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SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

latimes.com

331–340 of 557 posts

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, comfortable employees, we shouldn't have that. At my company I ensure that everyone is always borderline burned out!

I think you're missing the point, with or without intention. "Comfortable" doesn't mean that they have a nice house and are happy with their life at work. Comfortable in this context means they no longer have any concern about their own job performance, knowing they have a "sure thing" and underperform in their duties.

Good point. But I wasn't responding to the GGP's central argument, only to the implication that it's bad when employees get too comfortable.

In particular, I'm ranting against the use of the word "comfortable" for describing unmotivated/shitty employees. It's perfectly achievable to have a company that consists of people who are motivated, comfortable, and extremely productive.

It's a ridiculous Americanism that the only way to motivate employees is by making them "uncomfortable" (eg through fear of losing their jobs, like your example, or through other means).

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would be the rationale behind that? This clearly places limitations on a company's ability to optimize for achieving its goals, and ultimately stifles innovation. At the very least the long term impact of those downsides needs to be incorporated into any sort of social calculus. Would you prefer to live in a world without Teslas or SpaceXs, as long as employees are "taken care" of by their companies? This isn't…

Why would it "stifle innovation"? Having to run a company sustainably should promote innovation. It may stifle impractical get-rich-quick strategies and customer scamming, but that's not a bad thing.

This is very true - a huge amount of 'business strategy innovation' centers not around how to find better product-market fit or how to efficiently produce excellent products but on how best to game predictable trends to funnel benefits of resource collection/human effort at scale into a smaller number of hands (owners, management and the biggest/earliest investors).

The idea that upside potential of an organization's efforts can/should never make it into the workforce and the effort to ensure that it remain this way is extremely sad and corrupting and makes for a world where misaligned incentives and exploitation are much more likely than they 'should' be.

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#333
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…

What would be the rationale behind that? This clearly places limitations on a company's ability to optimize for achieving its goals, and ultimately stifles innovation. At the very least the long term impact of those downsides needs to be incorporated into any sort of social calculus. Would you prefer to live in a world without Teslas or SpaceXs, as long as employees are "taken care" of by their companies? This isn't…

Well, there are social contracts, and if you violate them, there are repercussions.

There are many social contracts tied to the word 'employee'. Expectation of livable vage. Expectation of stability. I liked the way patio11 once explained it (I think, and definitely am paraphrasing): "If you employ people and business is good, you get all of the profits and only owe them their wage. If business is bad, you still owe them their wage."

I am concerned that many companies are trying to weasel out of this unspoken contract. I remember McDonalds document specifying that they assume their employees have second jobs. Or that many game companies fire their QA teams every time a game is shipped.

Like, I get the incentive, I just don't like it.

To be honest, I wouldn't miss Tesla or Space X if it turns out they can't manage their employees.

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#334
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…

Employees can also leave at anytime for arbitrary reasons.

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would be the rationale behind that? This clearly places limitations on a company's ability to optimize for achieving its goals, and ultimately stifles innovation. At the very least the long term impact of those downsides needs to be incorporated into any sort of social calculus. Would you prefer to live in a world without Teslas or SpaceXs, as long as employees are "taken care" of by their companies? This isn't…

Why would it "stifle innovation"? Having to run a company sustainably should promote innovation. It may stifle impractical get-rich-quick strategies and customer scamming, but that's not a bad thing.

Because it removes degrees of freedom. If there are N ways to achieve goal X, and some of those ways include layoffs, then removing those ways from the space of possible strategies will reduce the probability of companies achieving X.

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#336
post #27

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_...

Hmm... someone mean could certainly have some fun sending fake emails to other employees.

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#337
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…

That sounds like a fantastic way to make it too risky to ever hire anyone

In Germany you see things like a single person having to do all jobs at once at a Pizza Hut or only three people working at the same time in a supermarket. A lot of customer-facing businesses are insanely understaffed. If your employer doesn't hire enough coworkers for whatever reason, your life will be miserable.

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#338
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The logistics of laying off 6000 people makes it very difficult to hold one on ones. Assuming 30 minutes per person, 8 hours in a day to hold meetings and 5 day work week, that's 75 person-weeks (!) just to hold one on ones. On top of that, there are security concerns with hanging onto employees and letting them have access to company property during a time that they know they will be fired. Especially for a company…

Firing via SQL query or an email filter. Is this what we have come to? SELECT * FROM employees ORDER BY last_performance_review_score LIMIT 600;

This is acctually probably how they do it.

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#339
post #260
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been laid off face to face. It's not enjoyable. The logistics of safely laying off 10% of a workforce really prohibits this anyway.

It's not enjoyable, but it's still the right thing to do. As for the logistics, each member of staff can be talked to by their immediate manager, making it scale easily. Matter of fact, this once happened to me, and my boss was as clearly upset to let me go as I was to leave. But everyone being let go was informed and given their notice as soon as the workday started, so there was no uncertainty or delay.

What if the managers are fired too? Should they be kept on just long enough to fire their reports? Is that somehow more humane?

Employment is a business deal. If you consider your relationship with your manager to be personal then you have an unhealthy view of your job.

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#340
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…

So cut from the top down, period? Cut the people with the vision and strategy of the company, until nothing but the assemblers and forklift drivers are left? I believe in worker rights, and the ability of a person to live in relative economic security. But should a company not EVER be able to restructure when it realizes it has too many workers, or too broad a mission? Is 2 months pay and medical not a decent send-of…

It's funny how you assume there'a choice. Unemployment in Europe as a whole (including Eastern Europe) is ~20%. Depends on what/when exactly of course but it is. Government (non-productive by definition, by which I mean they don't add value, not that they're not useful) is easily half of the remainder. So Europe has 40% value-adding employees among the working age population, which is about half the total population, or 20%.

In America it's actually better, close to 30%. Everywhere else it's much worse. In the Middle East, Africa, most of Asia it's at most 10%, and usually less than half that.

That means that you could, not in 50 years when the robots have taken over, TODAY, kill 85% of the population and the net effect on the world would be ... nothing. GDP wouldn't drop by so much as a dollar. Today, 85% of all humans alive are useless for the economy (some are school children and will become useful, but you could assume that to be ~10% and you wouldn't be far off the mark).

So for doing everything we do today, and for guaranteeing the future, we need around 25% of the human race. Everyone else is economically useless.

Note that this figure has been dropping for 40%, and has been for essentially all of history, with only short blips where more of the human race is actually useful (like the 30 or so post-WWII years). Even 15% economically useful population, historically speaking, is actually high, not low. What I mean to say is that the neutral expectation should be that that number is going to drop, not rise.

So: no, a company should not ever be able to restructure. Every month, every day, every second we can keep that number up by even a small amount gives use one more month, one more day, one more second of the society we currently have, where people are actually somewhat useful. The alternative, if you think it through, I'm sure you'll see, is war.

Or to put it another way: we need these people to have a job much more than we need a few extra dollars of GDP.

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