11 ms·

Tesla reviewing contractors, firing everyone not vouched for by an employee

175 points by WalterSear 9y ago

lsc 9y ago
Sounds shocking... but having worked as a contractor for a goodly portion of my career, I'd argue that something is seriously wrong if you can't get at least one employee to vouch for you. Really, every place I've worked, you could say this happens every month; almost always I've needed an employee to sign off on my hours, either the person I report to or the person they report to. I always took that as a vote of confidence, personally. (I mean, obviously, even if I get fired, I expect to get paid for hours worked, but point being, the guy just signed off on spending $15k-$20K, depending on the body shop cut, for a month of my work, I'd assume that would trigger at least a few minutes of "what did Luke do for me this month?" and a phone call letting me know not to come in Monday if the answer was "Not much".)
- analog31 9y ago
  I'm a regular employee, and I don't see it being any different. Figuratively speaking, my boss has to sign my paycheck every two weeks. If they don't like me, they can fire me.
  - lsc 9y ago
    see, I think there is a big cultural difference. Like, I always had that attitude as an employee, but I think that as an employee, it holds me back. I think the key is that as an employee, you are expected to act in the interest of the company in ways that are different from what you are expected to do as a contractor. My perception and experience is that as a contractor, I'm supposed to do what you tell me to do. If you tell me to do something stupid, I'm supposed to tell you it's stupid, and to explain why, but if you say do it anyhow, well, that's my job. It has more to do with task-based work. My perception is that as an employee you are expected more to act in the best interest of the company. I personally have a hard time seeing the difference between the two, because I'm not omniscient, I am sometimes wrong, and if the boss has heard my arguments for why the way they asked me to do a thing is stupid and still wants me to do it that way, well, maybe the boss knows something I don't know, right? The company, by making them the boss, has said that the company thinks the boss knows more than I do, so maybe the right thing to do is to go along with it? (I'm mostly talking of "the right way to do it" in the sense of "the most efficient or correct way to do it" - I think of ethical dilemmas in a different sort of way.)
    - analog31 9y ago
      I tend to think of myself as a professional first, and employee second. The distinction between employee and contractor becomes a matter of accounting and tax law. >>> The company, by making them the boss, has said that the company thinks the boss knows more than I do, so maybe the right thing to do is to go along with it? I don't assume that for one minute. I work in a job where there is literally nobody else in the company with my expertise.
      - lsc 9y ago
        >I don't assume that for one minute. I work in a job where there is literally nobody else in the company with my expertise. So, I've been there, and... the thing that makes me chuckle is that a few years later, in part because I thought the boss was such an idiot, I started my own company with my own employees. The funny thing was, I found myself, at times, getting into the same sort of arguments with my employee, only on the other side. There are... other factors in play, when you are looking at things from a organizational or business perspective.
        analog31 9y ago
        Indeed, and I run my own business on the side. I've also been in management. I have a very close relationship with many of the managers, so they are pretty open with me about their thought processes and the issues that they face. And they face the same arguments with the managers above them, and so forth... "So, naturalists observe a flea..."
    - bitwize 9y ago
      > My perception is that as an employee you are expected more to act in the best interest of the company. As an employee, if you object to something your boss is really on board with, you can expect to be fired. It is, in general, a career limiting move to tell anyone above you that what they're asking you to do is stupid. Maybe if you're a God-tier management consultant, you can propose changes and expect to have them implemented. As a regular employee or contractor schlub, no. If you want to keep your job, adopt their perspective. (Illegal actions are another issue. While it's illegal in many jurisdictions to fire a whistleblower, in practice you're still risking your job to blow the whistle. Not that you shouldn't do it.)
- tzs 9y ago
  > Sounds shocking... but having worked as a contractor for a goodly portion of my career, I'd argue that something is seriously wrong if you can't get at least one employee to vouch for you. That sounds reasonable, although I could see a need for some exceptions. For example, I could see a company using a contractor for its front end web development and another contractor for running the web server. The first contractor would be working with employees, such as sales and marketing that decide what is supposed to go on the site, and they could vouch for that contractor. The second contractor, the one running the web server, could easily end up only interacting with the front end web contractor.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - bch 9y ago
    The second contractor would surely have a hiring manager that could explain what’s what to upper management.
    - mifreewil 9y ago
      > would surely have a hiring manager that could explain... This is a big assumption
      - bch 9y ago
