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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
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.
So I should pack my bag and get ready?
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.
"You can't fire someone for talking about starting an union."
Not quite. You can't _tell_ a person you fire that it is because he tried to start a union.
Until morale improves.
It totally works.
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