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Tesla's Mass Firings Spread To SolarCity as Employees Say They Were Blindsided (cnbc.com)
Tesla has laid off over 200 employees from its SolarCity business for performance reasons, just over a week after firing hundreds more from its motor vehicle division. From a report: Employee dismissals at Tesla are continuing, according to six former and current employees, and have spread from its motor division to SolarCity offices across the U.S. Echoing reports from earlier this month, these SolarCity employees say they were surprised to be told they were fired for performance reasons, claiming Tesla had not conducted performance reviews since acquiring the solar energy business. Earlier this month, Tesla began firing hundreds of employees after it announced a recall of 11,000 Model X SUVs. Tesla had already announced plans to lay off 205 SolarCity employees at its Roseville, California, office by the end of October this year. However, SolarCity employees across the country have been fired in the last two weeks -- not just in California, but also in Nevada, Arizona, Utah and beyond, according to these employees.
I am one of those affected. Anyone have a $50,000 per year job for me in Silicon Valley in IT?
Solar City employees shouldn't have been blindsided if they were wearing solar eclipse glasses.
SolarCity was well on its way to bankruptcy. The only reason Musk bought SolarCity was to save his cousins and the SolarCity bonds he owned - at the expense of Tesla shareholders. And all it took was a lame presentation showing fake solar tiles to convince them.
I cannot see Tesla's long view in their reasons here. They are a high-profile set of companies (Solar City, Tesla, Boring Co. and SpaceX among others) and this news has hit major outlets - not just niche industry rags. It would be in their best interest to get out in front of this and provide some detail; but they have not. The arbitrariness of the reasons given for firing employees en masse is now what is in the history books for them, and this will surly dissuade talent from desiring to work for a Musk company in the future. Uber is another big-name entity that is walking this same line due to the narrative around its work environment.
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Investors should sell everything Musk related NOW!
200 people out of (according to Wikipedia) 15,000 (that's 1.33%) is in no way shape or form a *mass* firing?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
You can't fire someone for talking about starting an union.
I have an acquaintance that worked for Solar City in the Roseville area, who had been told this was coming and was offered either a severance package or a job at Tesla in NV. This person isn't someone with a super unique skill set either and seemed to speak like it was common knowledge this was coming soon.
I thought it was common practice to layoff the bottom 5%, 10% or maybe even more every year after reviews are complete? I have seen it in the past at some large well known companies.
Seriously, companies do this all the time and it doesn't cause any news at all. Just because it's Tesla (an interesting company from a nerd's point of view) does this make a splash. And really the firings weren't that big of a percentage of the work force
This is just business as usual.
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The company has not performed well.
Therefore, by logical implication, its employees have not performed well.
Therefore, all employees are fair game for being laid off for performance reasons.
Non-Union Low-Rate Luxury Auto Maker finally begins to behave like one after attempting (and failing) to become a Mid-Rate builder.
News at 11.
Make sure your resume and LinkedIn profile is up to date and put off any large purchases you don't absolutely need because you're next.
Tesla/Elon Musk critics will use this to fuel their illogical hatred of the man and his brand. It's funny to see the logic hurdles many are already jumping over in this thread. If you all are so sure Tesla is going to fail, please short sell otherwise STFU.
If Google is right Solar City has 15k employees, even assuming that the 200 number is a bit low 1.5% of their workforce. It seems fairly on par with the performance firings done by pretty much every large company out there on various timetables (some once a decade, some biannually). Companies like Walmart do this on a regular basis rotating from store to store (have a family member that regularly complains about this).
The WARN Act requires that employers provide a notice 60 days in advance of covered plant closings and covered mass layoffs (where mass layoffs is defined as 50 or more employees being layoff).
So, keep that in mind.
Seriously, companies do this all the time and it doesn't cause any news at all. Just because it's Tesla (an interesting company from a nerd's point of view) does this make a splash. And really the firings weren't that big of a percentage of the work force
This is just business as usual.
