8 ms·

I'm not a fan of this style of management at all. I won't knowingly go to work for a company that behaves in this manner. I've read that Netflix does it, and

I'm not a fan of this style of management at all. I won't knowingly go to work for a company that behaves in this manner. I've read that Netflix does it, and I've seen inferences that they acquired the practice from Disney. If you have a low performing employee that you want to get rid of, fine. Arbitrarily destroying the lives of a percentage of your workforce in an annual purge is not OK. People always seem to put Musk on a pedestal. Personally, I've always been (and always will be) leery of a company run by a PayPal founder.

lacker 9y ago
What style - firing 2% of your employees in a given year? That is not a very high rate for a large company. It's only news because everything Tesla is news.
- Steeeve 9y ago
  2% turnover over the course of a year might not seem high. Firing 2% of your workforce in a single day is.
  - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
    Research shows the long-term effects of disruption are a function of its duration. (If you’re looking for the paper I am referencing, it was an IMF paper on the effects of conflict on economic productivity.) Short and harsh is better than long and simmering.
    - Steeeve 9y ago
      I get that. If there's a layoff or a re-org going on, getting it all done at once is better. The idea of losing poor performers on an annual basis is the one I cannot get behind. I am perfectly fine with the idea that someone who isn't doing there job loses it. Where I have a problem is that once a year managers are told to dump their lowest performing people. The reality is that people will game the system. They will hire with the intention of firing. They will fire people who are adversarial either personally or professionally. They will fire people for arbitrary reasons. They will fire people for personal reasons. While tech work is easy to come by right now, it does not mean that the experience will be easy to deal with. Each person who was fired will now have to explain themselves to their families and their prospective employers. I doubt many of them took the job in the first place knowing it was not a stable environment.
      - mattmanser 9y ago
        The alternative is everyone waits for an excuse, the next recession, and then you get a massive 10% layoff.
        notahacker 9y ago
        The alternative to arbitrarily requiring a proportion of staff are fired on a certain day and thus institutionalising the necessity of having disposable staff members to protect your core team is setting real performance standards, offering real criteria for improvement and firing people that can't or won't improve to meet standards regardless of what time of year it is. Companies that impose forced stack rankings and firing quotas don't exactly have a great track record of avoiding large redundancies in recessions, and indeed due to company-wide underperformance...
tbabb 9y ago
Do they set a "quota" for 2%? Or is it that they do it every year, and 2% is about the number that falls out? I do agree that a "firing quota" is backwards; it should be a standard of performance. But even in a healthy, high-performing company, 1 (or maybe 2) out of 100 people being a drag/net-negative contributor doesn't sound far too off. Ultimately I think it helps the other 98 people to ask those two to leave as soon as it's clear they're not going to become a net positive. If that assessment comes at a specific time of year, so be it; if it's "Okay, we have /n/ heads to chop off, where are they coming from??"... then yeah, not so much.
- dunkelheit 9y ago
  The problem is that a true company-wide firing of bottom 2% of performers is impossible - you would have to somehow compare and rank people with vastly different roles to pull it off. So the way to do it is to first choose unlucky departments and set a quota for each department, then choose unlucky managers and let those managers choose unlucky employees. Which makes it a lot more similar to a layoff than the company likes to admit. These employees may be perfectly solid workers but now they have to bear a stigma of being fired for "performance" reasons. I had a manager friend whose company went through a "not-layoff" when approx. 2% of the workforce were let go. His group was among the unfortunate ones so he was told to choose one victim among his subordinates - but there was no one with unsatisfactory performance in his opinion. Still he had to choose. Didn't improve his morale that much - he quit shortly afterwards.
  - syshum 9y ago
    I was actually in a similar spot once... I choose to fire myself... The company is out of business now, mainly due to poor and unethical management
    - sitkack 9y ago
      Thank you.
  - wisty 9y ago
ianai 9y ago
I know Tesla seems to hold a special place for many people. But I don’t see how these business practices result in them disrupting the automotive industry.
- jfoster 9y ago
