High-level executives at Tesla are bailing out.
Back when Musk announced his overoptimistic production schedule for the Model 3, his two top production executives quit.[1] Nine more high-level executives have left so far this year.[2]
I know someone who just got fired in this round at Tesla. His manager never communicated to him that he was a bad performer. He was not on a PIP or any performance plans. He was also working on Model 3. One fine morning his manager called him and said this would be his last day. He is a single income earner and was so shocked by this news that he is getting borderline depressed. They offered only 2 weeks of severance.
I think firing without giving warnings and opportunity to improve is sick. These people don't even know they were doing badly. I can't tell if they've been told where they screwed up. These people could be spending a lot of time figuring out what went wrong when everything seemed to be going fine. They don't deserve that, regardless of performance.
They are people, they have lives and it wasn't anything like gross misconduct.
I worked at a bigco during a RIF (reduction in force), and underperforming /teams/ or even /sections/ had their management told, “your team underperformed — fire X number of lowest performers”.
Then the manager was effectively forced to just pick people to let go.
Shitty, but par for the course for many bigco places (outside tech), from what I have heard over the years.
I don't know if this helps your friend but I know BMW in Munich is hiring. A lot of departments are fine with English speakers. I found a couple of examples for him if they are useful:
without commenting on the unfairness -- as an employee, if you aren't prepared for this to happen to you, then you are doing yourself a disservice and are improperly managing your finances.
Any and all of us can, and some will be, 'fired' for less with less.
I'm not a fan of this style of management at all. I won't knowingly go to work for a company that behaves in this manner. I've read that Netflix does it, and I've seen inferences that they acquired the practice from Disney.
If you have a low performing employee that you want to get rid of, fine. Arbitrarily destroying the lives of a percentage of your workforce in an annual purge is not OK.
People always seem to put Musk on a pedestal. Personally, I've always been (and always will be) leery of a company run by a PayPal founder.
And it is exactly this style of management that is causing problems at the German automation plant he aquired (see my comment in the duplicate thread). It is probably a reason why production of the Model 3 is behind -- the company he acquired builds the factory robots needed for advanced automation. Smart move to acquire it then and it explains why the timing is now off.
You can't run a German plant like an American one, people will take the 30 day vacations that have been written into their contracts since before he arrived (just because you have a new boss doesn't mean the old contract is invalid), take sick days if they need them (unlimited sick days by law, they don't come out of your vacation time), and go home at 5pm because they value their home/family/free time. Last I checked the factory had at least dozens of positions open that they can't fill because no one here wants to work for them.
Do they set a "quota" for 2%? Or is it that they do it every year, and 2% is about the number that falls out?
I do agree that a "firing quota" is backwards; it should be a standard of performance. But even in a healthy, high-performing company, 1 (or maybe 2) out of 100 people being a drag/net-negative contributor doesn't sound far too off. Ultimately I think it helps the other 98 people to ask those two to leave as soon as it's clear they're not going to become a net positive. If that assessment comes at a specific time of year, so be it; if it's "Okay, we have /n/ heads to chop off, where are they coming from??"... then yeah, not so much.
Any company, whether it's our pet tech company or a boring bank, will have to let go of what they believe is under performing staff at some point. Some companies manage to do little by little so no-one notices, some do it in bulk once a year and it becomes news.
I'm not sure what is better for the employees but often middle managers tend to keep their staff until forced by top management to let someone go.
As for "destroying" lives, I suggest we don't let ourselves get carried away by this. A job is a job; a means to make money. There are other ways to make money, including by taking another job or by starting your own company, which is very realistic for former Tesla engineers.
Just like you are not obliged to buy a Tesla model 3 although you might have bought a Tesla model S beforehand, Tesla is not obliged to buy your services as employees forever and ever. A job is not till death do us part.
As for comment about "arbitrarily" firing people; there is nothing that supports that Tesla did that. Why would they fire people arbitrarily? They are scaling up. The last thing they would do is to fire for the sake of it.
If it helps, he didn't really found PayPal or have much of anything to do with it one way or the other. He founded X.com, which merged with PayPal. He left after not doing much beyond arguing with Max Levchin about Windows vs FreeBSD. IIRC.
Most people considered him kind of a joke before Tesla and SpaceX were mainstream successes.
He's done amazing things with that PayPal money though. I bet a few dozen people on HN have ambitions as big as Elon Musk's but haven't lucked upon an easy $160M cash. He's the proof of what's possible when the right kind of person does.
How is an "annual purge" of low performing employees any different ethically to a day-to-day purge of low performing employees?
The only difference is HR strategy. Perhaps they want to signal to the labor market that they're not shy about ridding themselves of second-rate colleagues? I don't like working with second-rate colleagues; it certainly makes me want to work for Tesla.
