From what I've heard from the SpaceX and ULA people I know (although there may be some sample bias because most of the SpaceX people I know quit due to the hours), that's not really the case. ULA is more of a 9-5 company, especially for union folks, whereas SpaceX is more of a 60-80 hours/week kind of place.
That's usually what happens basically everywhere. I 'survived' multiple rounds of layoffs and they always touch stuff that's deemed 'unnecessary' but needs to be kept alive and thus adding to the workload of already overworked employees.
i've done a lot of contract work for spacex. imo i think part of the reason they work so much is because they have no formal methods group. everyone seems to solve similar problems in slightly different ways instead of having a vetted and documented 'right' way to approach certain things. i've literally been paid to write code that does the same thing for different groups in slightly different ways. having done a lot of aerospace contracting, this is atypical from what i've seen elsewhere. my point is that if they formed a methods group to formalize and standardize across the entire org they might be fine with a 10% cut if they're not duplicating efforts all over the place.
Can you comment on this from the perspective of how the method works, as in the results it produces and why, as opposed to whether it's standard/common or not? To me, SpaceX is remarkable because they've done what the rest of the world failed to do for 20 years. That's of course a combination of factors - vision, drive, start-up mentality - but are their actual processes/development methods also in any way better than in traditional space companies?
Appreciate if you can provide an anecdata: those you’ve worked with should have no problems landing another job? Just trying to get a feel of whether this will be a minor or major stress event for those fired.
It's because projections for large launch demand are softer for the next few years than had previously been expected. It was thought that that weakness would give way and demand would perk back up. This layoff is happening because that's no longer expected to happen and they're not going to need the staff to match a much greater launch rate.
What does it mean? It more or less officially confirms that Starlink is the only way they can finance the plans for Mars and BFR. There isn't going to be a huge uptick in launches in the coming years, such that that will be enough to dent their capital requirements. Musk has been attempting to finance some of SpaceX's capital demands with debt recently to avoid further diluting his stake, because it risks pushing him below a controlling interest. It's very questionable whether he'll be able to hold the line on that if the launch rate is going to remain fairly stagnant versus 2018.
I suspect that Starlink is, in fact, a significant CAUSE of the softening of GTO launch demand. All this LEO megaconstellations will be providing many of the same services as these long-lived, expensive geosynchronous birds, so the business case for them becomes much less certain.
If Starlink, OneWeb, etc were cancelled tomorrow, it's likely GTO launch demand would pick back up significantly.
Starlink is both the cause of and solution to this problem.
It's a game theory problem - even if Starlink wasn't happening, OneWeb would be going ahead anyway. So if the GEO satellite operators are going to be running scared anyway, SpaceX might as well get its own entrant into the market.
I don't think this argument holds up to analysis. According to the OneWeb and Starlink Wikipedia pages:
1. May 2014: OneWeb (formerly 'WorldVu') receives its initial $500 million in funding [1]
2. January 2015: SpaceX's satellite constellation is announced. [2]
3. December 2016: OneWeb receives an extra $1.2 billion from SoftBank and existing investors [3]
4. March 2017: Blue Origin signs OneWeb as a customer [4]
If SpaceX was a neutral transport provider, there's little reason that OneWeb would have chosen Blue Origin over SpaceX. Blue Origin is probably offering very low prices, but SpaceX arguably could match them.
I meant - no reason not to get that market share in the small-comsat market.
As to why do it themselves as opposed to just be a provider to OneWeb, I think this is a sneaky way to do some price discrimination - SpaceX, like everyone else, may have some spare launch capacity, so having an internal (hopefully-profitable) project to soak up that demand rather than cratering launch prices may be worth it.
They recently switched from composite hull to metal hill for BFR/Starship, so it might be a case of terminating those employees whose primary focus was designing the composite hull and whose skills were not transferable. There will likely be talent pools that get thinned out too, welders who won’t be so necessary now that Block 5 is in production and Falcon Heavy is “operational” (meaning fewer expendable launches, less demand for welders to build new rockets).
It doesn’t help that there’s been little warning (though I guessing a lot of these employees had some warning that they are going ormtheir teams are getting thinned).
I hope for the best, the people leaving SpaceX have certainly got great resumes to recommend them to new employers!
I think their headcount surprises a lot of people. SpaceX has gotten very big over the past few years trying to carve out market share and evolve F9. The old incumbent competition (ULA) has around 3500 employees. Part of the difference in headcount is likely because SpaceX does a lot more in-house manufacturing, but still it seems like a large differential.
10% is a big fraction. How often do large, stable companies execute a layoff like that? Sometimes layoffs can be not so bad, for example when that's the company's way of clearing off the managers' firing wishlist without incurring legal trouble. However at 10% of the workforce, this may be a change of direction away from R&D and towards sitting on the falcon 9 and launching to LEO.
It's a big fraction but it's not necessarily unheard of. For example Autodesk laid off about 13% of its workforce at the end of 2017. Additionally, in California you've got to give plenty of advance notice and as a result the state tracks mass layoffs[1].
Ah, this only tracks data for layoffs in California and the the ratio isn't necessarily very useful. OTOH it's a good list of companies engaging in mass layoffs that could be used to look for nationwide trends.