  Some of their employees are not good. Some of them disrupt the others. Some of them are negative. They make the other talented employees not want to work at the company. So you remove them. The remainder of the company is then happier and produces better results.
  - alphaalpha101 9y ago
    If someone is disruptive or negative, then you should get rid of them immediately.
    - rqs 9y ago
      Disruptive maybe, but negative? Some people became negative because they saw problems they can't resolve by themselves. Maybe don't fire this kind of people? But, well, it seems some companies just don't care.
      - jfoster 9y ago
        The problem is that negativity goes nowhere. There's nothing special about raising a problem until you have a realistic proposal about how to address it either fully or partially.
      - alphaalpha101 9y ago
        Negative = a negative influence. Someone that just feels negatively about some things obviously can't be fired. There's no ground for firing them. You need a reason to fire someone. A good reason.
yahna 9y ago
Netflix is extremely up front about it. Still have heard it's a constant battle to not get fired. Sounds lousy.
staunch 9y ago
If it helps, he didn't really found PayPal or have much of anything to do with it one way or the other. He founded X.com, which merged with PayPal. He left after not doing much beyond arguing with Max Levchin about Windows vs FreeBSD. IIRC. Most people considered him kind of a joke before Tesla and SpaceX were mainstream successes. He's done amazing things with that PayPal money though. I bet a few dozen people on HN have ambitions as big as Elon Musk's but haven't lucked upon an easy $160M cash. He's the proof of what's possible when the right kind of person does.
- orbifold 9y ago
  Wikipedia says that he founded X.com, which merged with Confinity, initially he became CEO and later Peter Thiel the founder of Confinity took over and the company was renamed to PayPal.
  - staunch 9y ago
    Yes, it's a bit confusing. Confinity created PayPal (roughly as we know it) before merging with X.com. X.com was a failed online bank and not really doing anything like PayPal's eBay stuff. > Confinity launched its milestone product, PayPal, in late 1999.[1] Confinity merged with X.com, founded by Elon Musk, in March 2000. The merged company became known as X.com because this was thought to be a name with broader long-term potential than Confinity or PayPal. However, surveys showed that a majority of consumers considered the name X.com vague and potentially pornographic and preferred that the company simply be called PayPal. After a corporate restructuring, the company adopted the name PayPal Inc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confinity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confinity
- noitsnot 9y ago
  From Wikipedia, he was the CEO after the merger who decided to shut down online banking and focus solely on PayPal. It sounds like he had a lot to do with it.
  - staunch 9y ago
    It wasn't even a choice. X.com was a failure and PayPal was taking off. Ultimately, this kind of decision is up to the board anyway, not the CEO.
sjwright 9y ago
How is an "annual purge" of low performing employees any different ethically to a day-to-day purge of low performing employees? The only difference is HR strategy. Perhaps they want to signal to the labor market that they're not shy about ridding themselves of second-rate colleagues? I don't like working with second-rate colleagues; it certainly makes me want to work for Tesla.
- alphaalpha101 9y ago
  Firing people is unethical unless they're actually violating their contract. VIOLATING it. Not just 'not the perfect employee I hoped you would be'.
- mcpherrinm 9y ago
  I've heard of tales from Cisco where managers tried to get internal transfers of bad employees to their team so they'd have somebody extra around to fire when cutting time comes.
- throwawayknecht 9y ago
  How would it be different if a hospital murdered X% of their worst-prognosis patients every January 1st, rather than letting X% die over the course of the year regardless of interventions?
  - zeroxfe 9y ago
    This is a ridiculous analogy -- Hospital patients (for the most part) don't have control over their diseases, employees (for the most part) have control over their performance. (Also, patients are customers of the hospital -- you should be comparing this to hospitals firing their worst doctors every year, which IMO, would be fantastic.)
  - sjwright 9y ago
    An invalid (and thoroughly disgusting) analogy. You are conflating murder and death in a rather untidy way, and hoping that the disgust for the analogy taints that which we're making an analogy about. If you like the theme of murder: How would it be different if a prison, rather than executing death row inmates on the first day they were legally permitted, instead delayed their executions so they could bundle them up into annual batches?
throwingerman 9y ago