        Is it? Seems plain to me, but 1) I honestly don’t know what the org structure is at Tesla 2) assuming there are hiring managers, if they’re hiring people they wouldn’t vouch for (to boost their dept size (again not knowing the org chart)), then managers are gaming Tesla, and that’s another problem
        KajMagnus 9y ago
        Maybe the person who hired the web server admin, has since left to work with something else. And there's a new boss / hiring manager, who is a bit clueless. I suppose this scenario is unlikely to happen, but still, in a really large company, then, low risk, times many many people = maybe shouldn't be ignored.
- walshemj 9y ago
  I don't think this is individual IT/DEV self employed contractors here.
- WalterSear 9y ago
  > I'd argue that something is seriously wrong if you can't get at least one employee to vouch for you. The corollary to that is that if you get to the point where you need to check on the vouchsafety of all your contractors - en masse - something is seriously wrong with your company.
  - p1esk 9y ago
    Something is seriously wrong with most large companies, and most of them simply ignore that. Good to see Tesla being different in that regard.
    - rhino369 9y ago
      I dunno, GM and Ford build a fuck-ton more cars and have better build quality (which is shitty by int'l standards). Seems like Teslas's problem is bigger.
      - Retric 9y ago
        They have been building basically the same cars for far longer so that does not say much. Tesla is attacking too many different problems at the same time IMO. Just building batteries at scale and low cost is on it's own a huge undertaking. Now add cars, self driving systems, charging network, home battery and solar etc. It's over valued as a pure car company, but the other lines could also be huge companies on their own.
      - mikeash 9y ago
        Having owned both a GM and a Tesla, I'm amused by the idea that GM's build quality is better. I actually liked my GM a lot, but quality was lacking to say the least.
        ConcernedCoder 9y ago
        year make and model? I only ask, because honestly, I bought ( ordered and customized online really ) a new 2015 GMC Canyon and I love this truck like I've never loved another vehicle in my lifetime... and literally NOTHING has gone wrong with it, not even a loose screw... or burnt-out light bulb...
- LifeLiverTransp 9y ago
  We are not- fired usually though. Ones contract is simply not renewed or ended ahead of time. I always thought of us contractors as stateless mercenaries, and you cant expatriat (aka fire) a stateless mercenary. Also regarding the useless middle management Elon mentions- thats the beauty of sub-contracting. The poor fool at the end of the chain usually has to do the managment work and projekt-management too.
- matchagaucho 9y ago
  Elon is addressing the "barnacle upon barnacle" problem with Contractors. Sure, the Contractor on the front lines actually doing work may be "liked". It's the middle manager/Contractor's boss sitting in an office 1,000 miles away that Elon wants to get rid of. Employees can apparently hire/manage Contractors directly, but Contractors can't outsource the work they were hired to do.
- mathgenius 9y ago
  > something is seriously wrong if you can't get at least one employee to vouch for you. It's not just a "vouch", the language used is: "a Tesla employee putting their reputation on the line." It's like the tesla-mafia, watch out or cousin Elon is coming for ya!
  - Trundle 9y ago
    Putting your reputation on the line is exactly what vouching is.
WaylonKenning 9y ago
In the race for attention, is this article interesting because it's a new model for implementing and delegating work, or more the fact that a company has decided to rapidly cut down on contractors? Because there's lots of companies that rapidly cut down on contractors, and I doubt they'd all have an article written about them at the top of Hacker News. I'm neither here nor there about the company, but I note that it competes for a lot of my attention. I feel like if they decided to switch to all Macs, or abandoned Slack for IRC, I'd see a story about it here on Hacker News.
- aerovistae 9y ago
  Exactly.
ryandvm 9y ago
As a contractor myself, this sounds like a great idea. If there aren't multiple people at an organization that can vouch for you, there's a good chance you're dead weight - or at any rate, there are no checks in place to prevent you from becoming so.
- foxyv 8y ago
  My Dad liked to tell a story. The parts of the body were arguing about which was most important. The heart pumps the blood, the brain keeps everything working together, the lungs bring in air etc... Then the anus closed up! Even if no one vouches for the butt hole in department C they can still be necessary. Something to keep in mind before making sweeping changes without regards to the details.
gpmcadam 9y ago
Meta: can you not link to the Disqus deeplink on the page? https://electrek.co/2018/0...ployee/#disqus_thread
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
empath75 9y ago
This is one of those things that’s going to be painful in the short term and pay off in the long term, but given Tesla’s precarious financial situation, who knows if they’ll even have a long term. It’s possible that musk is just trying to cut their burn rate and is going to blame the inevitable decline in production after this on ‘restructuring’ or whatever.
cbanek 9y ago
Having an employee vouch for you... does this not imply they don't even know where their money is going as a company and who is valuable and who is not? I agree, that having the line worker / employee using the part's blessing is important, but surely there are more holistic top-down ways of evaluating this?
- gk1 9y ago
  > surely there are more holistic top-down ways of evaluating this? Which would take months. This is about sending a message as much as it is about cutting costs (fast).