Maybe, maybe not. Consider it in terms of your own workplace: if you worked on a team of 10, and one person got laid off, would that seem so huge? I think the question is whether this round of layoffs is in response to an acute cash flow issue or just part of long-term financial prudency. They fact that they waited until after Christmas and are providing 8 weeks of pay and benefits makes me hopeful that it's the latter.
Also, given that Falcon 9 is now essentially "done", I expect there probably is a fair bit of internal capacity that's accumulated during its development which can be cut. For example, SpaceX is famous for building a lot of components in house, but perhaps they'll move more to using subcontractors for Falcon 9 parts. That might free up money to spend on R&D. The challenge will be to become leaner and save money in the core launch business without compromising standards. It'll only take a couple of accidents to trash their reputation.
Pretty much, yeah. In an 11 person company, each individual is basically a whole department. That one person might be your only marketer, or your only frontend developer, or your only accountant. That's a really big deal.
Firing one person in a 10 person company could mean that you lose your entire accounting/finance skillset in one fell swoop. Or your sole developer. It is a big deal in terms of intellectual property and skill pool within your organisation.
Down stream impact of how to cope with that loss is another factor. Fire your book keeper and does your remaining engineering team have to spend 10% of their time doing invoices and reconciling bank accounts?
It could also mean firing that one developer who vastly underperforms, but you still have 5 other skilled developers because developing happens to be what your company does.
You must be fun to work with. I’ve worked in 10 person companies, and it’s the sort of place where there’s nowhere to hide. By extension you generally won’t find slackers in a small company.
"SpaceX decimates its WorForce" would have been just as correct but then Swat Teams might have moved in :).
On topic, probably just cutting out the fat (I'm sure most companies can fire 10% and a month later very few would notice the difference). But then, why not move them to R&D? I doubt SpaceX has cash problems to fire (more or less) essential workers.
As long as the company is planning on doing 10% less than most will not notice.
10% usually means 10% to 40% of company productivity is affected shortterm. 10% leave, 5% wanted to get fired but didn't, 25% will think they are next and change how they work (some positive some negative).
It is usually a signal for top performers to start moving on. In this case the story is spacex is growing conflicts with the layoffs.
In certain circumstances, once the means of production are created [most of] the workers are no longer needed, but the means being privately held (by a narrow group of owners) means they alone can benefit going forward.
You can make a feast together and share it; or you can make a feast together, kick out most of the helpers and gorge yourself.
Capitalism says the second option is better because you get to have more.
Strictly speaking, Capitalism says that the Capitalists get to choose which option they go with.
In a system with healthy incentives, we might expect Option 1 to be the sensible capitalist equilibrium, because capital needs to be maintained and the builders/maintainers become the same people.
Don't forget that, in theory, the workers can become capitalists themselves if they aren't getting a good share of the benefits. In my view usually when they don't it is because of government interference (eg, the pre-Uber situation in taxis, or how regulation tends to entrench existing players).
As an example, someone who switches from working as a landscaper to running a landscaping business has switched from a worker role to a capitalist role — even though they likely spent less money doing so than a software engineer worker owns. Being a “capitalist” is defined by capitalizing ventures, not the mere volume of capital.
I would argue that the reason society has become so disequitable is that we’ve made it difficult to transition between worker and small capitalist — that is to say, that we’ve undermined small and lifestyle businesses.
No... It was part of the 2018 announcement. 2018 was better than expected so they revised 2019 forecast.
"Early Friday, GM said 2018 EPS will exceed previous guidance of $5.80-$6.20. It also expects to surpass an earlier view of adjusted automotive free cash flow of $4 billion."
I am not sure why you're getting downvoted. Imagine if Apple/iPhone lost 10% of its growth, people would start panicking. Context is extremely important. 10% of a dollar is not a lot of money, but 10% of a billion USD would be many times what I'd need for the rest of my life.
Waiting until after Christmas is indeed nice, but the 8 weeks is actually mandated by law.
California WARN act applies to any site that has at least 70 employees and lays of at least 50. When this is triggered, the employer needs to provide at least 60 days notice.
WARN only applies to notice, not to severance pay. As far as I know, even in a mass layoff situation in CA like this, they are not required to provide any compensation. You could look at it as "hey we're going to fire you in 60 days per WARN, so just stop working now and we'll pay you for that time" but it's not quite the same - they could just notify them, make them work the 8 weeks and not provide any actual severance pay.
While there have been cases of that the average person is going to fullfil their obligation and collect the check. Any manager that really is concerned about theft and sabotage in that scenario should not be a manager. Employees steal and sometimes sabotage while gainfully employed too.
My point was that risk already is there. That person that got passed over for a promotion for instance. It only takes one that is still employed at a company.
It is about a notice, but once you lay off a person it is a liability to give them access to internal systems. So majority of companies turn it around and make it look like that's also part of severance. It makes them look better and they follow the law. There is no requirement to pay severance anyway.
It is more like you work at a company with 10 people. One person is fired but that person happens to be hr. The remaining 9 somehow get payroll done but someone is always short.
8 weeks of pay as severance is insultingly horrible, even for very junior employees. If a company hopes to grow and be taken seriously as a professional workplace, you have to do much, much better than 8 weeks pay & benefits for severance.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Always negotiate severance up front as part of any job offer, and consider 4-6 months as an absolute minimum for junior or mid-level employees, and at least 12 months of pay for senior employees. Simply turn down job offers when a company won’t offer this and take a longer time to find an offer at one of the (many) companies that will.