And it is exactly this style of management that is causing problems at the German automation plant he aquired (see my comment in the duplicate thread). It is probably a reason why production of the Model 3 is behind -- the company he acquired builds the factory robots needed for advanced automation. Smart move to acquire it then and it explains why the timing is now off. You can't run a German plant like an American one, people will take the 30 day vacations that have been written into their contracts since before he arrived (just because you have a new boss doesn't mean the old contract is invalid), take sick days if they need them (unlimited sick days by law, they don't come out of your vacation time), and go home at 5pm because they value their home/family/free time. Last I checked the factory had at least dozens of positions open that they can't fill because no one here wants to work for them.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- leereeves 9y ago
  > [Musk] also joked to employees they would be going through “production hell” to meet demand for the new car. It sounds like taking sick days, vacation days, and going home at 5pm is exactly what Musk doesn't want from employees. Germans are fortunate to have those benefits guaranteed by law (and culture).
  - koevet 9y ago
    This is not for Germany only. The majority of EU contries have similar benefits guaranteed by the law.
    - leereeves 9y ago
      The comment I replied to, however, was about Germany.
    - briandear 9y ago
      I always wondered why laws are needed to require benefits. Seems like working for someone is a consensual choice that ought be regulated by the free market itself. Other than physical safety regulations, seems like the rest of it is government overreach. It’s also weird to me that a “contract” covers “workers” rather than a contact negotiated by each worker. Seems rather Marxist to me to consider workers as interchangeable cogs in the production machine. Some guy might not care about 30 days vacation but might prefer more money, as an example.
fmueller 9y ago
Firing a person should not destroy their life. Something else is really wrong if this is the case.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Sure, because everyone has enough money in the bank, no running expenses, no health issues, and a new job just around the corner.
- stuaxo 9y ago
  Leaving at the same time as a whole bunch of your colleagues are dumped on the job market makes it more difficult to find a job. Having news stories that you are in an underperforming two percent won't help either. This is a pretty callous move and no surprise it has affected morale.
- Steeeve 9y ago
  Most people, even well paid engineers, live paycheck to paycheck. Sizable companies take a month to bring in a new employee in the best case. Most hiring managers are skeptical of people fired in a mass "underperformance" firing. Toss in the fact that most people have never been fired and it's a massive blow to the ego. And also that it's terrible to communicate to your spouse and children that you've been fired for doing a bad job at work. That's a recipe for depression. Which makes it even harder to find work again. Which exacerbates the depression. And you're living on credit. And the bills are piling up. And you are starting to get phone calls. If you can't jump right into a new job, it's a hard situation to be in, no question about it.
  - ethbro 9y ago
    There's no reason a well-paid engineer (let's say $75k-250k) should be living paycheck to paycheck, even with a large family. If someone is, they should realize they deliberately chose that situation by failing to adjust for cost of living when comparing employment options.
    - Steeeve 9y ago
flexie 9y ago
Any company, whether it's our pet tech company or a boring bank, will have to let go of what they believe is under performing staff at some point. Some companies manage to do little by little so no-one notices, some do it in bulk once a year and it becomes news. I'm not sure what is better for the employees but often middle managers tend to keep their staff until forced by top management to let someone go. As for "destroying" lives, I suggest we don't let ourselves get carried away by this. A job is a job; a means to make money. There are other ways to make money, including by taking another job or by starting your own company, which is very realistic for former Tesla engineers. Just like you are not obliged to buy a Tesla model 3 although you might have bought a Tesla model S beforehand, Tesla is not obliged to buy your services as employees forever and ever. A job is not till death do us part. As for comment about "arbitrarily" firing people; there is nothing that supports that Tesla did that. Why would they fire people arbitrarily? They are scaling up. The last thing they would do is to fire for the sake of it.
- colechristensen 9y ago
