Tesla Employees Detail How They Were Fired, Claim Dismissals Were Not Performance Related (cnbc.com) 250
New submitter joshtops shares a CNBC report: Tesla is trying to disguise layoffs by calling the widespread terminations performance related, allege several current and former employees. On Friday, the San Jose Mercury News first reported that Tesla had dismissed an estimated 400 to 700 employees. That number represents between 1 and 2 percent of its entire workforce. But one former employee, citing internal information shared by a manager, said the total number fired is higher than 700 at this point. Most of the people let go from Tesla so far have been from its motors business, said people familiar with the matter. They were not from other initiatives like Tesla Powerwall, which is helping restore electricity to the residents of Puerto Rico now. The mass firings, which affected Tesla employees across the U.S., had begun by the weekend of Oct. 7 and continued even after the initial news report, sources said. Among those whose jobs were terminated in this phase, some were given severance packages quickly while others are still waiting on separation agreements. Some terminated employees told CNBC they were informed via email or a phone call "without warning," and told not to come into work the next day. The company also dismissed other employees without specifying a given performance issue, according to these people. "Seems like performance has nothing to do with it," one Tesla employee told CNBC under the condition of anonymity. "Those terminated were generally the highest paid in their position," this person said, suggesting that the firings were driven by cost-cutting. That assessment was echoed by several others, including three employees fired from Tesla during this latest wave.
Bummer (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Bummer (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bummer (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, if 2% of Tesla's workforce was so bad it needed firing all at once, I'd say it's the management that was underperforming.
Re:Bummer (Score:5, Interesting)
Meanwhile, Tesla has 2484 open jobs on its website [tesla.com]. A rather curious strategy if they're trying to "disguise a layoff". Let's lay off "up to 700 people" and then hire 2484 new people to.... cut back on the workforce?
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Well if you read the summary, the people they laid off were allegedly the highest paid people in their job categories.
Re:Bummer (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd personally take a report from people who were fired about how they weren't deserving of being fired with a grain of salt.
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But that's not the point of the comment you are replying to. It is a well-known cost cutting strategy to fire senior employees and hire junior ones for no other reason than that itself. Nominally this is idiotic because, especially in hourly jobs, a junior employee is usually much less productive (makes more mistakes, doesn't coordinate with other departments, etc) than a senior one. But if you're measuring productivity by hours worked instead of quality of work or other metrics, then that difference doe
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Or that Tesla is "over-valued" and the "correction" is kicking in, possibly (just possibly...) having something to do with a changing political climate.
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More likely the paid for attacks by the fossil fuellers and the other automotive manufacturers, will continue, especially the fossil fuellers ones. It doesn't seem to be working but they keep on doing it, American main stream media, the global bull puckey channel, any lie you can pay for will be told, just buy the right amount of ad space. This fits in the category of oh noes Stalin and the KGB used Pokemon GO to hack the planet (undead douche baggery). You just don't know what to believe coming out of US m
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The quote in the article is from a "Tesla employee", without qualification as "former Tesla employee" as used elsewhere in the article. Also, I'd take a report from the people doing the firing that it was merit-based and not a cost-cutting measure with a grain of salt as well.
Of course, it's all highly speculative at this point and in some sense I don't even see how it really matters, apart from as an indicator of Tesla's short-term economics.
Re:Bummer (Score:5, Insightful)
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Just because they're advertising doesn't mean they're actually filling them.
But they don't have to fill those openings (Score:2)
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If you are in a business where you don't have cyclical layoffs to purge the trash, then you need some kind of policy to weed out the poor performers. Maybe doing it in a giant wave like this is not a great idea, but it's better than not doing it. And frankly, it probably does make a lot of sense to do it in a wave. Performance reviews (or whatever metric is being done) are usually all finished at around the same time, so you'd know who your bad performers are all at once. Why wait? I wish the public schools
Trash and weeds (Score:2)
Yeah, yeah, it's just a metaphor, but it speaks volumes with respect to thought processes.
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Well, if 2% of Tesla's workforce was so bad it needed firing all at once, I'd say it's the management that was underperforming.
Perhaps Management took their hands off the wheel, the autopilot nagged them about it, and they finally put down the coffee and morning paper and started paying attention again - before they entered an intersection with a crossing semi-truck.