Most companies will negotiate severance with you but you have to ask and make it clear that in-writing severance details to serve as protection against unexpected unemployment from layoffs is a dealbreaker for you.
Most candidates won’t negotiate this, which is why most companies don’t have to offer it except to the few special case people that require it.
If we all, as candidates, unilaterally make it impossible to hire us without adequate severance, we’ll all be better off.. instead of just the minority of candidates who put forward the effort to negotiate it and aren’t afraid to turn down offers that don’t include defined severance agreements.
> I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Always negotiate severance up front as part of any job offer, and consider 4-6 months as an absolute minimum for junior or mid-level employees, and at least 12 months of pay for senior employees. Simply turn down job offers when a company won’t offer this and take a longer time to find an offer at one of the (many) companies that will.
Have you put this into practice? It'd be a nice contingency to have in place but seems like it'd put a damper on the tone of the negotiations ("I'm already thinking about being let go and want to make it really expensive for you to do so").
Yes, I have absolutely put this into practice. I have encountered companies that have blanket policies about either low or no severance, and I simply reject any offer or request to continue negotiations without severance. This has certainly made job searches take longer and certainly left me feeling frustrated after investing time in take-home tests, on-site interviews and negotiations, only to learn that severance agreements weren’t possible in some cases.
But I gained a lot of experience regarding how to negotiate it and talk about it, and ultimately found that most companies are perfectly happy to negotiate it as part of the job offer.
I think most every job I've had as a developer would think it ridiculous for me to ask for severance. Severance is meant for high end positions where there's a large cost to the employee to switch jobs because of how illiquid management and executive roles can be. Developer jobs are extremely easy to switch between.
It’s wrong thinking like this that allows companies to continue omitting severance from many basic developer job offers. Meanwhile, if you don’t assume “it’s ridiculous” and actually ask for it, you find many companies are perfectly willing to negotiate it, even for junior level software engineering positions.
> towards sitting on the falcon 9 and launching to LEO.
That would still leave them with many thousands of redundant employees. Falcon 9 is done and the production is dropping due to reusability. Recently, they had a 3rd re-flight of the same core, which, coupled with the slowdown of the global launch market, means that in the next years they will need to produce a third to a half of the number of cores they used in 2017. The same for Merlin engines.
They basically fulfilled their mission and drastically reduced the cost of getting into orbit - which for the space industry is dominated by labor costs. Without a greatly increased demand, they can't justify keeping those people around.
And they can't roll all the Falcon production workforce towards BFR, Raptor and Starlink since those are still strongly R&D dominated projects and the skill set is incompatible. At the same time, they have hundreds of engineering positions open for those projects.
I would have put them on other Musk projects to keep them from going to the competition. SpaceX doesn't have a monopoly on low cost launch. The next place to figure out how to 3d print a tungsten titanium copper nickel chromium iron one piece rocket nozzle will also have that advantage.
If Musk is really more interested in getting humanity into space as soon as possible then padding his already large bankroll, having some competition can really keep people and companies focused on making quick progress. I have heard him say he would like some more companies competing with SpaceX in interviews for just this reason and his actions seem to suggest he his main goal in life really is making humanity a multi-planet civilization.
He also said that he joined Tesla to help jump start the electric car revolution by a decade and his total asset liquidation in 2008 to support Tesla and SpaceX seems to support that this attitude is not just some PR move, but who knows for sure.
This is an interesting take, they weren't laid off, they graduated.
The same thing is used to train a talent pool in a vendor eco system, hire contractors to build demo apps and integrations, but cycle them out after every project. All those people can now put Tech X on their resume.
SpaceX definitely transformed the entire endeavor of space travel.
Musk is incredibly stretched and has very nearly missed bankruptcy several times. It seems highly unlikely he can afford the largesse to hand over any business to his competitors. A SpaceX-2 without billions sunk in R&D could drastically undercut their launch prices and capture the lion's share of the market, without having any intention to go to Mars. This would be great for the launch market and access to LEO but would delay colonization.
It's pretty clear Musk sees his for profit endeavors - Tesla, commercial and government launches, Starlink - as cash cows for a long term investment into something no one in the market is yet ready to finance. Until that changes and Mars becomes an interesting commercial proposition, Musk will ruthlessly pursue his business and leave nothing on the table, precisely to acquire the funds to bootstrap his vision.
When we establish a Mars colony it will probably take centuries before it's truly self-sufficient. I don't see the point of starting with a self sufficient colony on Earth, especially if the challenges are quite different from Mars.
Mercury is 3:2 locked, it still has normal days (although they are longer than its year). The poles don't get direct sunlight though so they are frigid all the time.
The Antarctic is actually heavily protected by treaties preventing colonisation and exploitation of resources.
This all goes up for grabs when the treaties expire in a few decades and it's presently an environmental issue to try and get them resigned rather than have an oil rush there.
If you ask the PR department or look at the "About Us" section of any company, you'll find some fantastical story how they're improving humanity by earning millions doing whatever they do too.
Depends on management style. Stack ranking companies, which used to include MS and GE) would fire 10% (theoretically the bottom 10%) every year. It's no longer fashionable, but there are probably some that still do this more or less.
Musk does seem to believe in occasionally "trimming the fat" when the numbers get tight. SpaceX did this exact thing in 2014, and Tesla has done it recently (and is now back over the headcount post-layoffs).