  When you mass fire people like this, it can only seem like your plan was to fire a large set of people and you made it a goal to find them. You're quite likely to find people to fire that are down on their luck for some reason or another. You're also quite likely to alienate or scare a sizable portion of your workforce. Anxiety about getting fired will drive a lot of people to perform worse. Conversely, a feeling that your company will support you during rough times can make those rough times shorter and help productivity. It's also about diversity. Diversity of life situations, diversity of mental health status, diversity of motivations, etc. etc.
ThomPete 9y ago
It's the Jack Welsh management style. https://www.manager-tools.com/forums/jack-welchs-20-70-10 https://www.manager-tools.com/forums/jack-welchs-20-70-10
- tyingq 9y ago
  Culling the bottom 10%, every year, is a big step beyond this. This one seems off, especially noting that some of the fired say they never received a bad review. But it's not yet in that league.
ZenoArrow 9y ago
I'm not a fan of this style of management either, but at this moment in time we need a standard bearer for electric cars, and Tesla is best placed to fill that role at the moment. After the (hopefully successful) release of the Model 3, assuming this drives other companies to push forward electic cars, we won't need Tesla to be successful anymore, so I'd expect more people to be critical after that.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  How does the Bolt fit into that framework?
  - ethbro 9y ago
    I think people question GM's long term commitment to electric cars based on its history and legacy ICE business. That may change, but it's going to take awhile from anyone who remembers how the EV1 went. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1
    - maxerickson 9y ago
      I never drove an EV1 or anything, but I remember people being really mad they wouldn't sell them at prices equivalent to the really cheap leases they offered them to the public with, and that they had mediocre range (and remember NiMH batteries? Ew!).
      - ethbro 9y ago
        > and remember NiMH batteries? Ew! In 25 years, I'm sure we'll be saying the same about our current lithium ion chemistries. You engineer with the technology you have, not the future technology you wish you had. ;)
        maxerickson 9y ago
        Even after some huge advance that rendered lithium-ion obsolete, I imagine I would still think of them as the line in the sand between batteries that worked okay and batteries that were pretty good. Not just for electric cars, things like cordless tools, lithium-ion versions are much nicer than anything that preceded them.
AsyncAwait 9y ago
> People always seem to put Musk on a pedestal. Personally, I've always been (and always will be) leery of a company run by a PayPal founder. Bingo! I never quite got the Musk hype train, between how he treats his employees, doesn't respect work life balance, has unrealistic expectations and talks about people not wanting to work for him as less talented, promotes the idea of American exceptionalism etc., I don't see the appeal. As for his 'accomplishments', he seems to talk a lot and constantly over promise/under deliver. I guess his appeal is that his companies at least approach the exciting territory, which is quite a difference from another 'food delivery startup' of the Valley, but lets not make an average (if electric) car made by Tesla, with plenty of its own, documented QC problems something it is not, just because Musk is involved.
- omilu 9y ago
  He risked everything to make a rocket company from nothing, if ever there was a person that earned the hype, this is the person.
  - d215 9y ago
    Really? Everything? His life? His children’s lives? Or just money? Or just his investor’s money? My point being if you have a lot you can risk a lot in absolute terms, but maybe not so in terms relative to your own wealth or well-being. I don’t think he even risked his reputation with his space rocket thing. ‘Fail fast, etc’, right?
    - azernik 9y ago
      He was at one point, when both Tesla and SpaceX were early in their lifetimes and bleeding money, on the verge of bankruptcy and (from what came out from his ex-wife) a mental breakdown.
    - ethbro 9y ago
      He's risked far more than most investors, including bailing out his own companies (SpaceX and Solar City) by taking personal loans against his stock in others that were doing better (Tesla). If he hasn't infused the cash, SpaceX at least would have failed. There were a number of finance articles about it at the time "questioning" the odd moves, but paraphrased from Musk, 'If investors are risking their money, shouldn't I be risking mine too?' If your metric for "enough" is "work to literal death" then I expect you'll continue to be unsatisfied.
hyperpape 9y ago
Podcast on Netflix's practices: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/08/28/435583328/episode-647-hard-work-is-irrelevant http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/08/28/435583328/episo... They're pretty brutal. In one case a woman works herself to the point of chronic back pain. They tell her to take as much time as she needs to recover. But when she comes back, her job is gone (they didn't hire someone else, they just eliminated it).