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2%? Is this supposed to be some enormous number that other companies don't hit? The only large layoffs I see from the company were in 2008, then last year when they bought Solar City.
I saw predictions 4 months ago that this would happen soon when Tesla released poor Q2 numbers. At that point, with inventory problems, it seemed inevitable that there would be a bit of turnover. What I've also found is that when a company has to cut costs, it often doubles as a way of cutting dead wood. That can be people wh
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Well, if 2% of Tesla's workforce was so bad it needed firing all at once, I'd say it's the management that was underperforming.
Exactly! When I saw that it said many of them were the highest paid for their positions, I instantly thought "team leads/managers." Exactly what you'd hope to see at this stage in the process when they were hiring so fast for so long; a culling of lame middle managers from every department. You can't cull the dud workers until after you cull the dud managers, or the dud managers will end up firing all the good workers to cover their own asses. This is a sign of good governance.
The whole concept of a "layoff
Rack and stack? (Score:3)
Maybe they started using the old GE strategy of firing th bottom x% of the workforce as a matter of preventative maintenance?
"Stack ranking, also referred to as forced ranking, where managers across a company are required to rank all of their employees on a bell curve, has been a controversial management technique since then GE CEO Jack Welch popularized it in the 1980s.
"Only a small percentage of employees, typically about 10%, can be designated as top performers. Meanwhile, a set number must be labeled as
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2% of the workforce is not that large.
Also, look at the bright side. If the company routinely lets go of under-performers, it makes everyone else work harder to keep from being the next person let go.
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I've yet to meet an underperformer who admitted that was why they were terminated. Not saying these people were, just something that I keep in mind.
I've also yet to meet an asshole fired for misbehavior who understands that being an asshole is poor performance. They almost invariably believe their performance was so divine that they have a Special Right of Asshole.
I'm guessing a lot of the people who claim that "no performance reason was given" were in fact told a performance reason related to behavior and they just can't comprehend that anything other than widgets per hour is a performance metric.
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Look around the poker table, if you can't spot the chump, it's you.
If you haven't worked with 'air thieves' you are one. It really is simple as that.
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And the loser can't know it, or (s)he will leave the game before being fleeced. If you know you have a bunch of tells, you don't play poker.
Most underperforming employees don't know it either. In both cases, ego gets in the way.
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That's more or less, what all the good players are doing.
But there are people that don't know odds, don't know what a pot ratio is etc. Just chumps.
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There is more than one kind of job in the world. Working at something you're not good at, isn't a winning plan.
Maybe the fired employees will be great ditch diggers.
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Look around the poker table, if you can't spot the chump, it's you.
Studies show that parents really do have a favorite child. Studies also show that if you have to ask, it isn't you.
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Ayn Rand argued in favor of those who produce. She argued that wealth is not a zero-sum game (such as the poker analogy); that wealth is created. And, if it is created, we ought to respect the creators of said wealth.
The creators are more valuable to society than the redistributors - especially if the distributors end up shackling or killing the creators.
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You said the "R" name. That's another no-no here.
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Just taking you at face value for the sake of argument (not meant to either cast aspersions, nor be naively trusting of a random AC): what do you think of UAW and their activities concerning Tesla?
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Not anymore.
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I think this whole discussion should pivot on what one anonymous Tesla employee says.
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"Seems like performance has nothing to do with it," one Tesla employee told CNBC under the condition of anonymity. "Those terminated were generally the highest paid in their position,"
Huh... why would Tesla be paying under-performers so much?
Salaries pretty much never go down. They only go up. The longer you've worked at the company, the more you get paid, regardless of actual performance.
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Don't short the stock in any case. Margin call can kill you. If you think it's overvalued, buy out of the money put options. Sure they are bets that the company will fail in a specific date range, but your losses are limited to the premium you paid upfront. With the kind of volatility Testa stock has, that premium won't be small.
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Or better yet, just go with index funds, because if highly paid portfolio managers with research staffs routinely don't beat them, you probably can't either.
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On the other hand, I know someone who make a medium sized fortune when Oracle cancelled their Christmas party. (20 years ago now)
He knew what it meant. Ellison has his ego tied up in that party. Cancelling the party meant the earnings were terrible.