In my experience, the larger the company the less painful it is to fire 10%.
In large engineering organisations, laying off 10% makes no difference at all on anything apart from the ego of managers whose teams shrink.
On the topic, wasn't Jack Welsh/GE that popularised the idea of firing the bottom 10% every single year? Not saying that this is necessarily a good idea but that shows the amount of slack in large organisations.
It really is. After every such round, I think to myself "finally!". And things start getting done slightly faster afterwards.
Edit: In any big corp, there are usually many employees who act as "barriers" to others. Either because they feel secure enough in their job and don't really care about performing, or because they lost sight of why things are being done, and are focusing on bureaucracy and "processes" for the sake of those two things.
The rounds of firing reliably identify the low productivity people? I'd have expected the opposite -- that they reliably identify those least able to swing the politics necessary to win high-visibility work, who in my experience are typically high-productivity individuals.
If the decimations have been going on for some time, I'd expect them to reliably hit low-performers, but only because the obvious low performers were hired as sacrificial lambs in the first place, which puts the whole exercise deep in "cobra effect" territory.
Maybe reusability is already having the desired effects? When a reusable launch is cheaper than using an expendable rocket, a big chunk of the savings must be labor (the raw materials are cheap) SpaceX, I think, is doing unusually deep manufacturing (vs contracting out, where most of the the hit of reduced labor demand would happen at component suppliers), so the reduction is at their own workforce if the increased efficiency is not fully compensated by increased demand.
The one time I lived through a 10% reduction, the results were not catastrophic, but still pretty bad. Morale took a huge hit. What's worse, is that it spooks everyone. Resumes get updated, networks get activated, and you find a lot of people leaving after the layoff for new jobs.
Some think you should do this annually. "Back when he was running GE, Jack Welch famously argued that leaders should fire the bottom 10 percent of their workforce each year, as part of an orderly continuous improvement process."
https://www.inc.com/paul-b-brown/should-you-fire-10-of-your-...
Ah the glory of the stack ranking. Microsoft did this as well, and it was much celebrated when they stopped, as the stack ranking had a lot of effects that had nothing to do with performance (like coworkers stonewalling each other, or infighting, and what do you do with an org of rockstars).
Not to mention that eventually you end up firing some really smart people and find worse replacements (not in the least due to shitty reputation - but also because of regression to the mean and because people are biased towards hiring worse than themselves in this regime). Definitely so at 10% p.a. if you're in a remotely niche industry.
Were the sacrificial lambs at least told in secret that they were 'hired in order to be laid off' at the next round? I hope they were not just given rote tasks, but allowed to explore their skills while they are in limbo so that they can train-up or look for jobs... Nah that's just wishful thinking.
Telling someone they're going to be laid off and having them build skills both reduce their "goal performance," thereby serving the purpose of justifiably lowering their stack rank. I can imagine hiring some smart guy with a good resume, then telling him congratulations he just won a year's supply of O'Riley books.
If the ‘lamb’ is unfamiliar with the concept there is no hint you could give that would not also open you up to lawsuits.
When I was told that I wasn’t good enough by my new boss and should look for another job on my first day, I thought it was ridiculous, and that it would be possible to change her mind. She was not my hiring boss due to a reorganization that happened just before I started. I hung on for a year and the stress literally nearly killed me, I ended up quitting for health reasons. I got the lowest ranking you could get in what I believe to be the shortest amount of time in the company’s history.
The funny thing is is that I’m a freakish prodigy at my work and after a successful stint at a different company, I ended up back at the same company at much much higher position.
Hating companies like this is like hating a snake that bit you... it’s a snake. At least in the US the money is better.
If I could give advice to anyone who finds themselves in a similar position it would be that failure is not the end and not always your fault. And probably find a new job sooner rather than later.
Additionally, when the stack ranking is done at the first or second-level manager (which is usually the case), you end up making sub-optimal decisions. Meaning: the bottom 10% on team A may be better than the top 20% of team B. Which then leads A-players to seek to work on B-teams, so they can be on the top of the stack ranking.
Stack ranking is a failed experiment, and by now I think all companies realize that.
It won't be over until Harvard, Wharton, and all the other top business schools teach that stack ranking is destructive. Jack Welch is a blithering idiot if he still believes in stack ranking. I've a feeling that the reason a CEO of a company like GE would like stack ranking is the false sensation of control it must give them. In reality, one of the key reasons you have managers in the first place is that management is a people problem, so you need people to manage people, and managers need to get to know the people they manage.
No cooperation within teams (one of you has to go, one of you gets a good bonus, the rest get nothing).
No cooperation between teams either (for similar reasons, and besides, you're busy enough trying to shine within your team).
Any innovation that requires a solid team and cooperation just doesn't happen. Lots of innovation that can be done by just one or two people doesn't get approval from mgmt because they don't get it and are busy measuring the wrong things.
So you're forgoing all the best innovations while building a toxic work environment. Your best and brightest will either stay and game the system, or go elsewhere and be happier.
Stack ranking is a highly destructive tool of management. I would recommend it to my competitors, and only to my competitors.
Are we just going to completely ignore the 17 year reign of Jeff Immelt? GE Capital gained enough prominence to destroy the company under his reign. Jeff was the one that acquired one of the nations largest subprime lenders in 2004, primed perfectly to maximize losses in 2008.
