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Tesla fires hundreds from headquarters, factory

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Re: Tesla fires hundreds from headquarters, factory

#61

Post by Iv »

emodendroket wrote: post #41
wpietri wrote: post #29

Do other companies do this? Unless this is GE-style force ranking, I've never heard of it. If somebody isn't performing well, I have no idea why I'd wait up to a year to deal with it. And it seems terrible for morale (and PR) to have a regular event where a bunch of people will be let go in one block.

> Tesla said the performance-based departures were not considered layoffs and not subject to state notifications. It also said the moves have generally boosted worker morale, as high-performing employees have been rewarded. Maybe I'm just paranoid but this part kind of smells to me.

If your employer who apparently fires people randomly asked you in a survey if you are happy about your company, would you answer honestly?

Re: Tesla fires hundreds from headquarters, factory

#62

Post by SeanDav »

This sort of behaviour is quite common in companies, so I can't help wondering if it is true that studies have shown a significant percentage of Silicon Valley CEO's and company executives are psychopaths.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/21/apparently-psychopaths-make-...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/15/silicon-v...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy_in_the_workplace

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-small-business/wp/201...

Re: Tesla fires hundreds from headquarters, factory

#63

Post by closeparen »

mc32 wrote: post #20
caseysoftware wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While 300-700 people sounds massive, it's out of 33,000 or about 1-2%. It's not hard to believe that 1-2% of a company were bad hires, couldn't/didn't deliver, or weren't a great match for the job anymore.

Admittedly it's a small fraction. To me, while not a communist by any means, I do think that cos. often simply think about he employee-employer relationship as unidirectional: the employee owes the employer but I see more and the company owes society at large to support its workers, where it can. Not saying they should carry inept unqualified workers, but that they should make some effort to place mal-assigned worker…

Projecting responsibility for societal well-being onto for-profit employers is crazy. If we think everyone deserves something, we need to provision it directly as a society.

Corporations are poor stewards of our welfare, and trying to coerce them into this role (i.e. minimum wage, healthcare mandate, obligation to hold on to unneeded workers like you propose here) has the nasty side-effect of inhibiting potentially beneficial transactions (pushes employers towards automation, encourages them to split decent full-time jobs into several shitty part-time jobs to stay below eligibility thresholds, locks the lowest-value workers out of the market entirely, keeps the product category well below its potential i.e. taxis, etc).

If we think people should have at least a certain income (and I do), we need higher taxes and a stronger welfare system, not more labor regulation. If we think everyone deserves good healthcare (and I do) we need single-payer, not an employer mandate. If we think people shouldn't have to face loss of income due to economic conditions, we need to strengthen unemployment insurance, not pressure companies to keep workers they don't want or need.

Going down the path of engineering a perfect society by attaching obligations to the employer-employee relationship just disincentives employers from starting those relationships if they can help it.

Re: Tesla fires hundreds from headquarters, factory

#64

Post by jwdunne »

dmode wrote: post #49

I know someone who just got fired in this round at Tesla. His manager never communicated to him that he was a bad performer. He was not on a PIP or any performance plans. He was also working on Model 3. One fine morning his manager called him and said this would be his last day. He is a single income earner and was so shocked by this news that he is getting borderline depressed. They offered only 2 weeks of severance…

I think firing without giving warnings and opportunity to improve is sick. These people don't even know they were doing badly. I can't tell if they've been told where they screwed up. These people could be spending a lot of time figuring out what went wrong when everything seemed to be going fine. They don't deserve that, regardless of performance.

They are people, they have lives and it wasn't anything like gross misconduct.

I think Mr Musk has a lot to answer for.

Re: Tesla fires hundreds from headquarters, factory

#65

Post by [deleted] »

ehnto wrote: post #60
metaphor wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know someone who just got fired in this round at Tesla. ... They offered only 2 weeks of severance. Fired or layed off? I've never experienced either, but I always thought severance pay was exclusive to the latter.

I thing the difference you are thinking of is when someone is being made redundant versus being fired. Being fired implies the employee failed in some way. Being made redundant implies the company changed in such a way that the employee is no longer needed. Being made redundant tends to be the situation that attracts a severance package of any significance. Depending entirely on the country and state of course.