Not insider trading either. The party's cancellation was public, he just knew the culture well enough to know what it meant. So many out of the money puts just after the earnings date. He ultimately had to explain to the SEC, but they just said 'clever'.
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Wow
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Re:Bummer (Score:5, Interesting)
I highly doubt they'll ever have one. People have been totally brainwashed against unions. Companies tout over and over again how everyone needs to come together and be buddies. Prima donna rockstar IT guys and developers loudly proclaim that they would never stoop to the level of their peers. And people wonder why there's no job security.
Things are going to have to get REALLY bad for unions to make a comeback. Bad enough for the average people to tune out the propaganda, like 50% unemployment bad. I personally have zero issues with seniority-based job security as long as the person is performing at an acceptable level. Too many people I know are getting thrown out of the IT field in their 40s and 50s, and it's nearly impossible to get rehired due to age discrimination. I think my next career move is going to have to be "cashing in my chips" and taking a lower-paying stable job.
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I personally have zero issues with seniority-based job security as long as the person is performing at an acceptable level.
The issue here is that "acceptable level" is highly subjective depending on the company and the industry. If you're looking for job security, don't work for a volatile company that could succeed or fail in a matter of a few short years. Tesla is that company. Your "acceptable level" threshold is much higher there. For folks looking for job security and a lower acceptable level of work, look for a government job or work for a utility.
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Unlike traditional automakers, Tesla does not have a union. Yet.
Unlike traditional *American* automakers. There isn't a single unionized foreign-owned assembly plant in the US.
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Seeing how unions so effectively ruined the competitiveness and efficiently of the Big 3, which were already very strong, established and highly profitable companies, a union would be a death sentence for a relatively young and developing company like Tesla.
Big 3 management was entirely incompetent as well. I know we love to say unions killed the big 3, but perhaps if they had good direction and knew how to react to what other automakers were doing to get ahead, they might have been fine.
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There are reasonable rationales for having different safety standards for each country (Germans always wear their seatbelts, so the airbag can be smaller), but there is a cost to having unique standards. At a minimum, the development costs aren't spread out on a larger volume. At worst, consumers are forced to spend more for features that they may not want. Reversing cameras are a neat feature but the cost/benefit of having one on my compact car wit
Re:The truth (Score:5, Informative)
Not so much a truth when at the time Germany made twice as many cars while paying their workers twice as much money.
So, no. What happened to the Big Three was their bottom lines resting on high-margin, gas guzzling vehicles, and that line fell apart after Katrina pushed gas prices over $4 a gallon. Same thing that happened to them in the 80's when the oil embargo hit and Japanese manufacturers ate their lunch.
Bullshit. The long term well-being of the union and its workers is inseparable from the the long term well-being of the company. As opposed to corporate executives, who are happy to give themselves raises and golden parachutes while driving the company into the ground. Just ask Marisa Mayer and Carly Fiorina, just to name two.
Bullshit. Unions don't give themselves massive pay increases while the company is failing, you're thinking of corporate management. Management who talk the union into accepting pay and benefit cuts [aviationpros.com] while secretly securing golden parachutes for themselves in the event of bankruptcy.
All employees think they perform above-average (Score:5, Interesting)
Illusory superiority is something we probably all have mentally: We all think we're above average employees, when obviously that's impossible.
One thing I've noticed working at a few major companies is that nobody ever really gets bad performance reviews: Instead, they all range from satisfactory to excellent. But in reality, those who get satisfactory are getting bad reviews, it's just more polite to NOT say "you stink".
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Re:All employees think they perform above-average (Score:4, Insightful)
That's one newly fired employee's claim. Huge grain of salt required.
Do they even know what other employees make? Not most places. Sure you know what they project (car etc), but that's usually high interest financed bullshit.
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That's one newly fired employee's claim. Huge grain of salt required.
I'm sure that guy has a lot to spare.
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One employee making the claim you halfwit.
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So if they were below average, how did they get hired as the "highest paid in their position" ? At the very least, it is HR incompetence.
The probably weren't hired as the highest paid, but worked their way into it. Perhaps they then became under-performing, or perhaps Tesla is simply greening their workforce -- the latter is usually unlawful and almost always short-sighted.
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I consider the equivalent of "unsatisfactory" to be termination of employment.