lacker 9y ago

What style - firing 2% of your employees in a given year? That is not a very high rate for a large company. It's only news because everything Tesla is news.

Steeeve 9y ago
2% turnover over the course of a year might not seem high. Firing 2% of your workforce in a single day is.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  Research shows the long-term effects of disruption are a function of its duration. (If you’re looking for the paper I am referencing, it was an IMF paper on the effects of conflict on economic productivity.) Short and harsh is better than long and simmering.
  - Steeeve 9y ago
    I get that. If there's a layoff or a re-org going on, getting it all done at once is better. The idea of losing poor performers on an annual basis is the one I cannot get behind. I am perfectly fine with the idea that someone who isn't doing there job loses it. Where I have a problem is that once a year managers are told to dump their lowest performing people. The reality is that people will game the system. They will hire with the intention of firing. They will fire people who are adversarial either personally or professionally. They will fire people for arbitrary reasons. They will fire people for personal reasons. While tech work is easy to come by right now, it does not mean that the experience will be easy to deal with. Each person who was fired will now have to explain themselves to their families and their prospective employers. I doubt many of them took the job in the first place knowing it was not a stable environment.
    - mattmanser 9y ago
      The alternative is everyone waits for an excuse, the next recession, and then you get a massive 10% layoff.
      - notahacker 9y ago
        The alternative to arbitrarily requiring a proportion of staff are fired on a certain day and thus institutionalising the necessity of having disposable staff members to protect your core team is setting real performance standards, offering real criteria for improvement and firing people that can't or won't improve to meet standards regardless of what time of year it is. Companies that impose forced stack rankings and firing quotas don't exactly have a great track record of avoiding large redundancies in recessions, and indeed due to company-wide underperformance...

tbabb 9y ago

Do they set a "quota" for 2%? Or is it that they do it every year, and 2% is about the number that falls out? I do agree that a "firing quota" is backwards; it should be a standard of performance. But even in a healthy, high-performing company, 1 (or maybe 2) out of 100 people being a drag/net-negative contributor doesn't sound far too off. Ultimately I think it helps the other 98 people to ask those two to leave as soon as it's clear they're not going to become a net positive. If that assessment comes at a specific time of year, so be it; if it's "Okay, we have /n/ heads to chop off, where are they coming from??"... then yeah, not so much.

dunkelheit 9y ago
The problem is that a true company-wide firing of bottom 2% of performers is impossible - you would have to somehow compare and rank people with vastly different roles to pull it off. So the way to do it is to first choose unlucky departments and set a quota for each department, then choose unlucky managers and let those managers choose unlucky employees. Which makes it a lot more similar to a layoff than the company likes to admit. These employees may be perfectly solid workers but now they have to bear a stigma of being fired for "performance" reasons. I had a manager friend whose company went through a "not-layoff" when approx. 2% of the workforce were let go. His group was among the unfortunate ones so he was told to choose one victim among his subordinates - but there was no one with unsatisfactory performance in his opinion. Still he had to choose. Didn't improve his morale that much - he quit shortly afterwards.
- syshum 9y ago
  I was actually in a similar spot once... I choose to fire myself... The company is out of business now, mainly due to poor and unethical management
  - sitkack 9y ago
    Thank you.
- wisty 9y ago

ianai 9y ago

I know Tesla seems to hold a special place for many people. But I don’t see how these business practices result in them disrupting the automotive industry.