I see it ALL the time - like on CNBC, Bloomberg, WSJ,..... And here sometimes - Hello! IBM?!
Musk is Slahdot's current hero. The editors are gonna publish everything he says, he does, and everything his companies do to drive views and subsequently ad revenues.
Everywhere I've worked, companies go out of their way to try to avoid firing people purely for performance. It's hard to stop vindictive individual managers from singling people out for...special attention...but I've never worked in mandatory-firing environments. This is most likely a cost-cutting measure. Everywhere I've been, people have been more than made aware of their poor performance before being let go...no one doesn't see it coming. Once you get put on a performance improvement plan, you're on notice that it's nearly time to leave.
SolarCity might be trying to shed workers as the solar bubble dries up. We looked into solar systems for our house recently, and all of the companies are charging way too much for them, for any purchase option (loans, leases, outright purchase.) They're relying on the tax breaks to cloud the real cost of the equipment and maintenance, and (IMO) banking on the fact that most people don't know how their taxes are calculated. They just see they're getting a "huge" tax credit, resulting in a "huge" tax refund, and not taking the calculation to the next level and seeing how much the equipment cost is marked up. When the tax credit goes away, only a few of these companies are going to survive. The whole bubbly nature of this shows too -- you can tell that some of the local companies are these fly-by-night outfits with owners who jump from scheme to scheme and are just latching onto the latest way to make money.
I like the idea of solar, but I'm not going to pay massively marked up rates for a system. Most people just shovel a shoebox full of receipts to their "accountant" and can't figure out their own taxes, or just punch numbers into TurboTax. I think the solar companies have run through these people and are having trouble selling/renting solar panels to the rest of the homeowning population.
"Nah... I just do it to piss off my trolls and make coffee money off of them."
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"Which doesn't violate the Slashdot TOS. If you got a problem with that, take it up with management."
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This year I've posted ~4,000 comments.
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We have different priorities. You want to climb the corporate ladder. I want to own the corporate ladder.
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My employers don't care about what my Slashdot trolls think. Now go off and lick your balls somewhere else.
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200 People is about then 1 out of 125. With the other layoff added that is about 700 if you count worldwide 30000 employee, that is about 1 out of 30. Or 3% of the workforce. That does not sound like a big deal, and barely reach the level of rising profit (1000 employee I am guessing the order of magnitude of salary was 60K, so that means about a cost of 100K per year for the company, or 100 million per year (and that number is likely overestimated) that is over a more than 7 billion in 2016, that is a blip at those level, does not even correspond to a cent a share. If it stays at those numbers then it is a molehill and people are making it a mountain.
Until morale improves.
It totally works.
Remember when creimer used to imply that he was only the 3rd most disliked person on slashdot after you and apk in hopes that people would start trolling you and leave him alone?
Banking your companies future against a "toss-your-money-in-the-money-pit" style boondoggle monorail... I mean hyperloop... while laying off hundreds of employees in the areas where you can actually make products that are in demand and earn profit.
Now's clearly the time to invest!
Kudos to the guy for getting a bunch of universities to develop Hyperloop carriage prototypes for free that Musk owns the rights to if he likes them enough to use them though. That's a stroke of genius. It's a stroke of dickettry, but a genius level stroke. Musk: genius level dickettry stroker.
That got out of hand.
So did that!
Wanna research sex with live consenting adult human women??
He's done some similar research but nothing quite like that:
If all my assets were liquidated, I would still have enough cash to buy a new car and head off to Mexico to find a chica to marry.
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You're aware that are some states in the U.S. that allow underage marriage as young as 14 years old?
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As for my comment, I've heard stories of engineers retiring at 50, moving to Mexico and marrying underage girls. Since I work with ex-military, the Philippines is a popular retirement spot for marrying underage girls as well. It's all about getting the most bang for your retirement dollars.
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That only works if you retire to Mexico, build a mansion (by local standards), marry an underage sweet thing and bequeath all your possessions to the village.