  - wolco 9y ago
    What's the real message. Employees prepared to be fired as soon as we reduce the outsourcing budget. Your jobs are not safe so if a better opportunity comes up, take it.
icanhackit 9y ago
Being a hard ass CEO isn't sexy, but it's what so many successful CEO's are. > Often, it is like a Russian nesting doll of contractor, subcontractor, sub-subcontractor, etc. before you finally find someone doing actual work. I'd also argue that these multi-level contractor setups are a major security concern. Ideally they should make it policy to have no more than one additional level between Tesla and the contractor performing the work. Aggregate contracting will make assigning liability a difficult task and it's likely the person working for you is being underpaid as each layer takes their cut. Meanwhile you get 100% of the shit-storm from any media backlash about worker salary/conditions.
- solarkraft 9y ago
  It really makes me wonder: Isn't using contractors super inefficient? Why do companies, when they could do it in house, use them?
  - querulous 9y ago
    it's a lot easier to have a contracting shop send over 500 people than it is to hire 500 people
  - icanhackit 9y ago
    It's not inefficient if your metric is quickly getting workers in the door as contracting firms are built for this purpose. But you could argue that it will result in a poorer selection of high-quality candidates. I'd say this is because when hiring non-technical workers they're incentivised for numbers. This is in contrast to employment consultants getting fees in intervals over a period of a person's time with an employer, usually done for executive positions. So I'd say optimise your agreements with contracting firms for quality rather than quantity by paying them bonuses in intervals, with a low initial payment for the finding the candidate.
  - mikeash 9y ago
    There were a few good reasons I saw over my years as a contractor: 1. You can get a functioning team much more quickly. 2. It's a lot easier for someone unfamiliar with the field in question to evaluate the quality of a consulting company than to evaluate a prospective hire. 3. It's a lot easier to get rid of them once you don't need them anymore.
bsder 9y ago
Is it possible this just Tesla "encouraging" contractors to switch to employees? Contractors generally get paid significantly more than employees in the short term, and Tesla is on the line for getting to profitability.
- ams6110 9y ago
  Employees have a lot of expenses that contractors don't have. Payroll taxes, health insurance, other benefits, and generally there are more HR policies governing termination for an employee than a contractor, even in an at-will employment situation.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 8y ago
    Yes, in the major tech companies very few people will elect to stay W2 contractors if given the chance to convert. Most would prefer full time positions.
FartyMcFarter 9y ago
Don't contractors have managers that are supposed to, well, manage them?
- walshemj 9y ago
  Not that sort of singleton contractor - and technically having a company employee manage your day to day tasks will be take by the tax man as disguised employment - not a good idea.
  - ams6110 9y ago
    Yes, there will generally be a person designated to tell you what they want done, but they can't manage where and how you do it.
rdl 9y ago
Tesla seems like a company where people would place a premium on being a direct employee, vs. another organization. I'd certainly feel more 'pride' in saying "I work for Tesla" than "I work for X" for almost all non-SpaceX or tiny-startup values of X, and that's probably generally held by people who would contract for Tesla.
- p1esk 9y ago
  I'd certainly feel more 'pride' in saying "I work for Tesla" Why? SpaceX, sure. But Tesla? Just because it gets more news coverage?
  - rdl 9y ago
    Tesla is doing more innovation than the median tech company, and probably more than the 95th percentile. Plus, it's a consumer-understandable product, so you could "explain what you do at a dinner party" to someone outside of the domain. "Engineer at Tesla" beats "engineer at IBM" but probably is socially inferior to "radiation oncologist". Obviously status is to some extent subjective and culturally/individually determined, but there's broad agreement that certain jobs are higher status than others by various groups of people.
  - solarkraft 9y ago
    Tesla is cool. But as a contractor, effectively working for Tesla, I'd probably also call it that.
exabrial 9y ago
Wish the US government would do the same thing!
- tjr225 9y ago
  You're being downvoted but my work with a state government frightened me. It was amazing how many contractors are building castles of crap and then protecting them so that they can make an exorbitant living off of the teat of the taxpayer - and I'm about as liberal as one gets - AND this was at the state level.
- csa 9y ago
  While I largely agree with your sentiment, quite a bit of the problems with contracting that the US government has is because they don't do contracting well. Specifically, they are understaffing many offices, and they are putting not-so-qualified people in lead roles. Writing a good contract is hard. It's harder when the right staff are not in place to do it -- this is the current state of most US government contracting.
- protomyth 9y ago
  Grant programs always have multiple consulting firms that either evaluate the program or help manage the program. It was always so fun navigating the government/ contractor directives.
olliej 9y ago
The bigger concern I have is that it encourages extreme nepotism — people vouch for people from their schools and prior jobs, and so risks introducing systemic bias against people from different backgrounds. Obviously gender and race are heavily represented in this kind of thing, but even basic stuff like west coast vs east university nonsense can start happening.