Jack Welch was a massive GE Capital fan - he praised it to the skies in his books and it really came into its own under him. He said (and I'm paraphrasing) that as a chemical engineer by training, he was blown way that you didn't have to design, manufacture, "bend metal" with GE Capital - just turn GE's strong balance sheet into more money.
Maybe it's possible that that type of culture and system made Immelt the best candidate to take over? Or influenced his own decision-making?
Someone can probably confirm if it's still the case, but based on their Glassdoor reviews they have done stack ranking in the past which is often used to cull the bottom X% each year.
Yep, the warped logic of stack ranking still infects HR thought to this day, in some quarters anyway. It's one of those notions that sounds brilliant at first, but then when you think it all the way through, it reveals itself as patently bizarre and misguided.
As noted, it creates a really unhealthy intra-team sabotage mindset as everybody competes to avoid being at the bottom of the stack. It puts managers in a horrible spot, having to rank 'n' purge when maybe their team was humming along wonderfully all year. It creates an atmosphere of awful fear and dread that distracts from the work.
As one of my buddies said back when MS was still using this accursed system -- "If they'd used stack-ranking at Los Alamos, hell, Oppenheimer would probably have had to fire Feynman!" {obviously not reflective of the historical reality, but I think pithy nonetheless}
>"If they'd used stack-ranking at Los Alamos, hell, Oppenheimer would probably have had to fire Feynman!"
This seems pretty accurate to me, just imagine what would have happened if the top 10 people in the organization were put on the most important team, and then stack day rolled around...
I worked at a company that did this, then eventually phased it out. We were also required to do a self eval on a variety of categories, one a three point scale: exceeds expectations, meets or does not meet. My managing director point blank told me: no one exceeds expectations and if you dont meet, you're gone. So, the self eval was "meets" all the way down. After 2 years of that bullshit, I stopped filling it out. Figured, if theyre not going to take the opportunity for honest self reflection, why bother? I lasted there another 7 years before I left on my own volition. Never in the 7 years that I did not so the self eval did a manager mention it to me. Fuck that shit.
Sounds like all of the issues could be solved by just not being committed to 10%, moving to 5% or 2.5% as your workforce gets stronger. And spread the responsibility of choosing who to fire beyond single individuals, so a team of people is responsible for figuring out who is not contributing.
That would help, but even so, stack ranking is social and cultural poison. You can do it one random year, but do it every year and watch cooperation within and between teams die out because it's a dog eat dog world you've built.
At what point will business schools please start teaching that stack ranking is a bad idea?
They've proven that they can make reusable rocket. In the early days they had around 6 launches per year requiring six separate rockets. Now they're hitting 20-25 launches per year and can carry an even larger payload on each launch. But they claim to be able to fly each rocket ten times before needing to make a new one. So you're going from 6 new rockets per year to 2 new rockets per year. Also rockets are not like your software programs that get rewritten every time a manager feels like it. You stick with what works. I think this is entirely expected.
>So you're going from 6 new rockets per year to 2 new rockets per year. Also rockets are not like your software programs that get rewritten every time a manager feels like it. You stick with what works.
Last year, SpaceX had big plans for new rocket designs, a satellite constellation, and more. Unlike a ravioli canning plant, SpaceX has an option other than cutting down to maintnence staff once cash flow positive. If the worst possible interpretation of this news turns out to be true, they will end up managed like a ravioli canning plant and the hockey stick growth projections will go out the window.
Unless they're cutting the satellite constellation I think this fits in with what people expected for SpaceX's growth. The problem is even as costs for rocket launches go down we aren't seeking hockey stick growth in the demand for rocket launches. The number of rocket launches per year has remained steady since 2015. SpaceX is getting an increasing number of those launches but even if they got all of them they would only have 40 launches. I'm not sure what else they've publicly advertised which would assume hockey stick growth.
What about the point to point BFR/Starship launches? That could potentially compete with any long haul airline route which would have a huge growth potential. Admittedly it probably requires a different kind of staff.
There have been plenty of satellite price flexibility studies that show there is a marked lag between supply and demand.
This is because high launch costs demand extraordinary levels of design and Q&A: there may never be a second chance. Unfortunately, these supply chains have flexibility baked out for some time, perhaps predating the Apollo era.
Lowered launch costs and increased launch opportunities offer increasing failure tolerance to an increasing number of projects which can now afford second chances and backup plans. However, these corporate cultures take time to adapt, they've been built around single-shot opportunities for decades.
TLDR: satellite markets are anything but nimble at this point, due to historical reasons. This will change, given time.
I don't think it has anything to do with launch costs. Satellites take a very long time to develop, and they're hundreds of millions of dollars. You have one shot to get it right, and lowering launch costs doesn't really make a big dent in that.
Satellites are that expensive in large part because if you're spending hundreds of millions on a launch anyway, you can't afford to launch ten cheaper satellites.
To be a bit hyperbolic: if launches were cheap enough you'd have amateurs launching stuff hacked together in the garage, knowing if they fail it doesn't matter - they can just try again.
I would agree with this if the launch cost was a substantial portion of the satellite. There are a lot more things that play though, especially for Geo satellites. Things like orbital slots are finite, so you really want to make as large of a satellite as possible, which also translates to more expensive. Even if SpaceX gets the launch costs cut in half, that's still not a large portion of the total costs. I believe after all is said and done, the launch cost is still between 5 to 10% of the total costs.
