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Tesla Employees Detail How They Were Fired, Claim Dismissals Were Not Performance Related (cnbc.com)
New submitter joshtops shares a CNBC report: Tesla is trying to disguise layoffs by calling the widespread terminations performance related, allege several current and former employees. On Friday, the San Jose Mercury News first reported that Tesla had dismissed an estimated 400 to 700 employees. That number represents between 1 and 2 percent of its entire workforce. But one former employee, citing internal information shared by a manager, said the total number fired is higher than 700 at this point. Most of the people let go from Tesla so far have been from its motors business, said people familiar with the matter. They were not from other initiatives like Tesla Powerwall, which is helping restore electricity to the residents of Puerto Rico now. The mass firings, which affected Tesla employees across the U.S., had begun by the weekend of Oct. 7 and continued even after the initial news report, sources said. Among those whose jobs were terminated in this phase, some were given severance packages quickly while others are still waiting on separation agreements. Some terminated employees told CNBC they were informed via email or a phone call "without warning," and told not to come into work the next day. The company also dismissed other employees without specifying a given performance issue, according to these people. "Seems like performance has nothing to do with it," one Tesla employee told CNBC under the condition of anonymity. "Those terminated were generally the highest paid in their position," this person said, suggesting that the firings were driven by cost-cutting. That assessment was echoed by several others, including three employees fired from Tesla during this latest wave.
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Unlike traditional automakers, Tesla does not have a union. Yet.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
You are wrong, stupid, and spreading misinformation. /. moderation is a joke, but you are a moron who spreads misinformation.
You are making America dumber, like that traitor "president" who is subservient to Russia's government.
The firings will continue until morale improves around here.
Illusory superiority is something we probably all have mentally: We all think we're above average employees, when obviously that's impossible.
One thing I've noticed working at a few major companies is that nobody ever really gets bad performance reviews: Instead, they all range from satisfactory to excellent. But in reality, those who get satisfactory are getting bad reviews, it's just more polite to NOT say "you stink".
Tesla is just staging the ground to hire some h1b replacements for cheap.
govt welfare money doesn't cover regular employees.
Performance is PRETEXT used to fire undesirables before stock vestment. Especially if they're let go all at the same time!
Your opinion is being played for a fool.
This is systemic bullshit in our industry.
Your quotes are pretty stupid too. He is, in fact, the President.
NLRB should file an complaint!
"Those terminated were generally the highest paid in their position," this person said, suggesting that the firings were driven by cost-cutting.
Yes, underperforming on a work to cost ratio... The higher you get paid, the more profit you have to make..
Tesla has how much profit? Um... Can we say nearly nothing?
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
... especially in an at-will state, it's always legally in your best interest to not state a reason for the termination. For an at-will state, you are often not required to provide a reason, and if you do provide one it can come back to bite you in a lawsuit if they can show evidence otherwise.
This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
Maybe I'm lucky, but I've generally worked in places where they've never fired anyone for poor performance. Like the summary suggests, firings are usually based on salary and it's just a dumb HR thing. Are performance-based firings really a thing?
Just to be clear, I don't work exclusively with rockstars either. There are plenty of mediocre performers. But I've never experienced having someone get so bad at their job that they had to be removed.
There's no easy fix either...you basically have to not be the top guy on the salary spreadsheet when they decide to cut.
you have to pay unemployment for any reason. And yes, that means some people who don't desperately need it will get it. It also means your wages won't get depressed by them competing with you in the job market.
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This is a difference without a distinction, as they say.
When will people learn that money is a measure of resource allocation? These people represented misallocated resources.
That being said, I really wonder why companies cannot just reduce people's pay, and either let them stay on or leave of their own accord.
This is a meh story. McAfee did this on a regular basis pre sale to Intel. It was a non issue as the numbers were smaller, and unlike Tesla, no one really cared about a security company built on acquisitions.
That said, my heart goes out to those who were fired and their families. In this market, unless they're complete numnutz, they'll be working again quickly.
This is precisely the scenario Marx was trying to fight, so everything is as it should be here. Nothing to see, capitalism at work, move along. If you don't like it, move to Europe.
Some terminated employees told CNBC they were informed via email or a phone call "without warning," and told not to come into work the next day.
I'm fairly certain they didn't throw their belongings in the trash. But otherwise, yes, that's generally how it happens.
You mean Hillary? The one who could be bribed; had no problem selling US Uranium mines to Russia?
Yeah keep digging muthafuka. It's idiots like you who are turning a NeverTrumper like me into disliking you more than Trump.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
#notmypresident !!!!!
#actually...