What style - firing 2% of your employees in a given year? That is not a very high rate for a large company. It's only news because everything Tesla is news.
I know Tesla seems to hold a special place for many people. But I don’t see how these business practices result in them disrupting the automotive industry.
> People always seem to put Musk on a pedestal. Personally, I've always been (and always will be) leery of a company run by a PayPal founder.
Bingo! I never quite got the Musk hype train, between how he treats his employees, doesn't respect work life balance, has unrealistic expectations and talks about people not wanting to work for him as less talented, promotes the idea of American exceptionalism etc., I don't see the appeal.
As for his 'accomplishments', he seems to talk a lot and constantly over promise/under deliver. I guess his appeal is that his companies at least approach the exciting territory, which is quite a difference from another 'food delivery startup' of the Valley, but lets not make an average (if electric) car made by Tesla, with plenty of its own, documented QC problems something it is not, just because Musk is involved.
They're pretty brutal. In one case a woman works herself to the point of chronic back pain. They tell her to take as much time as she needs to recover. But when she comes back, her job is gone (they didn't hire someone else, they just eliminated it).
I'm not a fan of this style of management either, but at this moment in time we need a standard bearer for electric cars, and Tesla is best placed to fill that role at the moment.
After the (hopefully successful) release of the Model 3, assuming this drives other companies to push forward electic cars, we won't need Tesla to be successful anymore, so I'd expect more people to be critical after that.
Do other companies do this? Unless this is GE-style force ranking, I've never heard of it.
If somebody isn't performing well, I have no idea why I'd wait up to a year to deal with it. And it seems terrible for morale (and PR) to have a regular event where a bunch of people will be let go in one block.
This sort of behaviour is quite common in companies, so I can't help wondering if it is true that studies have shown a significant percentage of Silicon Valley CEO's and company executives are psychopaths.
Why would they have to be psychopaths to justify such behaviour? A belief that the project > people suffices. Can you not think of any project that is more important than the individual workers making it happen?
Also, I suspect they would react differently if e.g. the mass-laid-off committed mass suicide, whereas I doubt a psychopath would.
The high estimate was 700 fired. Out of 33,000, that's 2%. Culling the bottom 2% performers seems like a reasonable (even healthy) thing to do; not really an upheaval.
Man, that's rough. I know there is good reason to get rid of dead weight, but two things:
1. I had no idea dead weight would be allowed to exist at Tesla.
2. I believe dead weight can be redeemable, if you put in the right effort --not the procedural PIP stuff (which is about improvement as much as incarceration is about rehabilitation) but I mean real effort to rehabilitate a worker. Maybe too much effort for a high flying co.
While 300-700 people sounds massive, it's out of 33,000 or about 1-2%. It's not hard to believe that 1-2% of a company were bad hires, couldn't/didn't deliver, or weren't a great match for the job anymore.
Not to waste time pointing out what you already know, but I think it's worth adding that you can be fired without being dead weight. Many firms (especially in law or consulting) have chosen to have pyramid structures with up-or-out policies that fire half the employees every two years. Even if the fired employees are good, this keeps everyone motivated and allows you to churn through employees to find the really excellent ones worth developing. The system is not inherently good or bad, as long as all parties are aware of it.
I suppose "dead weight" can be redeemable, however I would say that if you are "dead weight" you probably have the wrong job, and are very likely better off finding something different.
As we get older, that's less and less of an option, and often we have to put up with a job rather than enjoy a job.
I used to be of the opinion that a company should have full right to drop dead weight as and when it chooses fit. The thing we forget is we, citizens, pay extortionate taxes to run a government which provides favourable incentives for companies to form and provide employment. They should, in return, be obliged to demonstrate some level of mutual benefit to employees, rather than purely incentivising shareholders' and directors' bonuses.
2 key sentences in the article say so much:
"Several said Model X, Model S and former SolarCity operations seemed to be targeted."
...
"The spokesman said most of the dismissals were administrative and sales positions, and outside of manufacturing."
This has little to do with performance or any conspiracies. If your output of products is about to dramatically shift there is no reason to think employment should remain stable among all departments. I would guess if shifting a company's labor requirements was more politically correct, the shift would be much larger.
The average pundits head might just explode trying to rationalize the juxtaposition of a clean tech company increasing production rapidly yet 'firing' hundreds. The rational, however, applaud these efforts and the difficult decisions this requires.
> If your output of products is about to dramatically shift there is no reason to think employment should remain stable among all departments.
Among all departments, of course not. But the job of administration and sales for the old model of car is a tremendously close match to administration and sales for the new model. If they didn't have a sufficiently large desire to fire these people, they would transfer most or all of them over.