"Satisfactory" can (unfortunately) mean anything from "it isn't yet worth the trouble of replacing you, so we're going to try and get you to improve before we fire you" to "you're a great employee but not particularly special".
It'd be lovely to have a more exact scale, but people told they're heading to the chopping block sometimes choose to sabotage the company instead of either finding a way to satisfy the company's expectations
Performance reviews are an excuse to fire. (Score:2)
Performance is PRETEXT used to fire undesirables before stock vestment. Especially if they're let go all at the same time!
Your opinion is being played for a fool.
This is systemic bullshit in our industry.
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Here's the thing... people *DO* get bad performance reviews, but those people don't generally stick around for very long afterwards, if they aren't actually fired for not doing their job correctly, or at all.
Key line (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Key line (Score:5, Insightful)
Who says they did? They could easily have been hired at a lower salary and received raises in response to over-performing, until such time as they stopped delivering in line with their higher salary. Maybe they burned out, maybe they got complacent, maybe they started a family and stopped putting in 100-hour weeks, maybe they got promoted into a position outside their area of excellence. Lots of reasons someone might stop being as valuable as they used to be. And for better and worse pay cuts in excess of those automatically applied by inflation are generally considered to be ill-advised.
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So by that argument the message being sent is to try to avoid over-performing and getting raises as that will eventually get you fired once you are paid too much. Workers should strive for mediocrity and never perform more than they have to in order to avoid getting pay raises and eventual termination... Slow and steady wins the race I guess...
As soon as I saw the headline the other day the first thing that came to mind is that they are cleaning house of all the union seekers, perhaps lumping them in with a
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For job security, reliable and otherwise uninteresting middle-of-the-pack performance does seem to be the safe path. Alternately you might excel, but turn down raises, promotions, etc. that would push you out of the relatively secure "worth more than they're paying me" niche.
None of that will help your bottom line of course - but it seems to be an unfortunate reality that "climbing the ladder" is a risky game, especially within larger corporations where top executives are largely unaware of the individuals
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I'd love to know how this random anonymous fired person could say this with any certainty. You have to be *very* careful about taking the word of recently-fired employees as gospel. Obviously, they're not going to be feeling very happy about Telsa at the moment. Even those who knew they were slacking off at work or not getting along with peers won't admit that to anyone else. In fact, those types of people are probably the most likely to slander your company after they're fired.
Granted, it's not like we
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Reading between the lines that means that one or more people who hadn't worked in the job as long as him were not fired.
Underperforming? (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, underperforming on a work to cost ratio... The higher you get paid, the more profit you have to make..
Tesla has how much profit? Um... Can we say nearly nothing?
When you fire someone... (Score:5, Insightful)
... especially in an at-will state, it's always legally in your best interest to not state a reason for the termination. For an at-will state, you are often not required to provide a reason, and if you do provide one it can come back to bite you in a lawsuit if they can show evidence otherwise.
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Tesla has publicly stated that these were for-cause firings. If they told the employees that it was not for-cause in their severance notice, now they've got a different kind of problem.
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Is anyone fired purely for performance? (Score:4)
Maybe I'm lucky, but I've generally worked in places where they've never fired anyone for poor performance. Like the summary suggests, firings are usually based on salary and it's just a dumb HR thing. Are performance-based firings really a thing?
Just to be clear, I don't work exclusively with rockstars either. There are plenty of mediocre performers. But I've never experienced having someone get so bad at their job that they had to be removed.
There's no easy fix either...you basically have to not be the top guy on the salary spreadsheet when they decide to cut.
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A person is fired for performance reasons. 2% of the workforce, fired and not laid off, with zero notice -- there's another underlying reason.
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Lucky? I'd expect a place that never fired for performance to be a 100% dysfunctional hellhole.
Re:Is anyone fired purely for performance? (Score:4, Informative)
I worked at a company that had a policy of firing the bottom 5% on a regular basis.
This wasn't actually done in any consistent manner and often the bottom 5% were merely unliked by management, while their performance was actually OK. All kinds of things can lead to a single bad performance review, few of them related to the person's actual capability.
The idea originates with Jack Welsh at GE (he proposed firing the bottom 10% in any year).