Because robots. Please stick around to assemble and train the robots....
https://electrek.co/2017/04/25/tesla-model-3-robot-production-line-pictures/
Some co's fire the bottom of the stack, others fire the top. This suggests a madness to the method.
Table-ized A.I.
Maybe they went through payroll and fired people who got paid more than their peers but did not perform better.
I used to work at GE, they did occasionally try to fire someone for poor performance. It was always a major hassle documenting the reasons, discussing the problem with the employee, etc. But it did happen once in a while when the person was truly a non-performer and sometimes resulted in a lawsuit against the company.
Much more common was a RIF - Reduction In Force. Those involved a large number of people (like this one at Tesla) and usually effected older employees, poor performers, and people with the misfortune to be in a poor performing business group. Yea, it's illegal to layoff older employees in order to cut salaries so they always threw in a few younger employees to make it look like a mix.
There were usually a few really poor performers around before a RIF. We called them "canaries", because like a canary in a coal mine, as long as they were around you knew you were safe.
The truth is that the Big Three automakers were (and are) unable to respond to competitive stresses caused by places with lower wages being able to export into the US market. The lame management was a given - though there were only three things the management could do:
1) Cut costs sufficiently to compete - I rate this as nigh-impossible as a practical matter, as things like transport, raw materials, and infrastructure cost more here, too, and the automakers couldn't remake the whole economy all on their own. That said, this is where unions hurt the most.
Unions are rather shortsighted beasts and they cause more harm to manufacturing workers in the long run than they help. If you take a year-long or five year view, they are great. Look over a career's length, and the evidence is equivocal. Over 100 years, the union will kill any manufacturing business dead. The objective of the union is to maximize return for the union members and to control/limit access to the labor market in that industry in the interest of maintaining scarcity toward maximizing union member return. This is rarely congruent with the interests of the manufacturer, most obviously in times of competitive stress. Unions are great at getting workers stuff when the going is good, but when it is rough, they are unwilling to give anything back. Unions most typically force the manufacturer to reach the edge of bankruptcy and total dissolution before the union is willing to negotiate in good faith and with urgency, and by then it is much too late.
You need only look at what happened to US Steel, if the automakers aren't convincing enough.
2) Diversify - which was done, but was insufficent to stop the bleeding. Think, say, investments in Mazda by Ford, or in Isuzu/Suzuki by GM (Geo line).
3) Push their political masters to restrict trade to protect their market. This is what was ultimately done. You didn't think all those foreign car makers built plants in the US for their health, did you? They were compelled to. All that free trade talk is bullshit once your ox starts getting gored.
So, those who blame the unions and blame the management have lots of details to pick from to support their view. My view is that we should just accept that free trade is a phantom and stop pretending that we don't have a corporatist, protectionist regime. It's the only way the old-fashioned US economy works on a macroscopic level. Even the internet companies are starting to feel the pinch and are going to become part of this old school economy before long.
Why is so much of politics today pretending we don't believe in what we actually do believe in?
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Pffft!! That's nothing!! We've got an underperforming moron in the White House whose got a $1B LOSS under his belt.
So, I looked for another job. Took their tests and was hired - with a 40% increase.
I PROVE it by walking for more money.
If it does, it is only for the shareholders.
I wonder if Musk would make better decisions if he didn't work 100 hours a week. He's intelligent, but not getting enough rest can really mess up your judgement.
Because people's job performance goes down when you reduce people's pay. There is every reason to expect that if pay was reduced to be fair for the work they were doing before having their pay lowered they would still be overpaid for the work they perform after.
Apple hires 700 new engineers.
Because you'll be thanked with a lot of grumbling and undermining that is bad for everyone.
Truthfully, in this market, the people fired are probably better off. At least some of them will rethink what they are good at and find appropriate work that will likely lead to greater success.
I once reduced a 48 man engineering team to 30 by layoff. The ground rules of the layoff were to lay off the lowest performers. After the layoff, we were still able to get our multi-year project completed on time.
The real interesting lesson for me was that every single one of those let go were better off a year down the road, some extravagantly so. They went in a variety of directions, but none were still traditional engineers. I had advised every one of them that engineering was not the profession for them and suggested better professions for those that were obvious.
Wow, the reacharound post-hoc justifications used to excuse mass layoffs.
Clearly, all their actions are worthy of defense.
Then I'll get one!
Can't justify spending $100k on something that has poorly aligned body panels and squeaks.
Maybe they started using the old GE strategy of firing th bottom x% of the workforce as a matter of preventative maintenance?
"Stack ranking, also referred to as forced ranking, where managers across a company are required to rank all of their employees on a bell curve, has been a controversial management technique since then GE CEO Jack Welch popularized it in the 1980s.