- zamalek 9y ago
  Your own reputation is put on the line by vouching for a contractor, according to the article. So if something bad happens down the line, your continued engagement with Tesla will be questioned too. Nepotism and bribes are going to happen, but I think there will be some fast lessons when Tesla axes employees for this behavior.
  - watwut 9y ago
    Which is exactly the situation when friends and former classmates get more advantage over someone you know for three months. It makes it more clicky.
- ralusek 9y ago
  You are basing this off of...what, exactly? Employees vouching for contractors are able to do so along any metric, but given that they are sticking their neck out professionally on their behalf, I assume that the criteria they care about the most is the exact criteria that will later be used to determine if the contractor was actually a good egg.
- fsloth 8y ago
  It sounds to me like you are mixing the concepts of trust, accountability, tribalism and pathological cronyism. Personal vouching for other people generally is the best guarantee for performance in absence of better criteria. Trust is not a bad thing. Trust does not alone degrade accountability. But you need to have a second accountability mechanism in place. Trust, but observe is the classical zen guidance into holding accountability within a group. Then the group dynamics kick in - tribalism and pathological cronyism. Exclusive clubs are a typical organization principle in the human species and they increase efficiency within the group by increasing trust and improving the quality of communication through larger shared background. Tribalism alone is not a problem to members within the group. To agents external to the specific group tribalism may manifest in many negative ways, of course, but it is totally context sensitive if it's a problem or not in the general sense. Many elite organizations, for example, exhibit highly tribal behavior. Then we get to the black sheep of the lot, pathological cronyism. I think we all can agree without further explanations why it's bad, but, the prerequisites for the pathological cronyism are many of the same kind as needed for the positive patterns exhibited in human socities, including trust and tribalism. The thing that keeps everything from collapsing into a self-satisfied old boys network is accountability. But using trust - instead of, say, bureaucracy - as one of the key ingredients of a company culture sounds to me totally great.
chasd00 9y ago
He's probably talking about consultants. I'm sure Accenture, Deloitte, and McKinsey (among others) infections have run rampant in just about all departments. Consultants are great when they're great but almost unimaginably inept and expensive when they're not.
- AndyNemmity 8y ago
  And the ones that are inept, are experts at sounding exactly the same or better than the ones that are great, making the difference difficult to understand without equal expertise.
rbobby 9y ago
This is what happens when you don't fill out your TPS reports correctly. Sarcasm aside it seems like Tesla has operational issues. This coupled with the story a few weeks back about somewhat "slapdash" power module assembly is a bit concerning. Musk is a visionary... but few visionaries are excellent operations people.
merinowool 9y ago
Sometimes when employee learns how much given contractor make, they get very bitter. I wonder how it is going to play out in terms of vouching... edit: typo
l0b0 9y ago
Is this meant to be shocking? When I was a consultant at a big European telecom company the department got a new manager who started by saying that there should be no multi-year consulting contracts - within a few months of hiring a consultant the position should be either inhoused or outsourced. I remember thinking “about f-ing time” even though my job would probably be one of the first on the chopping block. The financial incentives are so screwed up I can't believe consulting is still such a big business.
- aplummer 9y ago
  Without even factoring in work culture, the cost of a FT employee is really really high in a place like Australia where you basically can’t fire people. Want a 6 month project done, makes more sense to pay for a consultant team than try spin up new employees. They come in for a set period, fixed deliverables and accountability, then they go. Effect multiplies when it’s something like IT and the business is completely unrelated to IT.
dwighttk 9y ago
Can we take the #disqus_thread off the link?
trymas 8y ago
> Often, it is like a Russian nesting doll of contractor, subcontractor, sub-subcontractor, etc. before you finally find someone doing actual work. This means a lot of middle-managers adding cost but not doing anything obviously useful. who would not like to cut down mess like this?
chriskanan 8y ago
I wonder if this is to protect ip. I know of one self-driving startup in which the founder recently had his wife get an internship with Tesla's self-driving team. I'm sure there is a big risk of ip theft or just learning other things that can give a competitive advantage.
jerry40 8y ago
For a Russian it is nice to hear about a matryoshka from Musk. (sorry for useless comment)
JJMcJ 8y ago
The article is unclear. Does contractor mean supplier, or is it an individual working at Tesla site?
mike555 8y ago
I believe that in this particular case a contractor could be a company of couple hundred (or 1000s) people or so, producing a sub-part of a car. Car makers mostly just put the car together - they do not manufacture parts. Which begs the question: can Tesla afford to fire contractors? R&D on complex parts takes years, even at Tesla ...

