Alternative source for those without access to the LA Times. https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/11/tech/spacex-layoffs/index.htm...
I'm still skeptical of Starlink but I hope this all works out.
SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce
421–430 of 557 posts
Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce
#422Earlier quoted context omitted.
If those employees go to China with trade secrets, they might be violating ITAR. ITAR is enforced with big fines and prison time.
Not easy to catch though.
Define easy anyone who works on such technologies is on some FBI database somewhere and likely more than just one.
SpaceX doesn’t hire non-US citizens due to how hard it is to get the security clearance needed for them if they try to go to China they will likely get caught maybe not everyone, but enough to prevent any real knowledge transfer and more importantly the first one that will get caught is going to be made an example for the rest.
Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce
#423My gut says this is an aggressive Muskian decimation. 1) Maybe brought on themselves: 'hey, design/build the thing, then fire those who designed it' type thing, which definitely happens. It happens to companies in a crunch, or those who just put the outcome ahead of everything else. 2) A decimation: let's use this as an opportunity to drop anyone we feel is not cutting it - and teams that we created/hired we realize…
Yep, pruning is essential. It's the HR equivalent of code refactoring.
Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce
#42410% 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…
8 weeks of pay as severance is insultingly horrible, even for very junior employees. If a company hopes to grow and be taken seriously as a professional workplace, you have to do much, much better than 8 weeks pay & benefits for severance.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Always negotiate severance up front as part of any job offer, and consider 4-6 months as an absolute minimum for junior or mid-level employees, and at least 12 months of pay for senior employees. Simply turn down job offers when a company won’t offer this and take a longer time to find an offer at one of the (many) companies that will.
Most companies will negotiate severance with you but you have to ask and make it clear that in-writing severance details to serve as protection against unexpected unemployment from layoffs is a dealbreaker for you.
Most candidates won’t negotiate this, which is why most companies don’t have to offer it except to the few special case people that require it.
If we all, as candidates, unilaterally make it impossible to hire us without adequate severance, we’ll all be better off.. instead of just the minority of candidates who put forward the effort to negotiate it and aren’t afraid to turn down offers that don’t include defined severance agreements.
Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce
#425It's not unsual to layoff 10% of your workforce in hardware companies but it is unusual for a "growing" company. To put in perspective Pratt and Whitney laid off about 10-15% a couple years ago when they were in between the phasing out of the old engine and ramping up the new engine. Sometimes companies are unlucky because there is a drought where the demand for the new stuff is lower than the demand of old stuff but…
It is normal to layoff about 5% per year, you trim the one in the 20 that is the weakest and it has positive, not negative effects. Going to 10% is a bit stretch, but still workable. In the last companies I worked, if up to 20% of the people left one day it would have an immediate positive impact on the performance, less complexity to deal with and more focus to work on real stuff.
Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce
#426Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 abi…
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Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce
#427Not 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…
NDAs are used to protect both confidential information and trade secrets but trade secrets are treated differently from confidential information by the courts.
In typical NDA you specify a defined period of time to avoid the risk of a court declaring that an NDA is too restrictive. This should not apply to trade secret. Trade secret lasts indefinitely even after NDA time period expires if all other conditions for trade secret are met.
There are some cases where NDA expiring invalidates trade secret but it's mostly due to specific circumstances or badly formed NDA. You should inform the employees when they are dealing with a trade secret and use all means to keep them secret.
Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce
#428Earlier quoted context omitted.
Typically higher scores are better. If SpaceX used this query they would fire their 600 best employees. Or they use bad column names. On top of the lame SQL reference this diminishes the true severity of firing 600 real people. We have no reason to think the firing was this nonchalant. This diminishes the work and humanity of everyone involved. It appears to be a weak reference to stack ranking. Do you have any reaso…
Default ordering would be ascending order, smallest to largest. You would need to specify DESC to order the higher numbers first.
Yep, too late and too many beers to be commenting on HN.
Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce
#429Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, naturally every company has talent drain. The rockstars will not work long in one company and jump from one gig to the next. But if you have bad luck and hired some slackers, which will happen with the tightest of hiring schemes, then they will certainly stick around. Thus over time you still have to re-hire people you really need, but get a bigger and bigger amount of people who are just there for the social b…
You left out the part where managers are held accountable for failing to help their staff be productive. It’s easy to rant about slackers but in my experience they’re rare (and 100% protected by management) compared to people who are given conflicting or bad incentives or – by far the most common – work which appears simple only from a distance (e.g. how enterprise software developers can take 3 months to add a butto…
In many companies slackers are the norm, they cover each other and help them promote to cover even better. It happens a lot in non-technical companies where techies do the work, but the think layer of management and other positions are mainly paper-pushers and PowerPoint champions.
Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce
#430Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That 4% number is complete crap, and you know it. Could you explain it please? Even U6 is below 8 percent. https://www.macrotrends.net/1377/u6-unemployment-rate the part time part is big of course ( https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2015/05/the-many-flavors-of-... ) but that's how it was for decades since BLS started tracking it. With regards to ethical wages, SpaceX should pay well, so people don't depend on them (t…
We’ve pushed millions out of the workforce, partially with prisons, partially with welfare reform. There’s basically two Americas. In the other one, 40-60% of adults aren’t working.
The employment to population ratio is 79.7% for people 25-54. That has only been exceeded for less than 10 years in history. The only time it has ever been exceeded by more than a point was June 1997-May 2001 during the dot-com bubble.