"Only a small percentage of employees, typically about 10%, can be designated as top performers. Meanwhile, a set number must be labeled as low performers and are often fired or pushed out, giving the system the popular nickname "rank and yank."
This sounds exactly like what happens when a company decides to downsize - they call it a layoff. Performance doesnâ(TM)t come into play when you get rid of a division of team.
I would, however, be interested if the positions or individuals let go weâ(TM)re trying to unionize. Still, how does this break right to hire laws?
nt
Putting on my cynical hat here... although the laws vary by state, it looks really bad if you as an employer were to fire employees for reasons like "low performance" and then neglect to attempt to fill those positions. The former employees would then have a really strong case for unemployment benefits (which they might not otherwise be entitled to if fired with cause, but again, that varies by location), or maybe even wrongful termination if they can make a convincing case that their former employer used bogus reasons to avoid calling the terminations "layoffs."
But, there's nothing that says you (the employer) actually have to fill those openings... just leave them open, interview someone every once in a while to put up appearances, and you can then make a claim like "well, we've been interviewing, but haven't been unable to find any good candidates" without ever actually filling the position that you want to cut.
It was never about the cars Tesla has bigger fis to fry than a bunch of overpriced cars. No Tesla is all about the batteries, in cars, in homes, everywhere. They want nothing more than to blow up the central generation model of electrical generation and thus own the heart and soul of the modern world. We may end up driving any make of car but it will be Teslaâ(TM)s batteries that is in them all and Musk will collect a tidy sum from each one. The cars were a means to an end not the end itself.
Yeah, yeah, it's just a metaphor, but it speaks volumes with respect to thought processes.
CA is an at will state. You can hire from a competitor within a year even with sensitive info, and can be fired at will. They were fired at will. Too bad so sad.
What does any of what you say mean?
The FULL truth is that firm have the short, medium and long term goal of maximizing profit, even at the cost of being horrible to worker if needed. You forget the context in which union were born : as a counter balance to that. The result in the end were labor laws which were not done at the behest of firm , since they could not care less and came to even build horrible stuff like company scripts, child labor, not care about worker protection (what if a few worker are mangled by a machine "he, whatever") etc... Since then it has been a push/pull between firms and union. Sometimes the balance get in favor of union, sometimes not. But even in countries with load of social protection and strong union (think germany) it has NEVER been so out of whack that it destroyed manufacture. And they definitively caused more good than harm in the long run you specify. The reason US steel is dying , is because as a whole it is too expansive to produce, even if you paid worker zero and enslaved them. The reason is that steel production is resource intensive, and the major cost is not worker for a steel mill, it is the matter and the energy by a major factor. That is why even in the US, mini steel mill which use scrap steel and arc furnace produce cheap enough that they are profitable. Furthermore the major problem of the steel worker is that it is VERY easy to automate a lot of steel production. The union have NADA to do with that. Nowadays you can per worker count around 1500 tons of steel produced per year. And then the cost of steel dropped through the basement, the amount rose over capacity etc... NONE of those problem have anything to do with union, unless you are one of those person which pretend that getting paid under the cost of living is an option.
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Tesla is one of the biggest paper tigers in the history of business. Elon Musk is laughing all the way to the bank, but his investors will be left holding the bag when it all comes crashing down.
This may be a valid point. If it is not about building cars then there is no need for all those people on the car side of the company. Notice they did not lay off anyone from the battery side of the business.
I'm agreeing with the above post. I keep saying in my last two posts on the Muskovites, I'm guessing they can't pay their bills. And if you can't make payroll, that's a big legal hit. Better to avoid the problem than be hit by mandatory liability.
Tracy Johnson
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BT
Why is this a surprise? Tesla is a High Tech company. After working in the High Tech world for most of my career, I've come to expect layoffs. Fully half of the companies I've worked for have laid me off, never for cause. I don't think I was ever singled out because of the expense of my salary. It was always because the company had made a business decision to downsize or close a business unit. Most of the individual leaders I worked for tried to hire me into the next place they landed, and were sometimes successful. This business is speculative. Sometimes the money is there, sometimes not. Sometimes your product sells, sometimes it does not. Look at the statistics on the success of start-ups. Most of them fail. If you're working for one that fails, you get laid off. Other times the revenue is just not there to support a large business, so the owners decide to make it a smaller business, to fit the new revenue model. They don't owe you a living. This environment does not produce jobs for life. The best thing to do is learn to read the warning signs, have an exit plan, and have some money set aside for when the time comes. Maintain your employ-ability by learning the latest marketable skills (on your own time if you have to). Be ready, be valuable, be well networked with your work community. This is how it is.
Words, words, words