[deleted]

Re: Tesla fires hundreds from headquarters, factory

#66

Post by icebraining »

LoSboccacc wrote: post #47
wpietri wrote: post #29

Do other companies do this? Unless this is GE-style force ranking, I've never heard of it. If somebody isn't performing well, I have no idea why I'd wait up to a year to deal with it. And it seems terrible for morale (and PR) to have a regular event where a bunch of people will be let go in one block.

most large IT company do, including amazon google and ibm

[citation needed]

Re: Tesla fires hundreds from headquarters, factory

#67

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Steeeve wrote: post #51
lacker wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What style - firing 2% of your employees in a given year? That is not a very high rate for a large company. It's only news because everything Tesla is news.

2% turnover over the course of a year might not seem high. Firing 2% of your workforce in a single day is.

Research shows the long-term effects of disruption are a function of its duration. (If you’re looking for the paper I am referencing, it was an IMF paper on the effects of conflict on economic productivity.) Short and harsh is better than long and simmering.

Re: Tesla fires hundreds from headquarters, factory

#68

Post by jfoster »

ianai wrote: post #46
Steeeve wrote: post #37

I'm not a fan of this style of management at all. I won't knowingly go to work for a company that behaves in this manner. I've read that Netflix does it, and I've seen inferences that they acquired the practice from Disney. If you have a low performing employee that you want to get rid of, fine. Arbitrarily destroying the lives of a percentage of your workforce in an annual purge is not OK. People always seem to put…

I know Tesla seems to hold a special place for many people. But I don’t see how these business practices result in them disrupting the automotive industry.

Some of their employees are not good. Some of them disrupt the others. Some of them are negative. They make the other talented employees not want to work at the company. So you remove them. The remainder of the company is then happier and produces better results.

Re: Tesla fires hundreds from headquarters, factory

#69

Post by staunch »

Steeeve wrote: post #37

I'm not a fan of this style of management at all. I won't knowingly go to work for a company that behaves in this manner. I've read that Netflix does it, and I've seen inferences that they acquired the practice from Disney. If you have a low performing employee that you want to get rid of, fine. Arbitrarily destroying the lives of a percentage of your workforce in an annual purge is not OK. People always seem to put…

If it helps, he didn't really found PayPal or have much of anything to do with it one way or the other. He founded X.com, which merged with PayPal. He left after not doing much beyond arguing with Max Levchin about Windows vs FreeBSD. IIRC.

Most people considered him kind of a joke before Tesla and SpaceX were mainstream successes.

He's done amazing things with that PayPal money though. I bet a few dozen people on HN have ambitions as big as Elon Musk's but haven't lucked upon an easy $160M cash. He's the proof of what's possible when the right kind of person does.

Re: Tesla fires hundreds from headquarters, factory

#70

Post by dunkelheit »

tbabb wrote: post #45
Steeeve wrote: post #37

I'm not a fan of this style of management at all. I won't knowingly go to work for a company that behaves in this manner. I've read that Netflix does it, and I've seen inferences that they acquired the practice from Disney. If you have a low performing employee that you want to get rid of, fine. Arbitrarily destroying the lives of a percentage of your workforce in an annual purge is not OK. People always seem to put…

Do they set a "quota" for 2%? Or is it that they do it every year, and 2% is about the number that falls out? I do agree that a "firing quota" is backwards; it should be a standard of performance. But even in a healthy, high-performing company, 1 (or maybe 2) out of 100 people being a drag/net-negative contributor doesn't sound far too off. Ultimately I think it helps the other 98 people to ask those two to leave as…

The problem is that a true company-wide firing of bottom 2% of performers is impossible - you would have to somehow compare and rank people with vastly different roles to pull it off. So the way to do it is to first choose unlucky departments and set a quota for each department, then choose unlucky managers and let those managers choose unlucky employees. Which makes it a lot more similar to a layoff than the company likes to admit. These employees may be perfectly solid workers but now they have to bear a stigma of being fired for "performance" reasons.

I had a manager friend whose company went through a "not-layoff" when approx. 2% of the workforce were let go. His group was among the unfortunate ones so he was told to choose one victim among his subordinates - but there was no one with unsatisfactory performance in his opinion. Still he had to choose. Didn't improve his morale that much - he quit shortly afterwards.

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