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Tesla fires hundreds from headquarters, factory

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Re: Tesla fires hundreds from headquarters, factory

#151

Post by Steeeve »

fmueller wrote: post #97
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…

Firing a person should not destroy their life. Something else is really wrong if this is the case.

Most people, even well paid engineers, live paycheck to paycheck.

Sizable companies take a month to bring in a new employee in the best case.

Most hiring managers are skeptical of people fired in a mass "underperformance" firing.

Toss in the fact that most people have never been fired and it's a massive blow to the ego. And also that it's terrible to communicate to your spouse and children that you've been fired for doing a bad job at work. That's a recipe for depression. Which makes it even harder to find work again. Which exacerbates the depression. And you're living on credit. And the bills are piling up. And you are starting to get phone calls.

If you can't jump right into a new job, it's a hard situation to be in, no question about it.

Re: Tesla fires hundreds from headquarters, factory

#152

Post by tdb7893 »

briandear wrote: post #139
koevet wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not for Germany only. The majority of EU contries have similar benefits guaranteed by the law.

I always wondered why laws are needed to require benefits. Seems like working for someone is a consensual choice that ought be regulated by the free market itself. Other than physical safety regulations, seems like the rest of it is government overreach. It’s also weird to me that a “contract” covers “workers” rather than a contact negotiated by each worker. Seems rather Marxist to me to consider workers as interchan…

I think the issue is that a "free" market is a theoretical construct and not a practical one. There is a lot of asymmetry in contract negotiation and without these sorts of laws you get what we have in America, which is many people wanting more vacation time but having difficulty getting it (even software engineers who are very in demand right now will complain of not having enough vacation sometimes). From talking to Europeans I think most of them would agree that these laws make their life better and a law that makes their citizens life better pretty much across the board doesn't really seem to be huge overreach

Re: Tesla fires hundreds from headquarters, factory

#153

Post by azernik »

d215 wrote: post #134
omilu wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He risked everything to make a rocket company from nothing, if ever there was a person that earned the hype, this is the person.

Really? Everything? His life? His children’s lives? Or just money? Or just his investor’s money? My point being if you have a lot you can risk a lot in absolute terms, but maybe not so in terms relative to your own wealth or well-being. I don’t think he even risked his reputation with his space rocket thing. ‘Fail fast, etc’, right?

He was at one point, when both Tesla and SpaceX were early in their lifetimes and bleeding money, on the verge of bankruptcy and (from what came out from his ex-wife) a mental breakdown.

Re: Tesla fires hundreds from headquarters, factory

#154

Post by thegayngler »

closeparen wrote: post #63
mc32 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

I don't know how much of this I agree with but I definitely agree with most of it. I also hadn't considered the fact that we have forced businesses into the role of government because our government is underperforming.

Re: Tesla fires hundreds from headquarters, factory

#155

Post by azernik »

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.

Note the bit at the end:

> Tesla has a hearing before the National Labor Relations Board in November for charges that company supervisors and security guards harassed workers distributing union literature. Tesla denied the accusations.

>Openly pro-union workers were among those fired this week. Some believe they were targeted.

> The company denied union activities played a role in the dismissals.

There are dynamics in blue-collar labor and generally manufacturing that are not relevant to software companies.

Re: Tesla fires hundreds from headquarters, factory

#156

Post by sitkack »

syshum wrote: post #125
dunkelheit wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I was actually in a similar spot once... I choose to fire myself... The company is out of business now, mainly due to poor and unethical management

Thank you.

Re: Tesla fires hundreds from headquarters, factory

#157

Post by ethbro »

d215 wrote: post #134
omilu wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He risked everything to make a rocket company from nothing, if ever there was a person that earned the hype, this is the person.

Really? Everything? His life? His children’s lives? Or just money? Or just his investor’s money? My point being if you have a lot you can risk a lot in absolute terms, but maybe not so in terms relative to your own wealth or well-being. I don’t think he even risked his reputation with his space rocket thing. ‘Fail fast, etc’, right?

He's risked far more than most investors, including bailing out his own companies (SpaceX and Solar City) by taking personal loans against his stock in others that were doing better (Tesla).

If he hasn't infused the cash, SpaceX at least would have failed. There were a number of finance articles about it at the time "questioning" the odd moves, but paraphrased from Musk, 'If investors are risking their money, shouldn't I be risking mine too?'

If your metric for "enough" is "work to literal death" then I expect you'll continue to be unsatisfied.

Re: Tesla fires hundreds from headquarters, factory

#158

Post by jryle70 »

d215 wrote: post #134
omilu wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He risked everything to make a rocket company from nothing, if ever there was a person that earned the hype, this is the person.

Really? Everything? His life? His children’s lives? Or just money? Or just his investor’s money? My point being if you have a lot you can risk a lot in absolute terms, but maybe not so in terms relative to your own wealth or well-being. I don’t think he even risked his reputation with his space rocket thing. ‘Fail fast, etc’, right?

Space X was a Falcon failure away from shutting down. Isn't that risking reputation enough? He's selling the world the vision of Falcon Heavy, BFR, Mars colony. Any of that fail and he will be known forever as an ambitious but failed businessman.

Re: Tesla fires hundreds from headquarters, factory

#159

Post by hyperpape »

Someone wrote: post #148
spatulon wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably one bit of Tesla culture they can't bring to Germany is firing low performers. I worked for a German company for over a decade. I don't know if it was due to their culture or their laws, but I never saw anyone get fired for poor performance (except for failing the initial 6-month probation after joining). And it's not like we didn't have low performers — once I got into management it became quite clear tha…

The idea in large parts of western europe is that it is OK to fire employees who aren’t fit for their job, but that “low performing”, at best, only is a low quality indicator of the former. For example, management can stifle productivity in ways that individual workers have little influence on. Also, employees may be ‘useless’ for a while, but then improve again, for example if they are going through a divorce, the d…

How do people there understand the difference between low performers and people who aren't fit for their job? The latter has the sound of something lasting that cannot be fixed, but I'm wondering how it plays out in practice. How do you determine that someone is not fit for their job as opposed to a mere low performer?

Re: Tesla fires hundreds from headquarters, factory

#160

Post by ethbro »

Steeeve wrote: post #151
fmueller wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firing a person should not destroy their life. Something else is really wrong if this is the case.

Most people, even well paid engineers, live paycheck to paycheck. Sizable companies take a month to bring in a new employee in the best case. Most hiring managers are skeptical of people fired in a mass "underperformance" firing. Toss in the fact that most people have never been fired and it's a massive blow to the ego. And also that it's terrible to communicate to your spouse and children that you've been fired for…

There's no reason a well-paid engineer (let's say $75k-250k) should be living paycheck to paycheck, even with a large family.

If someone is, they should realize they deliberately chose that situation by failing to adjust for cost of living when comparing employment options.

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