jfoster 9y ago
Some of their employees are not good. Some of them disrupt the others. Some of them are negative. They make the other talented employees not want to work at the company. So you remove them. The remainder of the company is then happier and produces better results.
- alphaalpha101 9y ago
  If someone is disruptive or negative, then you should get rid of them immediately.
  - rqs 9y ago
    Disruptive maybe, but negative? Some people became negative because they saw problems they can't resolve by themselves. Maybe don't fire this kind of people? But, well, it seems some companies just don't care.
    - jfoster 9y ago
      The problem is that negativity goes nowhere. There's nothing special about raising a problem until you have a realistic proposal about how to address it either fully or partially.
    - alphaalpha101 9y ago
      Negative = a negative influence. Someone that just feels negatively about some things obviously can't be fired. There's no ground for firing them. You need a reason to fire someone. A good reason.

yahna 9y ago

Netflix is extremely up front about it. Still have heard it's a constant battle to not get fired. Sounds lousy.

staunch 9y ago

If it helps, he didn't really found PayPal or have much of anything to do with it one way or the other. He founded X.com, which merged with PayPal. He left after not doing much beyond arguing with Max Levchin about Windows vs FreeBSD. IIRC. Most people considered him kind of a joke before Tesla and SpaceX were mainstream successes. He's done amazing things with that PayPal money though. I bet a few dozen people on HN have ambitions as big as Elon Musk's but haven't lucked upon an easy $160M cash. He's the proof of what's possible when the right kind of person does.

orbifold 9y ago
Wikipedia says that he founded X.com, which merged with Confinity, initially he became CEO and later Peter Thiel the founder of Confinity took over and the company was renamed to PayPal.
- staunch 9y ago
  Yes, it's a bit confusing. Confinity created PayPal (roughly as we know it) before merging with X.com. X.com was a failed online bank and not really doing anything like PayPal's eBay stuff. > Confinity launched its milestone product, PayPal, in late 1999.[1] Confinity merged with X.com, founded by Elon Musk, in March 2000. The merged company became known as X.com because this was thought to be a name with broader long-term potential than Confinity or PayPal. However, surveys showed that a majority of consumers considered the name X.com vague and potentially pornographic and preferred that the company simply be called PayPal. After a corporate restructuring, the company adopted the name PayPal Inc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confinity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confinity
noitsnot 9y ago
From Wikipedia, he was the CEO after the merger who decided to shut down online banking and focus solely on PayPal. It sounds like he had a lot to do with it.
- staunch 9y ago
  It wasn't even a choice. X.com was a failure and PayPal was taking off. Ultimately, this kind of decision is up to the board anyway, not the CEO.

sjwright 9y ago

How is an "annual purge" of low performing employees any different ethically to a day-to-day purge of low performing employees? The only difference is HR strategy. Perhaps they want to signal to the labor market that they're not shy about ridding themselves of second-rate colleagues? I don't like working with second-rate colleagues; it certainly makes me want to work for Tesla.

alphaalpha101 9y ago
Firing people is unethical unless they're actually violating their contract. VIOLATING it. Not just 'not the perfect employee I hoped you would be'.
mcpherrinm 9y ago
I've heard of tales from Cisco where managers tried to get internal transfers of bad employees to their team so they'd have somebody extra around to fire when cutting time comes.
throwawayknecht 9y ago
How would it be different if a hospital murdered X% of their worst-prognosis patients every January 1st, rather than letting X% die over the course of the year regardless of interventions?
- zeroxfe 9y ago
  This is a ridiculous analogy -- Hospital patients (for the most part) don't have control over their diseases, employees (for the most part) have control over their performance. (Also, patients are customers of the hospital -- you should be comparing this to hospitals firing their worst doctors every year, which IMO, would be fantastic.)
- sjwright 9y ago
  An invalid (and thoroughly disgusting) analogy. You are conflating murder and death in a rather untidy way, and hoping that the disgust for the analogy taints that which we're making an analogy about. If you like the theme of murder: How would it be different if a prison, rather than executing death row inmates on the first day they were legally permitted, instead delayed their executions so they could bundle them up into annual batches?