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How is everyone so blind? Musk is the Bond villain we need, not the one we deserve. Think about everything this guy is a part of. Solar power. High efficiency batteries. Autonomous vehicles. Tunneling. Space exploration. How can no one else see what is going on here? When are the sheeple going to wake up? After Musk activates his army of solar powered autonomous space drones to Voltron together and drill to the core of the Earth and hyperloop our precious iron and nickle to Mars in order to resurrect his dead home planet!?!!?!
We would need at least 3208 110010001000s to equal one poster as shitty and annoying as creimer. Creimer is much worse I don't know how anyone even thinks he comes close.
Creimer is like 5 APKs times the number of cashew sockpuppets currently at 0 or higher karma.
Every machine needs lubrication, and reducing tolerances for the cogs means you need better lubrication. If your metrics are on for the first ten percent then you will need to adjust them later because they will become obsolete...along with the 10% they identified.
Yeah... that's a horrible situation if you take a "rank and file" job with one of them. But it's probably a pretty effective way to ensure the company keeps making good profits despite having clueless management.
I learned a long time ago that many bigger places use this as a standard business model. The "revolving door" works pretty well as a money-making machine, churning through bodies - IF you can keep that churn rate within certain parameters. Management is really only judged by hitting or exceeding whatever targets are set for their departments, so they, in turn, just keep people around for as long as they're producing numbers that help that total stay where they need it to be. If the place is designed around high turnover? They'll just have a whole team of people who process the new applicants as efficiently as possible so that becomes pretty much a fixed cost. (If you're asked to take a lot of standardized tests as part of the hiring process, it's a good clue you're applying at one of these places.)
Often, they'll even create a slew of petty and arbitrary rules so terminating a person can be done pretty much whenever they like without the employee having much of a leg to stand on that it was unjustified. Convergy's used to run call centers in the midwest that absolutely ran this way. Once hired, they set things up so your computer terminal tracked you by the second. Get up for a restroom break? The timer was counting until you returned and pressed another key. You weren't counted as present in the morning until you signed in. Run 30 seconds late because it snowed outside and you had to walk slow not to slip and fall on the ice? That's an automatic mark saved in your file about you being tardy. Work there long enough and you pretty much HAD to rack up at least a half dozen of these. Plenty of ammo for H.R. to use as your reason for termination at will, any time they felt like it.
I've noticed that "executives" in far away offices are often so out of touch with the companies in their charge, that I imagine them in meetings playing with action figures representing their different teams. Frankly, that's exactly what they do. They "play company" until one of their underlings has a really good execution that they can point to and take credit for and use to move away to some other sucker company for a bigger payoff.
No, the union represents only it's members.
Your claim is patently false. As long as 51% of the employees belong in the union, the union negotiated contract covers 100% of employees. So if the negotiators were paid for their time, the non-union member is freeloading for the benefits that are generated.
When disputes arise, union members must represent non-union members at the local level to the fullest extent of the contract. This forces union members to work for non-union members without compensation. This is also known as slavery.
Beyond the local, the contract typically does not apply. Since a large chunk of the dues are used to pay for lawyers on retainer and liability insurance, the non-union member does not enjoy those benefits.
It sounds like the CEO needs to be laid off for performance reasons.
This is fine. Everything is fine.
"Keep 'em scared"
If management is routinely firing the supposedly lowest-performing people the theory is that all those who remain will work harder AND the business will supposedly end up with an ever-improviong employee pool. The best will "bubble up" and the worst will drop off.
Of course, this all supposes that the employees will not have their morale crushed, burn out from high levels of stress, etc. The model does not usually last long because in most businesses that try it, the morale eventually affects even the best employees and eventually everybody ends up despising management and planning departures.
Musk has a bit of a messiah thing going on with a small slice of the world, so he'll probably be able to carry this on longer than most others would be able to (he's probably on-par with Steve Jobs in this regard) but he had better have a plan to pick up the pieces and change to a better model at some point or the wheels will come off his cart.
To begin with right?
I thought that was the point of the whole thing.
If I worked there, I'd go to work everyday expecting it to be my last day.