175 points by WalterSear 9y ago

lsc 9y ago

Sounds shocking... but having worked as a contractor for a goodly portion of my career, I'd argue that something is seriously wrong if you can't get at least one employee to vouch for you. Really, every place I've worked, you could say this happens every month; almost always I've needed an employee to sign off on my hours, either the person I report to or the person they report to. I always took that as a vote of confidence, personally. (I mean, obviously, even if I get fired, I expect to get paid for hours worked, but point being, the guy just signed off on spending $15k-$20K, depending on the body shop cut, for a month of my work, I'd assume that would trigger at least a few minutes of "what did Luke do for me this month?" and a phone call letting me know not to come in Monday if the answer was "Not much".)

analog31 9y ago
I'm a regular employee, and I don't see it being any different. Figuratively speaking, my boss has to sign my paycheck every two weeks. If they don't like me, they can fire me.
- lsc 9y ago
  see, I think there is a big cultural difference. Like, I always had that attitude as an employee, but I think that as an employee, it holds me back. I think the key is that as an employee, you are expected to act in the interest of the company in ways that are different from what you are expected to do as a contractor. My perception and experience is that as a contractor, I'm supposed to do what you tell me to do. If you tell me to do something stupid, I'm supposed to tell you it's stupid, and to explain why, but if you say do it anyhow, well, that's my job. It has more to do with task-based work. My perception is that as an employee you are expected more to act in the best interest of the company. I personally have a hard time seeing the difference between the two, because I'm not omniscient, I am sometimes wrong, and if the boss has heard my arguments for why the way they asked me to do a thing is stupid and still wants me to do it that way, well, maybe the boss knows something I don't know, right? The company, by making them the boss, has said that the company thinks the boss knows more than I do, so maybe the right thing to do is to go along with it? (I'm mostly talking of "the right way to do it" in the sense of "the most efficient or correct way to do it" - I think of ethical dilemmas in a different sort of way.)
  - analog31 9y ago
    I tend to think of myself as a professional first, and employee second. The distinction between employee and contractor becomes a matter of accounting and tax law. >>> The company, by making them the boss, has said that the company thinks the boss knows more than I do, so maybe the right thing to do is to go along with it? I don't assume that for one minute. I work in a job where there is literally nobody else in the company with my expertise.
    - lsc 9y ago
      >I don't assume that for one minute. I work in a job where there is literally nobody else in the company with my expertise. So, I've been there, and... the thing that makes me chuckle is that a few years later, in part because I thought the boss was such an idiot, I started my own company with my own employees. The funny thing was, I found myself, at times, getting into the same sort of arguments with my employee, only on the other side. There are... other factors in play, when you are looking at things from a organizational or business perspective.
      - analog31 9y ago
        Indeed, and I run my own business on the side. I've also been in management. I have a very close relationship with many of the managers, so they are pretty open with me about their thought processes and the issues that they face. And they face the same arguments with the managers above them, and so forth... "So, naturalists observe a flea..."
  - bitwize 9y ago
    > My perception is that as an employee you are expected more to act in the best interest of the company. As an employee, if you object to something your boss is really on board with, you can expect to be fired. It is, in general, a career limiting move to tell anyone above you that what they're asking you to do is stupid. Maybe if you're a God-tier management consultant, you can propose changes and expect to have them implemented. As a regular employee or contractor schlub, no. If you want to keep your job, adopt their perspective. (Illegal actions are another issue. While it's illegal in many jurisdictions to fire a whistleblower, in practice you're still risking your job to blow the whistle. Not that you shouldn't do it.)
tzs 9y ago
> Sounds shocking... but having worked as a contractor for a goodly portion of my career, I'd argue that something is seriously wrong if you can't get at least one employee to vouch for you. That sounds reasonable, although I could see a need for some exceptions. For example, I could see a company using a contractor for its front end web development and another contractor for running the web server. The first contractor would be working with employees, such as sales and marketing that decide what is supposed to go on the site, and they could vouch for that contractor. The second contractor, the one running the web server, could easily end up only interacting with the front end web contractor.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- bch 9y ago
  The second contractor would surely have a hiring manager that could explain what’s what to upper management.
  - mifreewil 9y ago
    > would surely have a hiring manager that could explain... This is a big assumption
    - bch 9y ago
      Is it? Seems plain to me, but 1) I honestly don’t know what the org structure is at Tesla 2) assuming there are hiring managers, if they’re hiring people they wouldn’t vouch for (to boost their dept size (again not knowing the org chart)), then managers are gaming Tesla, and that’s another problem
      - KajMagnus 9y ago
        Maybe the person who hired the web server admin, has since left to work with something else. And there's a new boss / hiring manager, who is a bit clueless. I suppose this scenario is unlikely to happen, but still, in a really large company, then, low risk, times many many people = maybe shouldn't be ignored.
walshemj 9y ago
I don't think this is individual IT/DEV self employed contractors here.
WalterSear 9y ago
> I'd argue that something is seriously wrong if you can't get at least one employee to vouch for you. The corollary to that is that if you get to the point where you need to check on the vouchsafety of all your contractors - en masse - something is seriously wrong with your company.
- p1esk 9y ago
  Something is seriously wrong with most large companies, and most of them simply ignore that. Good to see Tesla being different in that regard.
  - rhino369 9y ago
    I dunno, GM and Ford build a fuck-ton more cars and have better build quality (which is shitty by int'l standards). Seems like Teslas's problem is bigger.
    - Retric 9y ago
      They have been building basically the same cars for far longer so that does not say much. Tesla is attacking too many different problems at the same time IMO. Just building batteries at scale and low cost is on it's own a huge undertaking. Now add cars, self driving systems, charging network, home battery and solar etc. It's over valued as a pure car company, but the other lines could also be huge companies on their own.
    - mikeash 9y ago
      Having owned both a GM and a Tesla, I'm amused by the idea that GM's build quality is better. I actually liked my GM a lot, but quality was lacking to say the least.
      - ConcernedCoder 9y ago
        year make and model? I only ask, because honestly, I bought ( ordered and customized online really ) a new 2015 GMC Canyon and I love this truck like I've never loved another vehicle in my lifetime... and literally NOTHING has gone wrong with it, not even a loose screw... or burnt-out light bulb...
LifeLiverTransp 9y ago
We are not- fired usually though. Ones contract is simply not renewed or ended ahead of time. I always thought of us contractors as stateless mercenaries, and you cant expatriat (aka fire) a stateless mercenary. Also regarding the useless middle management Elon mentions- thats the beauty of sub-contracting. The poor fool at the end of the chain usually has to do the managment work and projekt-management too.
matchagaucho 9y ago
Elon is addressing the "barnacle upon barnacle" problem with Contractors. Sure, the Contractor on the front lines actually doing work may be "liked". It's the middle manager/Contractor's boss sitting in an office 1,000 miles away that Elon wants to get rid of. Employees can apparently hire/manage Contractors directly, but Contractors can't outsource the work they were hired to do.
mathgenius 9y ago
> something is seriously wrong if you can't get at least one employee to vouch for you. It's not just a "vouch", the language used is: "a Tesla employee putting their reputation on the line." It's like the tesla-mafia, watch out or cousin Elon is coming for ya!
- Trundle 9y ago
  Putting your reputation on the line is exactly what vouching is.

