a short period of time, and companies don’t track their productivity as rigourously as they do for full-time employees. Also, most companies encourage conversations around coffee machines — water cooler conversations are meant to be a staple at the workplace — and wouldn’t have minded interns spending some time getting their coffee.
But Musk saw this as a problem. He felt that the interns were wasting their time waiting long periods to get their coffee, and this wasn’t in the best interests of SpaceX. He not only made his stance clear in a memo to all employees, but also went ahead and installed cameras to make sure his wishes were carried out. The memo not only solved the immediate problem of interns wasting their time, but also sent a message across the company as to the amount of intensity employees needed to demonstrate to get SpaceX to succeed. Not everyone will agree with Musk’s methods, but installing cameras to prevent interns for wasting time at the coffee machine might be the ruthless efficiency that’s needed to launch rockets, catch them with mechanized arms, and take humans to space.