The solarcity firings would possibly represent a shift in labor requirements, but even then they are strongly denying it with the claims of performance-based firings and not layoffs.
If you are right then the talk about performance is just subterfuge to circumvent the law, and also it starts to look like they also illegally targeted workers talking about a union (which certainly looks bad if you've just been in the news for having too many workers injured on the job).
Flawed assumption being presented as logic here. The only logical reason for firing would be if the model S,X skills were completely irrelevant to whatever the new model is - which is unlikely.
SolarCity is an albatross of debt around their neck... no surprises. They have to raise debt for a long time just to get financing these obligations. No dog and pony shows, just paper to pay off paper.
So basically what you have is Musk over promising and under delivering but it's the worker's fault he could not meet unrealistic deadlines he set himself ignoring all reality.
Musk set Tesla up for failure and now the non-management people have to suffer as a result. The fact that this is even being talked about right now may hurt Tesla's chances of hiring great future employees...especially with that scathing article basically saying they were being fired for bad performance and not laid off.
Can you still get unemployment if you are fired for unsatisfactory performance?
[+] [-] Animats|8 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-04/two-tesla... [2] https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2017/08/02/tesla-ts...
[+] [-] dmode|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jwdunne|8 years ago|reply
They are people, they have lives and it wasn't anything like gross misconduct.
I think Mr Musk has a lot to answer for.
[+] [-] stock_toaster|8 years ago|reply
Shitty, but par for the course for many bigco places (outside tech), from what I have heard over the years.
[+] [-] viraptor|8 years ago|reply
But yeah, this is terrible. If you don't expect you're going to be fired for bad performance, that's a company's failure, not yours.
[+] [-] throwingerman|8 years ago|reply
https://recruiting.bmwgroup.de/ibs/Servlets/ibs/controller/s...
https://recruiting.bmwgroup.de/ibs/Servlets/ibs/controller/s...
I'm sure Mercedes and Audi would also have similar openings.
[+] [-] metaphor|8 years ago|reply
Fired or layed off? I've never experienced either, but I always thought severance pay was exclusive to the latter.
[+] [-] thereisnospork|8 years ago|reply
Any and all of us can, and some will be, 'fired' for less with less.
[+] [-] Steeeve|8 years ago|reply
If you have a low performing employee that you want to get rid of, fine. Arbitrarily destroying the lives of a percentage of your workforce in an annual purge is not OK.
People always seem to put Musk on a pedestal. Personally, I've always been (and always will be) leery of a company run by a PayPal founder.
[+] [-] throwingerman|8 years ago|reply
You can't run a German plant like an American one, people will take the 30 day vacations that have been written into their contracts since before he arrived (just because you have a new boss doesn't mean the old contract is invalid), take sick days if they need them (unlimited sick days by law, they don't come out of your vacation time), and go home at 5pm because they value their home/family/free time. Last I checked the factory had at least dozens of positions open that they can't fill because no one here wants to work for them.
[+] [-] tbabb|8 years ago|reply
I do agree that a "firing quota" is backwards; it should be a standard of performance. But even in a healthy, high-performing company, 1 (or maybe 2) out of 100 people being a drag/net-negative contributor doesn't sound far too off. Ultimately I think it helps the other 98 people to ask those two to leave as soon as it's clear they're not going to become a net positive. If that assessment comes at a specific time of year, so be it; if it's "Okay, we have /n/ heads to chop off, where are they coming from??"... then yeah, not so much.
[+] [-] flexie|8 years ago|reply
I'm not sure what is better for the employees but often middle managers tend to keep their staff until forced by top management to let someone go.
As for "destroying" lives, I suggest we don't let ourselves get carried away by this. A job is a job; a means to make money. There are other ways to make money, including by taking another job or by starting your own company, which is very realistic for former Tesla engineers.
Just like you are not obliged to buy a Tesla model 3 although you might have bought a Tesla model S beforehand, Tesla is not obliged to buy your services as employees forever and ever. A job is not till death do us part.
As for comment about "arbitrarily" firing people; there is nothing that supports that Tesla did that. Why would they fire people arbitrarily? They are scaling up. The last thing they would do is to fire for the sake of it.
[+] [-] staunch|8 years ago|reply
Most people considered him kind of a joke before Tesla and SpaceX were mainstream successes.
He's done amazing things with that PayPal money though. I bet a few dozen people on HN have ambitions as big as Elon Musk's but haven't lucked upon an easy $160M cash. He's the proof of what's possible when the right kind of person does.
[+] [-] sjwright|8 years ago|reply
The only difference is HR strategy. Perhaps they want to signal to the labor market that they're not shy about ridding themselves of second-rate colleagues? I don't like working with second-rate colleagues; it certainly makes me want to work for Tesla.