WaylonKenning 9y ago

In the race for attention, is this article interesting because it's a new model for implementing and delegating work, or more the fact that a company has decided to rapidly cut down on contractors? Because there's lots of companies that rapidly cut down on contractors, and I doubt they'd all have an article written about them at the top of Hacker News. I'm neither here nor there about the company, but I note that it competes for a lot of my attention. I feel like if they decided to switch to all Macs, or abandoned Slack for IRC, I'd see a story about it here on Hacker News.

aerovistae 9y ago
Exactly.

ryandvm 9y ago

As a contractor myself, this sounds like a great idea. If there aren't multiple people at an organization that can vouch for you, there's a good chance you're dead weight - or at any rate, there are no checks in place to prevent you from becoming so.

foxyv 8y ago
My Dad liked to tell a story. The parts of the body were arguing about which was most important. The heart pumps the blood, the brain keeps everything working together, the lungs bring in air etc... Then the anus closed up! Even if no one vouches for the butt hole in department C they can still be necessary. Something to keep in mind before making sweeping changes without regards to the details.

gpmcadam 9y ago

Meta: can you not link to the Disqus deeplink on the page? https://electrek.co/2018/0...ployee/#disqus_thread

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

empath75 9y ago

This is one of those things that’s going to be painful in the short term and pay off in the long term, but given Tesla’s precarious financial situation, who knows if they’ll even have a long term. It’s possible that musk is just trying to cut their burn rate and is going to blame the inevitable decline in production after this on ‘restructuring’ or whatever.

cbanek 9y ago

Having an employee vouch for you... does this not imply they don't even know where their money is going as a company and who is valuable and who is not? I agree, that having the line worker / employee using the part's blessing is important, but surely there are more holistic top-down ways of evaluating this?