39. (alternate formulation) The three keys to keeping
a new human space program affordable and on schedule:
1) No new launch vehicles.
2) No new launch vehicles.
3) Whatever you do, don't develop any new launch vehicles.
I'll admit it does say human space program but it doesn't specify where the humans are.
Oh, the LA Times seem to finally have taken down their GDPR wall. This is the first article on their domain that I’m able to read since last May, from Europe.
This is a false reading of GDPR - it applies only when either the person or the business involved is physically in the EU, not on the citizenship of the person involved.
See Article 3: Territorial Scope (https://gdpr-info.eu/art-3-gdpr/). Useful terms: "data subject" is a natural person to whom the data relates, "processor" refers to an entity that works with the data, "controller" to an entity that "owns" the data. e.g. you would be a data subject, the LA Times would be the controller, and Google Analytics would be a data processor.
==================================
1. This Regulation applies to the processing of personal data in the context of the activities of an establishment of a controller or a processor in the Union, regardless of whether the processing takes place in the Union or not.
2. This Regulation applies to the processing of personal data of data subjects who are in the Union by a controller or processor not established in the Union, where the processing activities are related to:
a) the offering of goods or services, irrespective of whether a payment of the data subject is required, to such data subjects in the Union; or
b) the monitoring of their behaviour as far as their behaviour takes place within the Union.
3. This Regulation applies to the processing of personal data by a controller not established in the Union, but in a place where Member State law applies by virtue of public international law.
According to some comments from employees, the company had an all-hands meeting where everyone was sent home and told to check their email over the weekend to find out if they're being laid off or not: https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/af1n7f/spacex_will_...
Tell the affected ones immediately. Don't tell the other 90% that they're potentially getting fired tomorrow. Treat people with respect and be transparent when you hold power over them.
Well, rather than a "Don't come Monday" email on a weekend, which effectively gives them 0 working days notice, giving those employees say, 2 weeks notice that they will be terminated at least gives them a chance to re-train for another position or get their resumes together to try and find another job while still getting an income to pay for rent, food etc.
FAR less 'cruel' to give them an opportunity to plan their exit and give them the psychological space to get used to the fact.
EDIT: In light of the 'read the article' responses and downvotes, I wanted to clarify that my comment here is directly addressing the question "what is a less cruel way of laying people off" against the purported scenario above of people being told on Friday to go home and check their emails to see if they still have a job on Monday.
This rarely happens because of liability and security. It’s pretty common to be walked out by security after packing up your stuff when you are laid off.
Heh, a hedge fund I worked at didn't even let you back to your desk. You were immediately escorted out by security. "Your personal effects at your desk will be mailed to you." Suppose there were exceptions to say grab keys, wallet or a purse, but you weren't packing up everything.
From the article: "SpaceX is offering a minimum of eight weeks’ pay and other benefits to laid-off workers, according to Shotwell’s email. The company will also provide assistance with career coaching, resume help and job searches."
So SpaceX is giving employees two months to focus their full efforts on finding their next job. This seems less cruel than telling them they will lose their jobs and then expecting them to keep working.
That is FAR less cruel, and more in line with how most companies handle a genuine redundancy.
My response above was to do with the fact that employees who were NOT terminated were also subjected to the psychological trauma of spending the weekend guessing whether they had a job come Monday. Not the best way to keep morale high.
That need not just be charity on SpaceX's part. The circumstances of the layoff sounds like it would trigger the WARN act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini.... If so, 60 days notice is a legal requirement, not beneficence on SpaceX's part.
Except keeping people around for two weeks longer allows people to say goodbye to their coworkers and people they might've worked with for years. It allows them to impart their knowledge to anyone else that might need it, document things that need documenting and more importantly: It means the company treats you like an actual human being.
Acting like people are just gonna sit around and mope is not only highly disingenuous but is also a good way to fuck over the people having to fill in the knowledge gaps.
It's also a good way to get a disgruntled worker who still has system privileges or physical access to cause all kinds of havoc. Not worth the risk, even if you think it's more humane.
Not worth the risk? Disgruntled workers only generally arise if you treat your employees like shit and do shit like say, telling employees 'hey you might not have a job on monday but we're not telling you! we're gonna give you a weekend to think about your possible jobloss'.
I honestly hope you never work in HR because your sort of attitude is genuinely disastrous to this industry. Acting like treating your employees with respect is a 'risk' is terrible.
I agree the mail thing is not great... but you’re saying that of the 600 employees who were laid off, not a single one of them will become disgruntled if they had a good work environment? I too despise HR practices in some instances, but I’d consider them extremely incompetent if they believed in collective goodwill of 600 people who just lost their jobs. Keeping their access to sensitive systems (in a rocket company, no less!) would be opening the company up to sabotage, and HR would be fully (and rightfully) blamed for it.
Also, if I were laid off, why would I want to continue working for them for two more weeks? I don’t care about the company’s success at that point. I’m already getting two months severance; it’s much better to focus entirely on finding a job as quickly as possible. Half a month’s paycheck is not worth the emotional pain of seeing your non-laid-off colleagues continue to live their normal life, but act all awkward around you.
In fact, I’ll go ahead and say: I think your attitude that requests laid-off employees to keep working is disastrous. Nothing about making them come to work is respectful or beneficial to them.
