SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce • Hacker News Board

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#321

Post by Retric » Sat, Jan 12, 2019, 10:17 AM UTC

TheSwordsman wrote: post #310

Retric wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SpaceX could quickly shrink by 10% via attrition and not highering new people. They can get rid of dead weight by firing people. This kind of small scale lay-off is mostly a stunt, or just sign of incompetence.

What's the current SpaceX attrition rate like, and how does that change across different organizations? It could be a response to their attempt to gain additional funding, and something they heard or agreed to for said funding. Speculation, but wouldn't surprise me.

SpaceX does not make that public. Best number I saw was 50% of new employees made it to 18 months suggesting rather high annual turnover. Long hours + low pay really add up.

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#322

Post by abcd_f » Sat, Jan 12, 2019, 10:18 AM UTC

kevinlou wrote: post #88

kepano wrote: post #30

If you are affected by the layoffs in Los Angeles, working in software engineering (esp. on ERP and internal tools), UI/UX, or supply chain — my company, Lumi is hiring https://www.lumi.com/jobs

Can confirm, Lumi is an awesome company run by solid founders.

You are not on the list - https://www.lumi.com/team

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#323

Post by azernik » Sat, Jan 12, 2019, 10:20 AM UTC

Robotbeat wrote: post #209

adventured wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because projections for large launch demand are softer for the next few years than had previously been expected. It was thought that that weakness would give way and demand would perk back up. This layoff is happening because that's no longer expected to happen and they're not going to need the staff to match a much greater launch rate. What does it mean? It more or less officially confirms that Starlink is the…

I suspect that Starlink is, in fact, a significant CAUSE of the softening of GTO launch demand. All this LEO megaconstellations will be providing many of the same services as these long-lived, expensive geosynchronous birds, so the business case for them becomes much less certain. If Starlink, OneWeb, etc were cancelled tomorrow, it's likely GTO launch demand would pick back up significantly. Starlink is both the cau…

It's a game theory problem - even if Starlink wasn't happening, OneWeb would be going ahead anyway. So if the GEO satellite operators are going to be running scared anyway, SpaceX might as well get its own entrant into the market.

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#324

Post by joelthelion » Sat, Jan 12, 2019, 10:21 AM UTC

To me the main question is, can they maintain a high level of quality while laying off people?

I've seen this first hand in my own company since they started laying off people on a regular basis. People try hard to keep things working, but quality inevitably degrades over time. In most areas, it's not necessarily obvious. In rocket engineering, on the other hand...

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#325

Post by isostatic » Sat, Jan 12, 2019, 10:22 AM UTC

pmontra wrote: post #312

antpls wrote: post #265

I don't understand how anyone in the world accept such social contract of being laid off anytime for arbitrary reasons. If you create a company, you take care of it and all of its members. If you have to cut expenses because the company needs to be "leaner" then you cut the salaries starting from the top executives. Eventually you fire management, because the state of the company is in part the result of their decisi…

I used to work for a mobile phone operator in Europe, so no quick way to lay off people. After the startup phase they ended up with hundreds of people in the software/network department that they really didn't need anymore. Not there at least, as the focus moved from development to operations. Some people were moved to operations but (I spare you the technicalities) we eventually ended up in a separate company provid…

In the UK, if your job is genuinely no longer needed, you can be made redundant, with mimimal pay off and notice (Typically 1 month notice and a minimum of 1 week per year redundancy)

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#326

Post by Reason077 » Sat, Jan 12, 2019, 10:24 AM UTC

Tesla did roughly the same thing in June 2018. Then went on to have a blockbuster quarter in Q4.

https://electrek.co/2018/06/12/tesla-layoffs-workforce-restr...

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#327

Post by pferde » Sat, Jan 12, 2019, 10:24 AM UTC

JKCalhoun wrote: post #262

entity345 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, the larger the company the less painful it is to fire 10%. In large engineering organisations, laying off 10% makes no difference at all on anything apart from the ego of managers whose teams shrink. On the topic, wasn't Jack Welsh/GE that popularised the idea of firing the bottom 10% every single year? Not saying that this is necessarily a good idea but that shows the amount of slack in large organ…

Must be great for morale.

It really is. After every such round, I think to myself "finally!". And things start getting done slightly faster afterwards.

Edit: In any big corp, there are usually many employees who act as "barriers" to others. Either because they feel secure enough in their job and don't really care about performing, or because they lost sight of why things are being done, and are focusing on bureaucracy and "processes" for the sake of those two things.

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#328

Post by azernik » Sat, Jan 12, 2019, 10:28 AM UTC

phendrenad2 wrote: post #67

w-m wrote: post #22

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.

They probably realized that they'll still get GDPR requests from EU citizens living abroad, so the block was fairly pointless.

This is a false reading of GDPR - it applies only when either the person or the business involved is physically in the EU, not on the citizenship of the person involved.

See Article 3: Territorial Scope (https://gdpr-info.eu/art-3-gdpr/). Useful terms: "data subject" is a natural person to whom the data relates, "processor" refers to an entity that works with the data, "controller" to an entity that "owns" the data. e.g. you would be a data subject, the LA Times would be the controller, and Google Analytics would be a data processor.

==================================

1. This Regulation applies to the processing of personal data in the context of the activities of an establishment of a controller or a processor in the Union, regardless of whether the processing takes place in the Union or not.

2. This Regulation applies to the processing of personal data of data subjects who are in the Union by a controller or processor not established in the Union, where the processing activities are related to: a) the offering of goods or services, irrespective of whether a payment of the data subject is required, to such data subjects in the Union; or b) the monitoring of their behaviour as far as their behaviour takes place within the Union.

3. This Regulation applies to the processing of personal data by a controller not established in the Union, but in a place where Member State law applies by virtue of public international law.

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#329

Post by Erlich_Bachman » Sat, Jan 12, 2019, 10:29 AM UTC

antpls wrote: post #265

I don't understand how anyone in the world accept such social contract of being laid off anytime for arbitrary reasons. If you create a company, you take care of it and all of its members. If you have to cut expenses because the company needs to be "leaner" then you cut the salaries starting from the top executives. Eventually you fire management, because the state of the company is in part the result of their decisi…

The point of a properly functioning capitalistic system is not that every employe will stay at the same company for the longest time possible. It is to have liquid labor force markets, which will make sure that both the companies can obtain (and replace when needed) the employees that match the company perfectly - and at the same time that every employee will easily find (and change when needed!) a matching workplace, one that best suits their (possibly continuously evolving) trade skills, ambitions, life circumstances, risk appetites etc.

Also,

> laid off anytime for arbitrary reasons

They are not arbitrary by any stretch of the meaning of that word. There are business reasons, changed or evolved business goals or market conditions. Those are all real objective phenomena which play very important role in the life of a company, ignoring which would be very fundamentally detrimental for companies and for markets in general.

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#330

Post by ginko » Sat, Jan 12, 2019, 10:34 AM UTC

Not sure if this is still the case but didn't SpaceX make a point to stick to trade secrets instead of patents[1] for fear of Chinese rocket agencies copying them anyways?

If they lay off 10% of their workforce, how do they ensure that their trade secrets are kept safe? Lay off only low-risk employees? NDAs? It was my understanding that the degree to which those can be enforced in California is limited.

[1] https://www.nasdaq.com/article/is-elon-musks-spacex-protecte...