gk1 9y ago
> surely there are more holistic top-down ways of evaluating this? Which would take months. This is about sending a message as much as it is about cutting costs (fast).
- wolco 9y ago
  What's the real message. Employees prepared to be fired as soon as we reduce the outsourcing budget. Your jobs are not safe so if a better opportunity comes up, take it.

icanhackit 9y ago

Being a hard ass CEO isn't sexy, but it's what so many successful CEO's are. > Often, it is like a Russian nesting doll of contractor, subcontractor, sub-subcontractor, etc. before you finally find someone doing actual work. I'd also argue that these multi-level contractor setups are a major security concern. Ideally they should make it policy to have no more than one additional level between Tesla and the contractor performing the work. Aggregate contracting will make assigning liability a difficult task and it's likely the person working for you is being underpaid as each layer takes their cut. Meanwhile you get 100% of the shit-storm from any media backlash about worker salary/conditions.

solarkraft 9y ago
It really makes me wonder: Isn't using contractors super inefficient? Why do companies, when they could do it in house, use them?
- querulous 9y ago
  it's a lot easier to have a contracting shop send over 500 people than it is to hire 500 people
- icanhackit 9y ago
  It's not inefficient if your metric is quickly getting workers in the door as contracting firms are built for this purpose. But you could argue that it will result in a poorer selection of high-quality candidates. I'd say this is because when hiring non-technical workers they're incentivised for numbers. This is in contrast to employment consultants getting fees in intervals over a period of a person's time with an employer, usually done for executive positions. So I'd say optimise your agreements with contracting firms for quality rather than quantity by paying them bonuses in intervals, with a low initial payment for the finding the candidate.
- mikeash 9y ago
  There were a few good reasons I saw over my years as a contractor: 1. You can get a functioning team much more quickly. 2. It's a lot easier for someone unfamiliar with the field in question to evaluate the quality of a consulting company than to evaluate a prospective hire. 3. It's a lot easier to get rid of them once you don't need them anymore.

bsder 9y ago

Is it possible this just Tesla "encouraging" contractors to switch to employees? Contractors generally get paid significantly more than employees in the short term, and Tesla is on the line for getting to profitability.

ams6110 9y ago
Employees have a lot of expenses that contractors don't have. Payroll taxes, health insurance, other benefits, and generally there are more HR policies governing termination for an employee than a contractor, even in an at-will employment situation.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 8y ago
  Yes, in the major tech companies very few people will elect to stay W2 contractors if given the chance to convert. Most would prefer full time positions.

FartyMcFarter 9y ago

Don't contractors have managers that are supposed to, well, manage them?

walshemj 9y ago
Not that sort of singleton contractor - and technically having a company employee manage your day to day tasks will be take by the tax man as disguised employment - not a good idea.
- ams6110 9y ago
  Yes, there will generally be a person designated to tell you what they want done, but they can't manage where and how you do it.

rdl 9y ago

Tesla seems like a company where people would place a premium on being a direct employee, vs. another organization. I'd certainly feel more 'pride' in saying "I work for Tesla" than "I work for X" for almost all non-SpaceX or tiny-startup values of X, and that's probably generally held by people who would contract for Tesla.

p1esk 9y ago
I'd certainly feel more 'pride' in saying "I work for Tesla" Why? SpaceX, sure. But Tesla? Just because it gets more news coverage?
- rdl 9y ago
  Tesla is doing more innovation than the median tech company, and probably more than the 95th percentile. Plus, it's a consumer-understandable product, so you could "explain what you do at a dinner party" to someone outside of the domain. "Engineer at Tesla" beats "engineer at IBM" but probably is socially inferior to "radiation oncologist". Obviously status is to some extent subjective and culturally/individually determined, but there's broad agreement that certain jobs are higher status than others by various groups of people.
- solarkraft 9y ago
  Tesla is cool. But as a contractor, effectively working for Tesla, I'd probably also call it that.

exabrial 9y ago

Wish the US government would do the same thing!

tjr225 9y ago
You're being downvoted but my work with a state government frightened me. It was amazing how many contractors are building castles of crap and then protecting them so that they can make an exorbitant living off of the teat of the taxpayer - and I'm about as liberal as one gets - AND this was at the state level.
csa 9y ago
While I largely agree with your sentiment, quite a bit of the problems with contracting that the US government has is because they don't do contracting well. Specifically, they are understaffing many offices, and they are putting not-so-qualified people in lead roles. Writing a good contract is hard. It's harder when the right staff are not in place to do it -- this is the current state of most US government contracting.
protomyth 9y ago
Grant programs always have multiple consulting firms that either evaluate the program or help manage the program. It was always so fun navigating the government/ contractor directives.

