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SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

latimes.com

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Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#501

Post by saberience »

dogma1138 wrote: post #448
jamiek88 wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can and do hire approved permanent residents too. It’s harder but they can work on ITAR information too. However the point stands that those people are vetted and tracked. How effective that is once they are in China or Russia etc I don’t know.

They can but I don’t think they do that Elon was asked several why don’t they hire non citizens. I’m sure some special cases do happen but the bulk of their workforce is US citizens. And again you assume that they won’t get caught going to Russia or China to begin with or that they won’t be tasked with assets in country once they arrive. We’re talking about 500-600 people here out of them it’s not clear how many woul…

They do definitely hire many green card holders, I know because I was going to be one if their offer had been better.

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#502

Post by rwj »

whatshisface wrote: post #6

10% 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.

The one time I lived through a 10% reduction, the results were not catastrophic, but still pretty bad. Morale took a huge hit. What's worse, is that it spooks everyone. Resumes get updated, networks get activated, and you find a lot of people leaving after the layoff for new jobs.

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#503

Post by azernik »

icpmacdo wrote: post #492
7e wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The launch market is very small and it's always taken longer to build a satellite than to provision the launch vehicle. These layoffs are a direct result of SpaceX's recent failures to raise money.

Can you link to the failure to raise money? I thought they just secured 500 million.

$500M was the size of the offering; as of 3 January, they had only managed to raise $273M

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1181412/000118141219...

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#504

Post by aey »

azernik wrote: post #503
icpmacdo wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you link to the failure to raise money? I thought they just secured 500 million.

$500M was the size of the offering; as of 3 January, they had only managed to raise $273M https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1181412/000118141219...

They should open it to the public with a reg d/s. I would love to be able to invest into SpaceX.

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#505

Post by Dylan16807 »

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…

> There are many social contracts tied to the word 'employee'. Expectation of livable vage. Expectation of stability.

If you fire 10% of your staff every 3 or 4 years, plus 1% the other years, that means the average employee has decades of job stability. That's probably enough.

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#506

Post by GeorgeTirebiter »

When you lay people off en-mass, that's a Management Error. I'm surprised nobody here has yet mentioned this fact yet.

Laying off (firing) individuals; or, if a change in strategic direction, laying off entire groups -- that's business.

But 'doing a Jack Welsh' -- that's Poor Management. I can only imagine that Bezos and Branson and ULA will be able to pick up some great employees.

And as for 'cutting the low performers' -- in my many years in industry, I've only seen this happen once. Every other person was 'let go' due to 'political' reasons.

My major point: This move signifies a colossal management fail. I'm looking at you, Elon.

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#507

Post by Dylan16807 »

SeanBoocock wrote: post #85
mulmen wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: "SpaceX is offering a minimum of eight weeks’ pay and other benefits to laid-off workers, according to Shotwell’s email. The company will also provide assistance with career coaching, resume help and job searches." So SpaceX is giving employees two months to focus their full efforts on finding their next job. This seems less cruel than telling them they will lose their jobs and then expecting them t…

That need not just be charity on SpaceX's part. The circumstances of the layoff sounds like it would trigger the WARN act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini... . If so, 60 days notice is a legal requirement, not beneficence on SpaceX's part.

The notice is a requirement.

Not requiring them to do any work whatsoever for that time is beneficence.

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#508

Post by ryanmercer »

jamiek88 wrote: post #454
ryanmercer wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the reddit comment there's no indication they said when they will be sending the email. It would have been far more practical to quietly go into each department "Jane, Jack come with us we're putting together a team" "Sally, Quan come with us we're putting together a team" take them all to an area "we're very sorry but we have to lay you off, we have counselors that we can refer to you if you need to talk to som…

That sounds terrible. Start the process with a lie finish it with asking them to do some work?! You've just been sucker punched with new team yay! wait not really you’re fired! Now please finish that document you were writing and GTFO. What? Please think more carefully than this if you are ever in the position of influencing layoffs or delivering the news.

Notifying your employer, that's giving you 2 months of severance, what you're in the middle of doing as to prevent everyone else on your team from having the nightmare of trying to figure out what you were doing as well as providing you with access to counseling and a job placement service is terrible?

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#509

Post by Dylan16807 »

dilyevsky wrote: post #139
purplezooey wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we can all agree it is chicken shit to not tell people in person.

Looks like Lumberghs of hn disagree.

Oh of course, anyone that disagrees with you must be an idiot taking the perspective of a bad boss, even when they're talking about their experience being fired.

Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce

#510

Post by erikb »

acdha wrote: post #397
erikb wrote: post #309

Earlier 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 my experience [slackers are] rare (and 100% protected by management)

Can you give an example of how you see slackers being protected by management? I wonder if we have the same definition of the word slacker.

In my experience the people protected by management are not doing much in terms of daily work, but they work a lot to always stay on top when it comes to prestige and taking credit from other people's work. So from my perspective they are working hard, just not to improve the teams results. That's why I call them parasites. They suck out the value of the team for their own gain.

What I call a slacker instead tries to do nothing but reading facebook (or HN) all day. Most of the time these are people who have given up hope to improve their careers for one reason or another. In many cases it is connected to a parasite sucking too much out of them and them not being able to recover self-motivationally.

I bet at least before readign this post your understanding of slacker and my understanding of parasite would be similar, right?

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