[+] [-] lacker|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ianai|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ThomPete|8 years ago|reply
https://www.manager-tools.com/forums/jack-welchs-20-70-10
[+] [-] fmueller|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AsyncAwait|8 years ago|reply
Bingo! I never quite got the Musk hype train, between how he treats his employees, doesn't respect work life balance, has unrealistic expectations and talks about people not wanting to work for him as less talented, promotes the idea of American exceptionalism etc., I don't see the appeal.
As for his 'accomplishments', he seems to talk a lot and constantly over promise/under deliver. I guess his appeal is that his companies at least approach the exciting territory, which is quite a difference from another 'food delivery startup' of the Valley, but lets not make an average (if electric) car made by Tesla, with plenty of its own, documented QC problems something it is not, just because Musk is involved.
[+] [-] hyperpape|8 years ago|reply
They're pretty brutal. In one case a woman works herself to the point of chronic back pain. They tell her to take as much time as she needs to recover. But when she comes back, her job is gone (they didn't hire someone else, they just eliminated it).
[+] [-] ZenoArrow|8 years ago|reply
After the (hopefully successful) release of the Model 3, assuming this drives other companies to push forward electic cars, we won't need Tesla to be successful anymore, so I'd expect more people to be critical after that.
[+] [-] yahna|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] wpietri|8 years ago|reply
If somebody isn't performing well, I have no idea why I'd wait up to a year to deal with it. And it seems terrible for morale (and PR) to have a regular event where a bunch of people will be let go in one block.
[+] [-] SeanDav|8 years ago|reply
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/21/apparently-psychopaths-make-...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/15/silicon-v...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy_in_the_workplace
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-small-business/wp/201...
[+] [-] JabavuAdams|8 years ago|reply
Also, I suspect they would react differently if e.g. the mass-laid-off committed mass suicide, whereas I doubt a psychopath would.
[+] [-] tbabb|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kryptiskt|8 years ago|reply
This crap from management shouldn't be tolerated, much less celebrated.
[+] [-] rdlecler1|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mc32|8 years ago|reply
1. I had no idea dead weight would be allowed to exist at Tesla.
2. I believe dead weight can be redeemable, if you put in the right effort --not the procedural PIP stuff (which is about improvement as much as incarceration is about rehabilitation) but I mean real effort to rehabilitate a worker. Maybe too much effort for a high flying co.
[+] [-] caseysoftware|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tedsanders|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] camus2|8 years ago|reply
Calling real people "dead weight" is insulting and dehumanizing.
[+] [-] DigitalJack|8 years ago|reply
As we get older, that's less and less of an option, and often we have to put up with a job rather than enjoy a job.
[+] [-] throwingerman|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CrLf|8 years ago|reply
Also, this sounds straight out of the Ministry of Peace:
"It also said the moves have generally boosted worker morale"
[+] [-] praulv|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nopzor|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xedarius|8 years ago|reply
https://www.quora.com/Could-Goldman-Sachs-strategy-of-firing...
I think Barclays also used to do it.
It's shitty thing to do to people. But you don't need me to tell you they're shitty companies.
[+] [-] carlossilva33|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spectrum1234|8 years ago|reply
This has little to do with performance or any conspiracies. If your output of products is about to dramatically shift there is no reason to think employment should remain stable among all departments. I would guess if shifting a company's labor requirements was more politically correct, the shift would be much larger.
The average pundits head might just explode trying to rationalize the juxtaposition of a clean tech company increasing production rapidly yet 'firing' hundreds. The rational, however, applaud these efforts and the difficult decisions this requires.
[+] [-] Dylan16807|8 years ago|reply
Among all departments, of course not. But the job of administration and sales for the old model of car is a tremendously close match to administration and sales for the new model. If they didn't have a sufficiently large desire to fire these people, they would transfer most or all of them over.
The solarcity firings would possibly represent a shift in labor requirements, but even then they are strongly denying it with the claims of performance-based firings and not layoffs.
[+] [-] emodendroket|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mankash666|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] erdle|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nstj|8 years ago|reply
If they were focused on 1 factory that would be weird - if they were company wide that would be within the bounds of normalcy.
Can anyone illuminate?
[+] [-] ape4|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] someonewhocar3s|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] fakenwse|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] thegayngler|8 years ago|reply
Musk set Tesla up for failure and now the non-management people have to suffer as a result. The fact that this is even being talked about right now may hurt Tesla's chances of hiring great future employees...especially with that scathing article basically saying they were being fired for bad performance and not laid off.
Can you still get unemployment if you are fired for unsatisfactory performance?