olliej 9y ago

The bigger concern I have is that it encourages extreme nepotism — people vouch for people from their schools and prior jobs, and so risks introducing systemic bias against people from different backgrounds. Obviously gender and race are heavily represented in this kind of thing, but even basic stuff like west coast vs east university nonsense can start happening.

zamalek 9y ago
Your own reputation is put on the line by vouching for a contractor, according to the article. So if something bad happens down the line, your continued engagement with Tesla will be questioned too. Nepotism and bribes are going to happen, but I think there will be some fast lessons when Tesla axes employees for this behavior.
- watwut 9y ago
  Which is exactly the situation when friends and former classmates get more advantage over someone you know for three months. It makes it more clicky.
ralusek 9y ago
You are basing this off of...what, exactly? Employees vouching for contractors are able to do so along any metric, but given that they are sticking their neck out professionally on their behalf, I assume that the criteria they care about the most is the exact criteria that will later be used to determine if the contractor was actually a good egg.
fsloth 8y ago
It sounds to me like you are mixing the concepts of trust, accountability, tribalism and pathological cronyism. Personal vouching for other people generally is the best guarantee for performance in absence of better criteria. Trust is not a bad thing. Trust does not alone degrade accountability. But you need to have a second accountability mechanism in place. Trust, but observe is the classical zen guidance into holding accountability within a group. Then the group dynamics kick in - tribalism and pathological cronyism. Exclusive clubs are a typical organization principle in the human species and they increase efficiency within the group by increasing trust and improving the quality of communication through larger shared background. Tribalism alone is not a problem to members within the group. To agents external to the specific group tribalism may manifest in many negative ways, of course, but it is totally context sensitive if it's a problem or not in the general sense. Many elite organizations, for example, exhibit highly tribal behavior. Then we get to the black sheep of the lot, pathological cronyism. I think we all can agree without further explanations why it's bad, but, the prerequisites for the pathological cronyism are many of the same kind as needed for the positive patterns exhibited in human socities, including trust and tribalism. The thing that keeps everything from collapsing into a self-satisfied old boys network is accountability. But using trust - instead of, say, bureaucracy - as one of the key ingredients of a company culture sounds to me totally great.

chasd00 9y ago

He's probably talking about consultants. I'm sure Accenture, Deloitte, and McKinsey (among others) infections have run rampant in just about all departments. Consultants are great when they're great but almost unimaginably inept and expensive when they're not.

AndyNemmity 8y ago
And the ones that are inept, are experts at sounding exactly the same or better than the ones that are great, making the difference difficult to understand without equal expertise.

rbobby 9y ago

This is what happens when you don't fill out your TPS reports correctly. Sarcasm aside it seems like Tesla has operational issues. This coupled with the story a few weeks back about somewhat "slapdash" power module assembly is a bit concerning. Musk is a visionary... but few visionaries are excellent operations people.

merinowool 9y ago

Sometimes when employee learns how much given contractor make, they get very bitter. I wonder how it is going to play out in terms of vouching... edit: typo

l0b0 9y ago

Is this meant to be shocking? When I was a consultant at a big European telecom company the department got a new manager who started by saying that there should be no multi-year consulting contracts - within a few months of hiring a consultant the position should be either inhoused or outsourced. I remember thinking “about f-ing time” even though my job would probably be one of the first on the chopping block. The financial incentives are so screwed up I can't believe consulting is still such a big business.

aplummer 9y ago
Without even factoring in work culture, the cost of a FT employee is really really high in a place like Australia where you basically can’t fire people. Want a 6 month project done, makes more sense to pay for a consultant team than try spin up new employees. They come in for a set period, fixed deliverables and accountability, then they go. Effect multiplies when it’s something like IT and the business is completely unrelated to IT.

dwighttk 9y ago

Can we take the #disqus_thread off the link?

trymas 8y ago

> Often, it is like a Russian nesting doll of contractor, subcontractor, sub-subcontractor, etc. before you finally find someone doing actual work. This means a lot of middle-managers adding cost but not doing anything obviously useful. who would not like to cut down mess like this?

chriskanan 8y ago

I wonder if this is to protect ip. I know of one self-driving startup in which the founder recently had his wife get an internship with Tesla's self-driving team. I'm sure there is a big risk of ip theft or just learning other things that can give a competitive advantage.

jerry40 8y ago

For a Russian it is nice to hear about a matryoshka from Musk. (sorry for useless comment)

JJMcJ 8y ago

The article is unclear. Does contractor mean supplier, or is it an individual working at Tesla site?

mike555 8y ago

I believe that in this particular case a contractor could be a company of couple hundred (or 1000s) people or so, producing a sub-part of a car. Car makers mostly just put the car together - they do not manufacture parts. Which begs the question: can Tesla afford to fire contractors? R&D on complex parts takes years, even at Tesla ...