throwingerman 9y ago

And it is exactly this style of management that is causing problems at the German automation plant he aquired (see my comment in the duplicate thread). It is probably a reason why production of the Model 3 is behind -- the company he acquired builds the factory robots needed for advanced automation. Smart move to acquire it then and it explains why the timing is now off. You can't run a German plant like an American one, people will take the 30 day vacations that have been written into their contracts since before he arrived (just because you have a new boss doesn't mean the old contract is invalid), take sick days if they need them (unlimited sick days by law, they don't come out of your vacation time), and go home at 5pm because they value their home/family/free time. Last I checked the factory had at least dozens of positions open that they can't fill because no one here wants to work for them.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
leereeves 9y ago
> [Musk] also joked to employees they would be going through “production hell” to meet demand for the new car. It sounds like taking sick days, vacation days, and going home at 5pm is exactly what Musk doesn't want from employees. Germans are fortunate to have those benefits guaranteed by law (and culture).
- koevet 9y ago
  This is not for Germany only. The majority of EU contries have similar benefits guaranteed by the law.
  - leereeves 9y ago
    The comment I replied to, however, was about Germany.
  - briandear 9y ago
    I always wondered why laws are needed to require benefits. Seems like working for someone is a consensual choice that ought be regulated by the free market itself. Other than physical safety regulations, seems like the rest of it is government overreach. It’s also weird to me that a “contract” covers “workers” rather than a contact negotiated by each worker. Seems rather Marxist to me to consider workers as interchangeable cogs in the production machine. Some guy might not care about 30 days vacation but might prefer more money, as an example.

fmueller 9y ago

Firing a person should not destroy their life. Something else is really wrong if this is the case.

pjmlp 9y ago
Sure, because everyone has enough money in the bank, no running expenses, no health issues, and a new job just around the corner.
stuaxo 9y ago
Leaving at the same time as a whole bunch of your colleagues are dumped on the job market makes it more difficult to find a job. Having news stories that you are in an underperforming two percent won't help either. This is a pretty callous move and no surprise it has affected morale.
Steeeve 9y ago
Most people, even well paid engineers, live paycheck to paycheck. Sizable companies take a month to bring in a new employee in the best case. Most hiring managers are skeptical of people fired in a mass "underperformance" firing. Toss in the fact that most people have never been fired and it's a massive blow to the ego. And also that it's terrible to communicate to your spouse and children that you've been fired for doing a bad job at work. That's a recipe for depression. Which makes it even harder to find work again. Which exacerbates the depression. And you're living on credit. And the bills are piling up. And you are starting to get phone calls. If you can't jump right into a new job, it's a hard situation to be in, no question about it.
- ethbro 9y ago
  There's no reason a well-paid engineer (let's say $75k-250k) should be living paycheck to paycheck, even with a large family. If someone is, they should realize they deliberately chose that situation by failing to adjust for cost of living when comparing employment options.
  - Steeeve 9y ago

flexie 9y ago

Any company, whether it's our pet tech company or a boring bank, will have to let go of what they believe is under performing staff at some point. Some companies manage to do little by little so no-one notices, some do it in bulk once a year and it becomes news. I'm not sure what is better for the employees but often middle managers tend to keep their staff until forced by top management to let someone go. As for "destroying" lives, I suggest we don't let ourselves get carried away by this. A job is a job; a means to make money. There are other ways to make money, including by taking another job or by starting your own company, which is very realistic for former Tesla engineers. Just like you are not obliged to buy a Tesla model 3 although you might have bought a Tesla model S beforehand, Tesla is not obliged to buy your services as employees forever and ever. A job is not till death do us part. As for comment about "arbitrarily" firing people; there is nothing that supports that Tesla did that. Why would they fire people arbitrarily? They are scaling up. The last thing they would do is to fire for the sake of it.

colechristensen 9y ago
When you mass fire people like this, it can only seem like your plan was to fire a large set of people and you made it a goal to find them. You're quite likely to find people to fire that are down on their luck for some reason or another. You're also quite likely to alienate or scare a sizable portion of your workforce. Anxiety about getting fired will drive a lot of people to perform worse. Conversely, a feeling that your company will support you during rough times can make those rough times shorter and help productivity. It's also about diversity. Diversity of life situations, diversity of mental health status, diversity of motivations, etc. etc.

