Rocket reuse became a normal occurance, probably earlier than the majority of the industry anticipated. Their competitive pricing took the market by storm, changing the equation of sending anything to space. There are less new payloads to launch in 2019, because it takes much longer to contract and build a satellite than to send it to space, and the market hasn't yet adapted to this new mechanic.
Their need for manufacturing new boosters scaled down greatly because of reusability. You cannot reasign all engineers to other projects, some must go.
On top of that SpaceX is moving to new risky projects like the Starship, and they need to cut any fat that poses risk to their long term plans.
Lastly, as few pointed out, it's a great opportunity to get rid of underperforming employees and restructure the company.
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 about how they're going to increase development while cutting staff. The big aero firms have room for improvement on productivity. But SpaceX has been lean from the start. I wonder how they'll get more out of an already highly productive team. That'd be something to learn from.
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.
SpaceX has like 7000 employees, about twice as many as ULA (their domestic competitor). There are reasons why (Dragon, BFR, Starlink, in-house engines, higher flightrate, more in-house everything), but that's a lot of people.
What I hope is we'll see new startups form out of these folk. What I'd like to see is an ESOP/co-op newspace company bent on similar goals. A lot of these employees have vested stock (or likely will vest soon) that might help capitalize such an effort.
> 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 about how they're going to increase development while cutting staff.
The oddness diminishes when you look at their open jobs listing [1], as it looks that they have >300 open positions.
> What's odd is why SpaceX is cutting staff with the new development underway on the larger rockets and the satellite business.
You're missing that they finished up falcon heavy development last spring, falcon 9 block 5 a little later, and crew dragon is finishing up now. That's a lot of development manpower freed up. To much for starship probably, and I don't know if many of the launcher skills are applicable to satellites.
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 benefits.
So what can you do to achieve your ambitious goals? Reduce the workforce and try to find a cutting point where you get rid of mostly parasites while keeping your ambitious work bees around.
Usually at the same time of the cut, some of the work bees also get raises and promotions, because then there's some free budget. So if you are an ambitious work bee, then "cutting staff" is actually also good news.
Finding the right cutting point is really the important point and hardest part. For instance you don't want to lay off people who really are performers but for some reason or another (e.g. they just got a baby) they don't perform right now. So at least in the companies I could look inside until now the cutting point is usually well inside the slackers group, so that the people who would recover and then start performing again have a chance to continue.
In the end, even the most tyranical ass-hole leader wants to have as many people as possible work as hard as possible to achieve his goals for him, in exchange for an amount of money that in most cases is peanuts for him. And not all leaders are even tyranical ass-holes.
It'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 you have to phase it out to maintain product lifecycles for sustainable growth.
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.
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.
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 latter.
Also, given that Falcon 9 is now essentially "done", I expect there probably is a fair bit of internal capacity that's accumulated during its development which can be cut. For example, SpaceX is famous for building a lot of components in house, but perhaps they'll move more to using subcontractors for Falcon 9 parts. That might free up money to spend on R&D. The challenge will be to become leaner and save money in the core launch business without compromising standards. It'll only take a couple of accidents to trash their reputation.
> towards sitting on the falcon 9 and launching to LEO.
That would still leave them with many thousands of redundant employees. Falcon 9 is done and the production is dropping due to reusability. Recently, they had a 3rd re-flight of the same core, which, coupled with the slowdown of the global launch market, means that in the next years they will need to produce a third to a half of the number of cores they used in 2017. The same for Merlin engines.
They basically fulfilled their mission and drastically reduced the cost of getting into orbit - which for the space industry is dominated by labor costs. Without a greatly increased demand, they can't justify keeping those people around.
And they can't roll all the Falcon production workforce towards BFR, Raptor and Starlink since those are still strongly R&D dominated projects and the skill set is incompatible. At the same time, they have hundreds of engineering positions open for those projects.
Depends on management style. Stack ranking companies, which used to include MS and GE) would fire 10% (theoretically the bottom 10%) every year. It's no longer fashionable, but there are probably some that still do this more or less.
Musk does seem to believe in occasionally "trimming the fat" when the numbers get tight. SpaceX did this exact thing in 2014, and Tesla has done it recently (and is now back over the headcount post-layoffs).
It's a big fraction but it's not necessarily unheard of. For example Autodesk laid off about 13% of its workforce at the end of 2017. Additionally, in California you've got to give plenty of advance notice and as a result the state tracks mass layoffs[1].