They launch giant multi million dollar missiles into space. Allowing an employee that knows they are terminated and is most likely distracted to continue working on a project like that is not worth the risk. If someone was genuinely upset and wanted revenge, a good portion of them are literally rocket scientists, they could probably figure out a way to do it if given a couple weeks.
Better just to cut ties as quickly as possible. They were given 8 weeks of severance and if they are really friends with the people, they can call them on the way home. They are not banned from communicating with their past co-workers.
I know it sounds harsh but there is no nice way to find out you were fired. This way mitigates the companies risk, provides decent (not great) severance for the employees and time to find a new job while being paid.
The only winners in a layoff are the shareholders.
I used to work for a government contractor and during lay-offs they rarely did the whole plug-pulling nonsense on their employees when they needed to restructure or lay people off.
So I suppose you can consider me highly skeptical when a commercial company makes the excuse that they're doing it for security reasons. Because to me, that sounds like pure bullshit designed to cover for shitty practices.
It's easy for me to take a pragmatic approach from the outside looking in but if I was the one getting laid off, I would probably share your sentiment.
I don't know why companies do the "escort you out by security" thing, but I doubt there is a great deal of logic to it, as I have observed that even at a given company, some people are treated like that and some aren't, and there's no sense to it. It's never happened to me, but a former boss of mine was laid off that way, and nobody admitted to knowing why. Yes, he could have destroyed a lot if he'd wanted to, but so could a less senior employee.
It's not enjoyable, but it's still the right thing to do.
As for the logistics, each member of staff can be talked to by their immediate manager, making it scale easily. Matter of fact, this once happened to me, and my boss was as clearly upset to let me go as I was to leave. But everyone being let go was informed and given their notice as soon as the workday started, so there was no uncertainty or delay.
Do it progressively rather than telling everyone "go home and start guessing whether you'll come back." Hack and slash will always have casualties, and you'll lose good people. If you go down the chain asking people confidentially whether there's anyone they feel the team would be better off without, then you can work on removing the weakest links without making the entire company feel like they can't trust you.
Seriously, if you cannot see that "fire by email" is far more impersonal and disconnecting than compassionately meeting with the employee 1 on 1 and giving them a definitive exit path along with the financial support to do so, then please do not ever work in HR or be responsible for employing people in the future.
To subject ALL your employees to the 50/50 prospect that they will have a job come next working day is tantamount to playing Russian Roulette with them using a gun with a 2 bullet chamber - one loaded. The psychological toll even on the 'survivors' will be brutal.
And employees have no responsibility to stay at a company that treats ex-employees like shit. Actions like these are a great way to demoralize your workforce and entice higher-level employees to jump ship.
I imagine it's possible that dehumanizing layoffs like this will put SpaceX at a competitive disadvantage, its lunch eventually getting eaten by companies who do care enough about their employees to interact with them in person regarding the business of the company and their place in it, good or bad. This would come out in increased efficiencies due to no surprise-axed-or-not email always threatening to land in their inboxes.
What is dehumanizing? Either way is awful, but companies have to make tough decisions and communicating those is not easy. Many people prefer an email over awkward semi-genuine HR discussions. Coworkers and manager will reach out afterwards in private and in person if they really cared about the connection.
Personally I would prefer to be fired by email versus an 1 on 1 face to face meeting. The financial support and other helpful tools seem like an orthogonal issue.
The 1x1 scenario still involves calling the laid off employees into meetings in sequence while everyone else stresses out wondering if they are next. Layoffs are brutal no matter what you do.
Not only that, but as someone who has been through this in the past...
What happens is you find out your department or wing of the building is next. You continue to try to do your job, meanwhile your manager starts walking towards you and stops at a couple cubicles down from you. You breath a slight sigh of relief. Meanwhile you and everyone else is prairie-dogging as others in the office start getting called out, and the VP strolls by and yells at everyone to "have some respect and quit gawking, get back to work". So now you keep your head down, and eventually get a tap on your shoulder from your manager.
You can't help but fight back tears, as you get lead to the conference room where an HR drone explains the package, benefits, and next steps. You are handed a box, escorted back to your desk, and put your personal belongings into the box while being watched like a hawk to make sure you don't do anything stupid. Some things you aren't allowed to put in the box until they are thoroughly examined. A forever half finished document is on your monitor. An email you were about to reply to is still visible, and will go unanswered. Your laptop is shut down, your accounts already locked.
Now you start on the walk of shame carrying the lonely box out to your car, start driving, and then your family wonders why you are home from work so early. But the look on your face tells the whole story, with the look of concern on your wife's face and the look of horror from the kids (of course, being kids, they start asking questions about how this will affect them). "Hey, kids, looks like we will be taking that camping trip a bit early, got some saved up for it, will figure out tomorrow when it gets here. It will be alright."
My only experience with layoffs is when one morning we suddenly had a departmental meeting, and it turned out none of us was being laid off, but our manager of over a decade was, and he was already gone, no chance to say goodbye.
What do you think goes through people's head as their managers walk to them "can we talk" during a staff reduction exercise?
Have you ever sit across an HR person saying all the right things and putting an as empathic as possible face on, and telling you "it's not you, it's us"?
Personally I'd prefer the email, as long as, I have a contact to talk to for the next steps.
I've been laid off face to face, it sucks. How is SpaceX supposed to lay off 600 people in 1 on 1 meetings and what significant difference does that even make?
We don't know the content of the all hands, they could have outlined the support plan there.
