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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?
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.
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.
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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Investors should sell everything Musk related NOW!
Oh come on... Sell everything Musk related now? How wrong you are..
You should have already divested yourself of anything Musk about a year ago...
Now... I got to go put some limit orders in to catch so cheap stocks that you folks are dumping.... What's that saying? Buy on bad news?
My guess is that because the adults in the room are actually in control enough to start managing these companies expenses, it might be a situation where these companies will start turning a profit soon. Layoffs can be a good sign, that management is actually starting to pay attention to costs.... Of course, it is also a possible sign of impending death... But I just don't see that happening yet.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
You never want to let employees know that you are going to fire them... leads to all kinds of problems.
Best to just fire them and "thank you for your service".
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
So, keep that in mind.
The short sellers have been consistently wrong on Tesla for years now. It's cost them a bundle.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Doesn't apply because it is less than 33% of the workforce at each site. Those HR people know all the tricks!
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.
I worked at a company that wanted to fire me for illegal reasons; they offered to do it "no cause" but instead I called their bluff and put in a 2 week notice. My co-workers gave me light duties, and the management was petrified, the production manager ended up having to audit all my activities (while trying to be secret about it) for the whole two weeks to make sure I didn't sabotage anything. It was funny as hell, way more fun than hiring a lawyer. It was a food product company, so there was a lot of equipment that was all life-and-death important. I was a great employee, they were just paranoid because they were a bunch of dishonest assholes and they were worried, "what if he is as bad as us? What shitty stuff would we do?"
"Nah... I just do it to piss off my trolls and make coffee money off of them."
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This year I've posted ~4,000 comments.
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Until morale improves.
It totally works.
Unfortunately, it is probably good news to investors, so yeah, limit your orders carefully.
Layoffs would be a very bad sign for a company that pre-sells their entire output, but luckily these were firings related to performance.
Luckily it wasn't a plant closure or layoff!
The short sellers have been consistently wrong on Tesla for years now. It's cost them a bundle.
Yea, but now we have layoffs happening.... This is new for Tesla. Of course, profits would be new for Tesla, as would actually selling cars in sufficient volume to remain viable would be new too. This is only going to get worse until they start selling cars...
I'm guessing their ability to raise cash to keep paying their labor costs is starting to become an issue and somebody in management took the adult role and started to readjust their cost structures. Cash flow is king, and more profitable business fail from cash flow issues than anything else.
So I'm not selling short, I'm buying puts...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
So I looked it up, since I assumed you were too stupid to do it yourself before claiming it was relevant, and it turns out that not only does it not cover firings, even if it was a layoff it wouldn't be covered because it is in the "50-499" employees range, and it is way less than the additional threshold of 33% of employees at the site.
And it says right in the text of the statute:
I've worked in places like this... Horrible places to work.
I worked at a now defunct Telco that routinely let the bottom 5% or so go each year, depending on how the numbers looked. Where it was good to dump the chaff, they often didn't consider the whole picture when they did this. I helped maintain the software for their telemarketing efforts and I knew one of their representatives who for three quarters had blown the doors off his "plan". In fact, as % of his plan he was their highest producer for 9 months of the year. Now if you exceed your plan in a quarter, they keep increasing your plan, so by the forth quarter, he didn't do so well, had some health issues which kept him off the phones and ended up in the bottom few percent and got let go. They where idiots..
The place was rife with back stabbing and sabotage as everybody clambered to stay at the top of the heap. It was a horrible place to work.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Federal subsidies subside, layoffs begin... (Says the news at 11)
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
SpaceX seems to be actually making money, though being privately held it's hard to know... So I'm guessing it won't be as bad there.
There is also the possibility of doing an IPO, though I think at this point they know the investors wouldn't make enough back to cover their investment. However, if you see an IPO with less than a billion in market capitalization, THEN be worried because the ax is going to fall.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
People are being fired for performance reasons. These are not layoffs.
Tesla loses money every year and people with no business training think think this means they can't make a profit.
Tesla makes a profit of about 25% on each car they make (and they sell every car they make even with production increasing).
Business 101: What is the difference between business investment and production costs?
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
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.
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.
Therefore, by logical implication, the man at the top controlling things should be let go as being ultimately responsible.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
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.
Yes they're called "companies you don't want to work for".
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it