Maybe reusability is already having the desired effects? When a reusable launch is cheaper than using an expendable rocket, a big chunk of the savings must be labor (the raw materials are cheap) SpaceX, I think, is doing unusually deep manufacturing (vs contracting out, where most of the the hit of reduced labor demand would happen at component suppliers), so the reduction is at their own workforce if the increased efficiency is not fully compensated by increased demand.
In my experience, the larger the company the less painful it is to fire 10%.
In large engineering organisations, laying off 10% makes no difference at all on anything apart from the ego of managers whose teams shrink.
On the topic, wasn't Jack Welsh/GE that popularised the idea of firing the bottom 10% every single year? Not saying that this is necessarily a good idea but that shows the amount of slack in large organisations.
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.
This isn't the first time SpaceX has done a 10% layoff round [1]. It seems like they do this at key inflection points where they're relatively sure they can make the next tech leap, and need to retool their workforce.
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.
My 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 we don't want/need.
3) General organizational shakeup.
4) A true and real opex cutback ahead of anticipated future needs.
The thing is - outside of human terms - it's a big cut but it might be highly rational.
'Pruning' I think is a essential aspect of any healthy organization, forcing entities to rethink, to shake them out of their settled positions, getting rid of organizational cruft.
Of course, there are humans behind every decision which makes it quite fundamentally something else.
But if you could imagine they were 'robots', as if to remove any issues of compassion and concern for externalized outcomes, and this were simply a simple dispassionate re-org ... then you can see where the economics might be pointing.
We also don't know the terms of the layoff: maybe some of them are voluntary. Maybe the payouts are huge. Sometimes these things work out well for a lot of those involved, obviously it doesn't for others.
Edit to add: I understand you were using this as a thought experiment. Sorry for knee-jerking.
If you're employing people to do something robots can't, you need to understand that the way to treat them is also different. This goes double if your mission is to improve the world instead of outright capitalism.
Presumably, one doesn’t want to prune a spaceflight organization quite as aggressively if it jeopardizes mission safety...
Could also be that they consider themselves “done” with major design phases of the heavy, while the people mover stuff is too far away to engage mid level designers with effectively?
hey, design/build the thing, then fire those who designed it' type thing, which definitely happens
That’s OK if you hire contractors and pay them premium contractors rates. It’s sleazy and underhanded to make people believe that job security is part of the “package” then bait-and-switch.
For comparison, DoD is reducing its medical workforce for 13%, 17,000 jobs. Makes total sense to me. I only work 12 hours a day, 6-7 days a week, so really, less than half-time.
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_...
Some think you should do this annually. "Back when he was running GE, Jack Welch famously argued that leaders should fire the bottom 10 percent of their workforce each year, as part of an orderly continuous improvement process."
https://www.inc.com/paul-b-brown/should-you-fire-10-of-your-...
Yep, the warped logic of stack ranking still infects HR thought to this day, in some quarters anyway. It's one of those notions that sounds brilliant at first, but then when you think it all the way through, it reveals itself as patently bizarre and misguided.
As noted, it creates a really unhealthy intra-team sabotage mindset as everybody competes to avoid being at the bottom of the stack. It puts managers in a horrible spot, having to rank 'n' purge when maybe their team was humming along wonderfully all year. It creates an atmosphere of awful fear and dread that distracts from the work.
As one of my buddies said back when MS was still using this accursed system -- "If they'd used stack-ranking at Los Alamos, hell, Oppenheimer would probably have had to fire Feynman!" {obviously not reflective of the historical reality, but I think pithy nonetheless}
They've proven that they can make reusable rocket. In the early days they had around 6 launches per year requiring six separate rockets. Now they're hitting 20-25 launches per year and can carry an even larger payload on each launch. But they claim to be able to fly each rocket ten times before needing to make a new one. So you're going from 6 new rockets per year to 2 new rockets per year. Also rockets are not like your software programs that get rewritten every time a manager feels like it. You stick with what works. I think this is entirely expected.
If you are affected by the layoffs in Los Angeles, working in software engineering (esp. on ERP and internal tools), UI/UX, or supply chain — my company, Lumi is hiring https://www.lumi.com/jobs
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 decisions in the long-run.
Will the 10% of the employees be the ones who are already in the less comfortable financial and social situation in their private life ?
SpaceX is not a tech company. Aerospace/defense contractor companies have frequent layoffs. Usually this occurs when one of these companies don't win a contract or new regulations cut back on defense/space programs.
