Slashdot Mirror
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.
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?
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".
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.
"Those terminated were generally the highest paid in their position," this person said, suggesting that the firings were driven by cost-cutting.
It's not trolling to mod off-topic posts to -1. Complain about it on a climate change story, it has no place here. Yeah yeah I know, "it's too important, we have to spread the word everywhere" says every zealot about every issue. Keep it on topic. If your screed has nothing to do with the story, then it should be modded down to -1, every time.
... 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.
Technically, your post is off-topic too - just sayin'.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Let's test my theory:
Wubba lubba dub duuuuuuuub!
I need that Szechuan sauce, Morty!
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.
All of us.
If it does, it is only for the shareholders.
> Global warming is real.
Unless declared integer.
Apple hires 700 new engineers.
"Slashdot is supposed to be a place free of censorship and it is time that the censorship of global warming skeptics stops."
You must be new around here. We "censor" ourselves. Majority rules on Slashdot.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
And I'd be fine getting modded down for it, I certainly wouldn't bitch and moan in other /. stories because some mod gave a -1 to my off-topicness.
Sure, I get it - I was just injecting some humor. Things get mis-modded all the time here and it can be annoying -- mostly so when "flamebait" or "troll" is applied simply because the moderator disagrees with the opinions (or facts) in the post -- and this happens a lot with certain topics. Such mis-moderation injects the moderator's viewpoint into the thread - which makes it commentary, not moderation. Also annoying is when a post is modded "off-topic" when it's topic-adjacent or otherwise weirdly connected (often in an attempt at some humor) which shows a lack of imagination on the part of the moderator.
In this case, the original post was way off-topic and I would have modded it as such, instead of troll.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
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."