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

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#391

Post by tyfon » Sat, Jan 12, 2019, 12:56 PM UTC

antientropic wrote: post #365

candiodari wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> Unemployment in Europe as a whole (including Eastern Europe) is ~20%. According to [1] unemployment in the EU-28 is actually 6.7% as of November 2018. Of course, there are some European countries that are not in the EU, but I doubt that including them will cause the figure to rise to 20%. [1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... > So for doing everything we do today, and for guaranteeing…

In Norway, staying at home with kids and managing the house is counted as work and you get "pension points" for it just like a regular job.

But they do not appear in the GDP figures of course.

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#392

Post by bunkydoo » Sat, Jan 12, 2019, 12:58 PM UTC

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…

Well I'm not sure trade secrets matter when you have someone like Musk behind the wheel of an operation like this. For example: most of Tesla's stuff is open sourced and there are no electric cars that currently come close.

From personally seeing some of their stuff with my own two eyes: anyone trying to copy even off stolen diagrams would end up with the Chinese or Russian version of the Challenger.

In the case of the Russians, they STOLE the blueprints for the shuttle and built one at Baikonur, that thing never saw the light of day and is rotting in a decomposing hangar in Kazakhstan.

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#393

Post by tyfon » Sat, Jan 12, 2019, 1:03 PM UTC

fma wrote: post #254

sonnyblarney wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10% is huge by any measure.

I work for GM (for now). 15% layoffs were announced before Christmas... No one knows when the ax will drop. Rumor is Monday or Tuesday. Moral is low and the office has been pretty damn quiet. Meanwhile we just raises earnings forecast today...

The forecast increase is probably a direct result of the layoff and they needed it to "meet the quarter".

I have the quarterly cycle. I find it extremely bad for both the society and companies when nobody takes the long term view.

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#394

Post by Milner08 » Sat, Jan 12, 2019, 1:05 PM UTC

celticninja wrote: post #382

toyg wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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.

Ehh, I've seen that happen in the UK, but only on the small scale. You cant do that if you're making 10% of the workforce redundant but if its one or two people you can. They moved them to a new role, gave them very little work to do and genuinely made them hate work, then after a year (I think they hoped they would have quit by then) the positions magically became redundant and they had a months notice.

Safe to say I left that place of my own accord not long after.

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#395

Post by jack_h » Sat, Jan 12, 2019, 1:06 PM UTC

unethical_ban wrote: post #319

skrebbel wrote: post #294

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.

> 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.

There might be multiple things going on here though. While I'm sure there are people who will settle into a job and underperform because they are virtually guaranteed their position, I'm guessing there are a lot more people in a situation where compensation isn't even matching inflation/CoL. In the latter situation the employee may just not care since the company doesn't care enough to compensate them 'fairly'. Depending on a lot of factors it may be difficult for them to find a new job somewhere else, so outwardly it might look like they're just 'comfortable' and underperforming.

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#396

Post by twodave » Sat, Jan 12, 2019, 1:09 PM 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…

So companies should be required to keep their low-performers indefinitely? That sounds like a recipe for getting 100% of your work force laid off to me... of course we don’t know the motive behind the layoffs so I guess we are both making some assumptions.

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#397

Post by acdha » Sat, Jan 12, 2019, 1:10 PM UTC

erikb wrote: post #309

roedog wrote: post #208

The SoCal aerospace job market is hot right now. The driver is multiple large program starts at multiple contractors who are competing for people. This should make it possible for everyone to land on their feet. (I've reached out to my former colleagues who left to join Space X) What's odd is why SpaceX is cutting staff with the new development underway on the larger rockets and the satellite business. I'm curious ab…

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 button because that involves 600 edits on 20 servers and a labyrinthine test plan).

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#398

Post by pas » Sat, Jan 12, 2019, 1:13 PM UTC

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…

> 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 (they can save enough to be able to sustain themselves for at least a few months while they look for a new job). If SpaceX doesn't need that many workers they should give them prior notice (2 months or more at least, I don't know how they handled this).

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#399

Post by HeadsUpHigh » Sat, Jan 12, 2019, 1:16 PM UTC

roedog wrote: post #208

The SoCal aerospace job market is hot right now. The driver is multiple large program starts at multiple contractors who are competing for people. This should make it possible for everyone to land on their feet. (I've reached out to my former colleagues who left to join Space X) What's odd is why SpaceX is cutting staff with the new development underway on the larger rockets and the satellite business. I'm curious ab…

SpaceX switched from carbon fiber construction for their next rocket to stainless steel. My guess is at least a big part of this workforce reduction relates to people involved in cf which are no longer needed. Additionally they had a lot of people working on crew dragon which as it now nears it's launch might not be needed any more( e.g. pica heatshield, electronics, software developers etc). Same goes for the now mature f9( block 5 was supposed to be the last iteration but there might have been some small improvements. Furthermore with the speed up on the Starship timeline the potential need for an elongated 2nd stage is reduced). So it makes sense for these divisions to move people to the new projects and at least some of them end up getting fired, either due to expertise or performance or whatever.

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#400

Post by sokoloff » Sat, Jan 12, 2019, 1:21 PM UTC

a-saleh wrote: post #333

pavelrub wrote: post #299

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…

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…

You absolutely owe them their wage for the time they worked. You don't owe them their job and wage for an indefinite amount of time going forward.