> We had an all hands meeting and were told to go home and wait for an email that basically says we stay or go. (from reddit post)
I'm surprised about that idea. At that size I expected them to follow "your account is locked immediately before you're told" policy. Guaranteeing people have access to company emails over the weekend and are told they're fired, sounds like a bad idea for IT to deal with.
i've done a lot of contract work for spacex. imo i think part of the reason they work so much is because they have no formal methods group. everyone seems to solve similar problems in slightly different ways instead of having a vetted and documented 'right' way to approach certain things. i've literally been paid to write code that does the same thing for different groups in slightly different ways. having done a lot of aerospace contracting, this is atypical from what i've seen elsewhere. my point is that if they formed a methods group to formalize and standardize across the entire org they might be fine with a 10% cut if they're not duplicating efforts all over the place.
IMHO, If I could guess announcing it all employees tells that you all are expendable. If you are doing that is not important for the company. You could be sent home forever. Gives a sense to everyone to pull up their shocks. Two days to think about your short commings
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.
[+] [-] MarcysVonEylau|7 years ago|reply
Rocket reuse became a normal occurance, probably earlier than the majority of the industry anticipated. Their competitive pricing took the market by storm, changing the equation of sending anything to space. There are less new payloads to launch in 2019, because it takes much longer to contract and build a satellite than to send it to space, and the market hasn't yet adapted to this new mechanic.
Their need for manufacturing new boosters scaled down greatly because of reusability. You cannot reasign all engineers to other projects, some must go.
On top of that SpaceX is moving to new risky projects like the Starship, and they need to cut any fat that poses risk to their long term plans.
Lastly, as few pointed out, it's a great opportunity to get rid of underperforming employees and restructure the company.
[+] [-] roedog|7 years ago|reply
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 about how they're going to increase development while cutting staff. The big aero firms have room for improvement on productivity. But SpaceX has been lean from the start. I wonder how they'll get more out of an already highly productive team. That'd be something to learn from.
[+] [-] HeadsUpHigh|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Robotbeat|7 years ago|reply
What I hope is we'll see new startups form out of these folk. What I'd like to see is an ESOP/co-op newspace company bent on similar goals. A lot of these employees have vested stock (or likely will vest soon) that might help capitalize such an effort.
[+] [-] consumer451|7 years ago|reply
The oddness diminishes when you look at their open jobs listing [1], as it looks that they have >300 open positions.
[1] https://www.spacex.com/careers/list
[+] [-] kemitchell|7 years ago|reply
Good on ya.
[+] [-] teleclimber|7 years ago|reply
You're missing that they finished up falcon heavy development last spring, falcon 9 block 5 a little later, and crew dragon is finishing up now. That's a lot of development manpower freed up. To much for starship probably, and I don't know if many of the launcher skills are applicable to satellites.
[+] [-] erikb|7 years ago|reply
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 benefits.
So what can you do to achieve your ambitious goals? Reduce the workforce and try to find a cutting point where you get rid of mostly parasites while keeping your ambitious work bees around.
Usually at the same time of the cut, some of the work bees also get raises and promotions, because then there's some free budget. So if you are an ambitious work bee, then "cutting staff" is actually also good news.
Finding the right cutting point is really the important point and hardest part. For instance you don't want to lay off people who really are performers but for some reason or another (e.g. they just got a baby) they don't perform right now. So at least in the companies I could look inside until now the cutting point is usually well inside the slackers group, so that the people who would recover and then start performing again have a chance to continue.
In the end, even the most tyranical ass-hole leader wants to have as many people as possible work as hard as possible to achieve his goals for him, in exchange for an amount of money that in most cases is peanuts for him. And not all leaders are even tyranical ass-holes.
[+] [-] syntaxing|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AdrianB1|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whatshisface|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stupidcar|7 years ago|reply
Also, given that Falcon 9 is now essentially "done", I expect there probably is a fair bit of internal capacity that's accumulated during its development which can be cut. For example, SpaceX is famous for building a lot of components in house, but perhaps they'll move more to using subcontractors for Falcon 9 parts. That might free up money to spend on R&D. The challenge will be to become leaner and save money in the core launch business without compromising standards. It'll only take a couple of accidents to trash their reputation.
[+] [-] yholio|7 years ago|reply
That would still leave them with many thousands of redundant employees. Falcon 9 is done and the production is dropping due to reusability. Recently, they had a 3rd re-flight of the same core, which, coupled with the slowdown of the global launch market, means that in the next years they will need to produce a third to a half of the number of cores they used in 2017. The same for Merlin engines.