ThomPete 9y ago

It's the Jack Welsh management style. https://www.manager-tools.com/forums/jack-welchs-20-70-10 https://www.manager-tools.com/forums/jack-welchs-20-70-10

tyingq 9y ago
Culling the bottom 10%, every year, is a big step beyond this. This one seems off, especially noting that some of the fired say they never received a bad review. But it's not yet in that league.

ZenoArrow 9y ago

I'm not a fan of this style of management either, but at this moment in time we need a standard bearer for electric cars, and Tesla is best placed to fill that role at the moment. After the (hopefully successful) release of the Model 3, assuming this drives other companies to push forward electic cars, we won't need Tesla to be successful anymore, so I'd expect more people to be critical after that.

maxerickson 9y ago
How does the Bolt fit into that framework?
- ethbro 9y ago
  I think people question GM's long term commitment to electric cars based on its history and legacy ICE business. That may change, but it's going to take awhile from anyone who remembers how the EV1 went. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    I never drove an EV1 or anything, but I remember people being really mad they wouldn't sell them at prices equivalent to the really cheap leases they offered them to the public with, and that they had mediocre range (and remember NiMH batteries? Ew!).
    - ethbro 9y ago
      > and remember NiMH batteries? Ew! In 25 years, I'm sure we'll be saying the same about our current lithium ion chemistries. You engineer with the technology you have, not the future technology you wish you had. ;)
      - maxerickson 9y ago
        Even after some huge advance that rendered lithium-ion obsolete, I imagine I would still think of them as the line in the sand between batteries that worked okay and batteries that were pretty good. Not just for electric cars, things like cordless tools, lithium-ion versions are much nicer than anything that preceded them.

AsyncAwait 9y ago

> People always seem to put Musk on a pedestal. Personally, I've always been (and always will be) leery of a company run by a PayPal founder. Bingo! I never quite got the Musk hype train, between how he treats his employees, doesn't respect work life balance, has unrealistic expectations and talks about people not wanting to work for him as less talented, promotes the idea of American exceptionalism etc., I don't see the appeal. As for his 'accomplishments', he seems to talk a lot and constantly over promise/under deliver. I guess his appeal is that his companies at least approach the exciting territory, which is quite a difference from another 'food delivery startup' of the Valley, but lets not make an average (if electric) car made by Tesla, with plenty of its own, documented QC problems something it is not, just because Musk is involved.

omilu 9y ago
He risked everything to make a rocket company from nothing, if ever there was a person that earned the hype, this is the person.
- d215 9y ago
  Really? Everything? His life? His children’s lives? Or just money? Or just his investor’s money? My point being if you have a lot you can risk a lot in absolute terms, but maybe not so in terms relative to your own wealth or well-being. I don’t think he even risked his reputation with his space rocket thing. ‘Fail fast, etc’, right?
  - azernik 9y ago
    He was at one point, when both Tesla and SpaceX were early in their lifetimes and bleeding money, on the verge of bankruptcy and (from what came out from his ex-wife) a mental breakdown.
  - ethbro 9y ago
    He's risked far more than most investors, including bailing out his own companies (SpaceX and Solar City) by taking personal loans against his stock in others that were doing better (Tesla). If he hasn't infused the cash, SpaceX at least would have failed. There were a number of finance articles about it at the time "questioning" the odd moves, but paraphrased from Musk, 'If investors are risking their money, shouldn't I be risking mine too?' If your metric for "enough" is "work to literal death" then I expect you'll continue to be unsatisfied.

hyperpape 9y ago

Podcast on Netflix's practices: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/08/28/435583328/episode-647-hard-work-is-irrelevant http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/08/28/435583328/episo... They're pretty brutal. In one case a woman works herself to the point of chronic back pain. They tell her to take as much time as she needs to recover. But when she comes back, her job is gone (they didn't hire someone else, they just eliminated it).