Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

latimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 557 posts

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#381

Post by wcoenen »

ginko wrote: post #330

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://w…

If those employees go to China with trade secrets, they might be violating ITAR. ITAR is enforced with big fines and prison time.

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#382

Post by celticninja »

toyg wrote: post #356
isostatic wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

“Genuinely” being basically arbitrary. What you do is you move people from role X to Y then, shortly after, you say role Y is no longer needed.

Nope, not how it works.

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#383

Post by ben_w »

SamReidHughes wrote: post #342
skrebbel wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well, there's a reason America has a higher standard of living than Europe.

Standards of living is complex, more of a vector field than a single scalar.

“Western” Europe is on average rich, Eastern Europe is still recovering from Soviet control and brain-drain. But even Western Europe is spikey, old Welsh coal-mining towns are poor, the old universities are rich.

Even apart from the location income variability, what money gets you varies; health costs much less in the UK than the USA, housing is cheaper in poor places than rich places — even PPP exchange rates aren’t perfect because the ratio of two different goods isn’t constant.

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#384

Post by 77pt77 »

viraptor wrote: post #39
Deimorz wrote: 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_...

Whatever the reasons for the workforce reduction, this way of doing it is just unnecessarily cruel.

Standard technique to avoid confrontations.

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#385

Post by Rainymood »

benjaminsuch wrote: post #374
Rainymood wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>laid off anytime for arbitrary reasons. You can also leave for any arbitrary reason, anything else is slavery, simply put. This goes both ways. >If you create a company, you take care of it and all of its members. If you create a company, you have a fiduciary duty towards your shareholders. A company only exist when it is profitable (either now or in the future) and it can only continue to exist if it can do so prof…

"...anything else is slavery" What?

If you are in any non-voluntary way forced to stay with the company and you can't leave. For example foreign workers that do labour intensive work where their housing is being taken care of by the employer in an exploitative way, they can't quit working because their employer is in charge of their housing, etc.

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#386

Post by Cardinal_ »

the8472 wrote: post #375
aristophenes wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two points in rebuttal. First, companies can expand more confidently if they know they can reduce more easily if they need to. It is more efficient for companies to be able to right-size themselves. Bolstering this point of view is that the USA has a 4% unemployment rate, which is about as low as you can get without things starting to break down. The US economy has been outperforming almost everyone too, creating mor…

> Bolstering this point of view is that the USA has a 4% unemployment rate As a counterpoint, Germany has much stronger employee protection laws and unions and has a comparable unemployment rate. That said, resizing is still possible there, it just has some lag.

Kinda off topic but job protection in Germany is such a joke it's almost fake news. Got terminated recently after 12 months for no reason, filed for unfair dismissal, won the case. 3000 eur is what I got (lawyer fees 1500). You can be fired for very little cost, it's dangerous to think you're protected.

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#387

Post by matz1 »

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…

Because it's also suck to not able to fire your employee for any reason.

A company purpose is to make money, not to take care its member. Its the government job to take care of its citizen. Using basic income, universal health care, cheap/free housing, etc.

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#388

Post by aristophenes »

russellbeattie wrote: post #377
aristophenes wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two points in rebuttal. First, companies can expand more confidently if they know they can reduce more easily if they need to. It is more efficient for companies to be able to right-size themselves. Bolstering this point of view is that the USA has a 4% unemployment rate, which is about as low as you can get without things starting to break down. The US economy has been outperforming almost everyone too, creating mor…

That 4% number is complete crap, and you know it. Even if it was accurate, which it isn't, 48% of the U.S. earn less than $30k a year [1] with few benefits. Corporations need to be flexible, but they also need to provide stable long-term employment so our society can grow and prosper. When Henry Ford launched the Model T, he made sure to pay his workers $5 a day so they could actually afford to buy the cars. It was a…

My comments had nothing to do with a minimum wage discussion, and I doubt SpaceX employs people for even near to minimum wage. This is a company that creates rather high wage jobs. It is also doing very risky things. If the USA had stricter rules about employment protection and all that came with it, Spacex would not exist at all, and the 90% of well paid employees that remain wouldn’t have gotten these jobs.

The ability for companies to take big risks is what pushes the economy forward so that we can all have better lives for a reduced cost, and better jobs too. To “protect” jobs you would hold us all back, we’d still all be working on farms or in factories instead of on computers, increasingly from home. Is that what you want? Why are people rioting in France? Maybe because they feel poorer than their parents. Their laws protecting jobs have removed opportunity from everyone in order to provide stability for some.

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#389

Post by tyfon »

isostatic wrote: post #325
pmontra wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Same in Norway.

In periods of "low order" for things like shipping/mining a company may put the employees on leave that the government pay, but this is only temporary. It's a method to avoid hire/fire waves.

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#390

Post by blueboo »

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…

> The point is that sometimes you really need less people

There's another crucial point: that this need is forecastable many (many) months in advance. If people are joining (or continuing to work at) a company with an expectation of investing in the 'long haul', but the company knows that this 'startup phase' isn't likely to last more than another nine months, there's a strong temptation for executives to deceive their employees.

As you say, 'nothing that can prevent a company to do that', but along those lines, there's nothing that prevents seeing this for what it is: an adversarial relationship where companies are doing their best to trick their employees.

Post reply on HN