Its like the "Survivor" TV show. Or "The Apprentice" - hey who was the host of that?
Tesla fires hundreds from headquarters, factory
81–90 of 268 posts
Re: Tesla fires hundreds from headquarters, factory
#82The high estimate was 700 fired. Out of 33,000, that's 2%. Culling the bottom 2% performers seems like a reasonable (even healthy) thing to do; not really an upheaval.
EDIT: Not healthy, though, if that 2% is a quota, rather than the happenstance fraction of people who fall below the performance bar at evaluation time.
2.12% would be a strange quota.
Re: Tesla fires hundreds from headquarters, factory
#83Wouldn't be surprised if this is to distract people from bad publicity such as production delays and handmaking of parts https://www.wsj.com/articles/behind-teslas-production-delays...
Re: Tesla fires hundreds from headquarters, factory
#84I 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…
What kind of role was the person in? Were they former SolarCity or Tesla Motors? Can you give us any other details?
Re: Tesla fires hundreds from headquarters, factory
#85There seems to be some confusion/ambiguity around whether these layoffs were focused on the Fremont Tesla factory or company wide.
If they were focused on 1 factory that would be weird - if they were company wide that would be within the bounds of normalcy.
Can anyone illuminate?
Re: Tesla fires hundreds from headquarters, factory
#86I 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 mi…
Some countries have laws requiring notice and time for a performance improvement period, before final termination of employment.
Re: Tesla fires hundreds from headquarters, factory
#87High-level executives at Tesla are bailing out. Back when Musk announced his overoptimistic production schedule for the Model 3, his two top production executives quit.[1] Nine more high-level executives have left so far this year.[2] [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-04/two-tesla... [2] https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2017/08/02/tesla-ts...
That's really interesting. The Economist ran a story earlier about how aggressive Musk's finances are and how there was weird finance going on and that Musk was simultaneously trying to keep things afloat, keep on a super aggressive schedule and keep control. https://www.economist.com/news/business/21709061-entrepreneu... Perhaps the wheels are starting to come off. Even if they do, it's been amazing what has been ac…
From afar, it seems that's just how musk did about everything. SpaceX was a potential catastrophy, but they passed the tipping point successfully. Everything Musk does is "adventure" like, which is unsurprisingly good for employee stability. It's a bit like Jobs at Apple. You're gonna suffer, maybe get fire but you worked on "that" project.
Re: Tesla fires hundreds from headquarters, factory
#88I 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…
without commenting on the unfairness -- as an employee, if you aren't prepared for this to happen to you, then you are doing yourself a disservice and are improperly managing your finances.
Any and all of us can, and some will be, 'fired' for less with less.
Re: Tesla fires hundreds from headquarters, factory
#89I'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…
Wikipedia says that he founded X.com, which merged with Confinity, initially he became CEO and later Peter Thiel the founder of Confinity took over and the company was renamed to PayPal.
Re: Tesla fires hundreds from headquarters, factory
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I get that. If there's a layoff or a re-org going on, getting it all done at once is better. The idea of losing poor performers on an annual basis is the one I cannot get behind.
I am perfectly fine with the idea that someone who isn't doing there job loses it. Where I have a problem is that once a year managers are told to dump their lowest performing people. The reality is that people will game the system. They will hire with the intention of firing. They will fire people who are adversarial either personally or professionally. They will fire people for arbitrary reasons. They will fire people for personal reasons. While tech work is easy to come by right now, it does not mean that the experience will be easy to deal with. Each person who was fired will now have to explain themselves to their families and their prospective employers. I doubt many of them took the job in the first place knowing it was not a stable environment.