Yes, at GE (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to work at GE, they did occasionally try to fire someone for poor performance. It was always a major hassle documenting the reasons, discussing the problem with the employee, etc. But it did happen once in a while when the person was truly a non-performer and sometimes resulted in a lawsuit against the company.
Much more common was a RIF - Reduction In Force. Those involved a large number of people (like this one at Tesla) and usually effected older employees, poor performers, and people with the misfortune to be in a poor performing business group. Yea, it's illegal to layoff older employees in order to cut salaries so they always threw in a few younger employees to make it look like a mix.
There were usually a few really poor performers around before a RIF. We called them "canaries", because like a canary in a coal mine, as long as they were around you knew you were safe.
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Are performance-based firings really a thing?
Yes. Sometimes by policy e.g. Stack-Ranking firing the bottom x%: See GE, Honeywell, Oracle.
Sometimes by value performance: e.g. Fire everyone without x billable hours: See every consultant every.
Usually though it's just used as a way to get rid of really poor people: e.g. consistent fuckups who shouldn't have been hired in the first place.
There are a few companies (usually some of the larger monsters) that take the view of a failing employee is a failing in management and they move their dead weight from d
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Orgs with regular scheduled cullings (rank and rate etc) end up with employees spending large amounts of effort to game the metrics.
If you're going to do something like that, you have to not publish the metrics, but then the employees infer them and game it anyhow.
There is no substitute for managers with a clue, rare as they are.
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Scheduled cullings are a well-known way to kill your company in its tracks. Not only do people game the metrics, as you say, but good workers will get out as fast as they can find another job. As a result you just end up with a bunch of workers trying to game the metrics and not much else who have essentially no interest in the company's well-being because they are being treated like cattle.
GE is a prime example. They are the 800lb gorilla in my industry but I would never work for them. They just had their 2nd of 3 planned major layoffs just in the 2nd half of this year. I have a friend who works there as a manager, and the number of people he has had to personally let go is staggering.
If you want this to stop (Score:2)
Without warning? (Score:2)
Some terminated employees told CNBC they were informed via email or a phone call "without warning," and told not to come into work the next day.
I'm fairly certain they didn't throw their belongings in the trash. But otherwise, yes, that's generally how it happens.
R. B. Trary was let go (Score:2)
Some co's fire the bottom of the stack, others fire the top. This suggests a madness to the method.
Does the reason matter? (Score:3)
Tomorrow's headline (Score:3)
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Re:PROTESTING AGAINST CENSORSHIP (Score:5, Funny)
Let's test my theory:
Wubba lubba dub duuuuuuuub!
I need that Szechuan sauce, Morty!
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Re:PROTESTING AGAINST CENSORSHIP (Score:5, Insightful)
You must be new around here. We "censor" ourselves. Majority rules on Slashdot.
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When I mod, I judge whether the Gentle Reader would benefit from reading shit posts like yours.
-1 Offtopic, Irrelevant, Troll, Flamebait
Fuck you and your claim of censorship and your tribalism, asshole.
Re: PROTESTING AGAINST CENSORSHIP (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not trolling to mod off-topic posts to -1. Complain about it on a climate change story, it has no place here. Yeah yeah I know, "it's too important, we have to spread the word everywhere" says every zealot about every issue. Keep it on topic. If your screed has nothing to do with the story, then it should be modded down to -1, every time.
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Technically, your post is off-topic too - just sayin'.
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And I'd be fine getting modded down for it, I certainly wouldn't bitch and moan in other /. stories because some mod gave a -1 to my off-topicness.
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And I'd be fine getting modded down for it, I certainly wouldn't bitch and moan in other /. stories because some mod gave a -1 to my off-topicness.
Sure, I get it - I was just injecting some humor. Things get mis-modded all the time here and it can be annoying -- mostly so when "flamebait" or "troll" is applied simply because the moderator disagrees with the opinions (or facts) in the post -- and this happens a lot with certain topics. Such mis-moderation injects the moderator's viewpoint into the thread - which makes it commentary, not moderation. Also annoying is when a post is modded "off-topic" when it's topic-adjacent or otherwise weirdly connect
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All of us.
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#notmypresident !!!!!
#actually...
Re:PROTESTING AGAINST CENSORSHIP (Score:5, Funny)
> Global warming is real.
Unless declared integer.
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what about have more EU like rights in the usa?