They basically fulfilled their mission and drastically reduced the cost of getting into orbit - which for the space industry is dominated by labor costs. Without a greatly increased demand, they can't justify keeping those people around.
And they can't roll all the Falcon production workforce towards BFR, Raptor and Starlink since those are still strongly R&D dominated projects and the skill set is incompatible. At the same time, they have hundreds of engineering positions open for those projects.
[+] [-] jccooper|7 years ago|reply
Musk does seem to believe in occasionally "trimming the fat" when the numbers get tight. SpaceX did this exact thing in 2014, and Tesla has done it recently (and is now back over the headcount post-layoffs).
[+] [-] inferiorhuman|7 years ago|reply
1: https://www.edd.ca.gov/jobs_and_training/Layoff_Services_WAR...
[+] [-] tamasrepus|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] usrusr|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] entity345|7 years ago|reply
In large engineering organisations, laying off 10% makes no difference at all on anything apart from the ego of managers whose teams shrink.
On the topic, wasn't Jack Welsh/GE that popularised the idea of firing the bottom 10% every single year? Not saying that this is necessarily a good idea but that shows the amount of slack in large organisations.
[+] [-] fuddle|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rwj|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stretchwithme|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Spooky23|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] someguydave|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] swampthinker|7 years ago|reply
[1] https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=35254.0
[+] [-] ginko|7 years ago|reply
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://www.nasdaq.com/article/is-elon-musks-spacex-protecte...
[+] [-] sonnyblarney|7 years ago|reply
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 we don't want/need.
3) General organizational shakeup.
4) A true and real opex cutback ahead of anticipated future needs.
The thing is - outside of human terms - it's a big cut but it might be highly rational.
'Pruning' I think is a essential aspect of any healthy organization, forcing entities to rethink, to shake them out of their settled positions, getting rid of organizational cruft.
Of course, there are humans behind every decision which makes it quite fundamentally something else.
But if you could imagine they were 'robots', as if to remove any issues of compassion and concern for externalized outcomes, and this were simply a simple dispassionate re-org ... then you can see where the economics might be pointing.
We also don't know the terms of the layoff: maybe some of them are voluntary. Maybe the payouts are huge. Sometimes these things work out well for a lot of those involved, obviously it doesn't for others.
[+] [-] btrask|7 years ago|reply
No. Don't.
Edit to add: I understand you were using this as a thought experiment. Sorry for knee-jerking.
If you're employing people to do something robots can't, you need to understand that the way to treat them is also different. This goes double if your mission is to improve the world instead of outright capitalism.
[+] [-] taurath|7 years ago|reply
Could also be that they consider themselves “done” with major design phases of the heavy, while the people mover stuff is too far away to engage mid level designers with effectively?
[+] [-] gaius|7 years ago|reply
That’s OK if you hire contractors and pay them premium contractors rates. It’s sleazy and underhanded to make people believe that job security is part of the “package” then bait-and-switch.
[+] [-] aviv|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] killjoywashere|7 years ago|reply
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2019/01/10/more-17000-un...
[+] [-] Deimorz|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] technotony|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MisterOctober|7 years ago|reply
As noted, it creates a really unhealthy intra-team sabotage mindset as everybody competes to avoid being at the bottom of the stack. It puts managers in a horrible spot, having to rank 'n' purge when maybe their team was humming along wonderfully all year. It creates an atmosphere of awful fear and dread that distracts from the work.
As one of my buddies said back when MS was still using this accursed system -- "If they'd used stack-ranking at Los Alamos, hell, Oppenheimer would probably have had to fire Feynman!" {obviously not reflective of the historical reality, but I think pithy nonetheless}
[+] [-] awake|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kepano|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antpls|7 years ago|reply
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 decisions in the long-run.
Will the 10% of the employees be the ones who are already in the less comfortable financial and social situation in their private life ?
[+] [-] jameslk|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] viraptor|7 years ago|reply
I'm surprised about that idea. At that size I expected them to follow "your account is locked immediately before you're told" policy. Guaranteeing people have access to company emails over the weekend and are told they're fired, sounds like a bad idea for IT to deal with.
[+] [-] Rebelgecko|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway4DFe5|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsmitty5000|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] rabbitonrails|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cvakang|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bredren|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Others|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GeorgeTirebiter|7 years ago|reply
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.