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what is the less cruel way to lay off 10% of your workforce
To tell people face to face, to have the courage instead of hiding behind the impersonal email. Basic etiquette.
10% is a big fraction. How often do large, stable companies execute a layoff like that? Sometimes layoffs can be not so bad, for example when that's the company's way of clearing off the managers' firing wishlist without incurring legal trouble. However at 10% of the workforce, this may be a change of direction away from R&D and towards sitting on the falcon 9 and launching to LEO.
Maybe, maybe not. Consider it in terms of your own workplace: if you worked on a team of 10, and one person got laid off, would that seem so huge? I think the question is whether this round of layoffs is in response to an acute cash flow issue or just part of long-term financial prudency. They fact that they waited until after Christmas and are providing 8 weeks of pay and benefits makes me hopeful that it's the latt…
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what is the less cruel way to lay off 10% of your workforce
Well, rather than a "Don't come Monday" email on a weekend, which effectively gives them 0 working days notice, giving those employees say, 2 weeks notice that they will be terminated at least gives them a chance to re-train for another position or get their resumes together to try and find another job while still getting an income to pay for rent, food etc. FAR less 'cruel' to give them an opportunity to plan their…
According to some comments from employees, the company had an all-hands meeting where everyone was sent home and told to check their email over the weekend to find out if they're being laid off or not: https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/af1n7f/spacex_will_...
Wonderful, all hail Elon, the next Howard Hughes. Seriously, can modern CEOs actually grow a pair and actually face their employees rather than hide behind tech?
10% is a big fraction. How often do large, stable companies execute a layoff like that? Sometimes layoffs can be not so bad, for example when that's the company's way of clearing off the managers' firing wishlist without incurring legal trouble. However at 10% of the workforce, this may be a change of direction away from R&D and towards sitting on the falcon 9 and launching to LEO.
That would still leave them with many thousands of redundant employees. Falcon 9 is done and the production is dropping due to reusability. Recently, they had a 3rd re-flight of the same core, which, coupled with the slowdown of the global launch market, means that in the next years they will need to produce a third to a half of the number of cores they used in 2017. The same for Merlin engines.
They basically fulfilled their mission and drastically reduced the cost of getting into orbit - which for the space industry is dominated by labor costs. Without a greatly increased demand, they can't justify keeping those people around.
And they can't roll all the Falcon production workforce towards BFR, Raptor and Starlink since those are still strongly R&D dominated projects and the skill set is incompatible. At the same time, they have hundreds of engineering positions open for those projects.
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Whatever the reasons for the workforce reduction, this way of doing it is just unnecessarily cruel.
What's less cruel? Face to face meetings? Layoffs suck, how is this particularly egregious?
ANYTHING is better than telling the entire company "go home and compulsively refresh your email all weekend to see if you get to come to work Monday"
Oh, the LA Times seem to finally have taken down their GDPR wall. This is the first article on their domain that I’m able to read since last May, from Europe.
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Well, rather than a "Don't come Monday" email on a weekend, which effectively gives them 0 working days notice, giving those employees say, 2 weeks notice that they will be terminated at least gives them a chance to re-train for another position or get their resumes together to try and find another job while still getting an income to pay for rent, food etc. FAR less 'cruel' to give them an opportunity to plan their…
From the article: "SpaceX is offering a minimum of eight weeks’ pay and other benefits to laid-off workers, according to Shotwell’s email. The company will also provide assistance with career coaching, resume help and job searches." So SpaceX is giving employees two months to focus their full efforts on finding their next job. This seems less cruel than telling them they will lose their jobs and then expecting them t…
My response above was to do with the fact that employees who were NOT terminated were also subjected to the psychological trauma of spending the weekend guessing whether they had a job come Monday. Not the best way to keep morale high.
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> So you're going from 6 new rockets per year to 2 new rockets per year. Also rockets are not like your software programs that get rewritten every time a manager feels like it. You stick with what works. Last year, SpaceX had big plans for new rocket designs, a satellite constellation, and more. Unlike a ravioli canning plant, SpaceX has an option other than cutting down to maintnence staff once cash flow positive. I…
Unless they're cutting the satellite constellation I think this fits in with what people expected for SpaceX's growth. The problem is even as costs for rocket launches go down we aren't seeking hockey stick growth in the demand for rocket launches. The number of rocket launches per year has remained steady since 2015. SpaceX is getting an increasing number of those launches but even if they got all of them they would…
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What's less cruel? Face to face meetings? Layoffs suck, how is this particularly egregious?
Seriously, if you cannot see that "fire by email" is far more impersonal and disconnecting than compassionately meeting with the employee 1 on 1 and giving them a definitive exit path along with the financial support to do so, then please do not ever work in HR or be responsible for employing people in the future. To subject ALL your employees to the 50/50 prospect that they will have a job come next working day is t…