You skipped right over the hiring facts of: the face to face interviews, consideration, and most importantly, the option for the (potential) employee to exercise their choice of whether to take the job or not.
None of which is available to the employee in a 'fire by email' scenario.
"Fire by email" isn't a bad option for layoffs in the double digit percentage as long as the delay between notification and sending the emails is low. Meeting 1 on 1 only works in non targeted low scale layoffs, anywhere else and it just creates hysteria.
Also fire by email doesn't mean there isn't a definitive exit path or no financial support. The article itself states the email claimed a minimum of 8 weeks of pay for those laid off.
Also it's 90/10 not 50/50. If you were firing 50% of your workforce there is no avoiding a "brutal" psychological toll for the remaining.
In percentage yes, but not in the manner of choosing the affected. Or at least one would hope it’s not every tenth person regardless of role, contribution, etc.
The roman definition involved beating 1 in 10 to death by the "coworkers", so no, I don't think 8 weeks of severance and helping them write resumes plus get new jobs elsewhere is a very good definition of decimation.
If 90/10 from the company perspective. From the employee perspective, it sounds like everyone at SpaceX went home on Friday wondering "Do I have a job come Monday?". To each and every one of them, the prospect of having a job versus NOT having a job would have been 50/50 as they had no insight into the decision making process for the layoffs.
Sure, for an employee who may have known they had made a lot of mistakes or were obviously underperforming etc., their knowledge that the chances of them being fired could have been skewed higher, but I am willing to bet that there will be many people thinking "My work is mission critical and I am a hard worker, I think I will be safe..." who will still unexpectedly get the pink slip on Monday.
"SpaceX is offering a minimum of eight weeks’ pay and other benefits to laid-off workers, according to Shotwell’s email. The company will also provide assistance with career coaching, resume help and job searches." - They are supporting them through it. I think this is as bad as any other way of lay off. Those 1:1s are farcical anyway. Only thing that could be better is to just send the mail only to the laid off employees.
Again, having gone through this a decade ago, that assistance gets outsourced to a company that specializes in it. Effectively it feels like you are attending a community college class on "how to find a job". It's not like they are going to call up a bunch of employers and try to match you to another position somewhere, you are still going to have to do a lot of legg work (home work) yourself. In my case it was somewhat beneficial, although the advice they had for me on my resume got totally shredded by the recruiters I worked with. At least it got me out of the house for 2 hours a day for the next 5 days.
The big lesson I try to pass on to everyone. Don't ever assume you will have a job next week. Be polite to any headhunters, assuming they are the professional kind, keep your resume up to date, network like crazy, have a few side project plans, don't be afraid of small jobs on the side, and most importantly keep a 3 - 6 month emergency fund. That fund doesn't have to be what you make in 6 months, but at least what your bare bones expenses are (mortgage, utility bills, minimum credit card payments), and try to keep your have-to recurring monthly expenses lower (mortgage / car payments, etc). That doesn't mean you can't spend on extra stuff, just make sure you can cancel them at any time.
Lol it's not that big a deal if you lose a job when you have around 12months living expenses saved up. So that goes twords living expenses, then you get unemployment at 60% of income. People need to move on, and stop being so emotionally invested in their work.
You are most likely an at-will employee. You or the employer can terminate the relationship immediately giving any reason or no reason. Just have money saved up and don't be afraid to quit without notice to something better if you need to.
The 6 month emergency fund is good for another reason, as f-you fund: in case working conditions get bad, you know you can just walk away. Somehow the knowing is enough, you never have to mention it, the confidence somehow shines through if you have a difficult chat with your manager.
The logistics of laying off 6000 people makes it very difficult to hold one on ones. Assuming 30 minutes per person, 8 hours in a day to hold meetings and 5 day work week, that's 75 person-weeks (!) just to hold one on ones.
On top of that, there are security concerns with hanging onto employees and letting them have access to company property during a time that they know they will be fired. Especially for a company that performs services for top secret government projects.
The easiest (though you won't catch me arguing that it's the best) way is to hold a staff meeting, and then let corp IT churn through the 6000 person list over the weekend and remove access.
Typically higher scores are better. If SpaceX used this query they would fire their 600 best employees. Or they use bad column names.
On top of the lame SQL reference this diminishes the true severity of firing 600 real people. We have no reason to think the firing was this nonchalant. This diminishes the work and humanity of everyone involved.
It appears to be a weak reference to stack ranking.
Do you have any reason to believe this is probdbly how they identified people to be let go?
It all depends on the person, personally I would prefer the spacex method as I don't have to put on a brave face for someone who is firing me. I also don't have to walk through the office knowing everyone is feeling sorry for me. The warning also gives me a day or so to brace myself in private at my home for the email so I am not caught completely off guard.
Also they fired 10% so there was a 9/10 chance they would be keeping there jobs.
No matter the method its done, everyone emerges from a layoff knowing that they are just a line item on a spreadsheet. Its unfortunate but true.
As someone who has been laid off, I would have much preferred an email over the awkward 1 on 1 meeting I got with my boss instead. I've been looking at other jobs already and just wanted to move on with my life. Instead I got stuck in a long conversation which was basically him just showering me with pity that I didn't want but had to graciously accept.
I can see why an email is the better option, seems much cleaner and less awkward. I have seen people go to meetings and while they are in the layoff meeting all there access is cut off - so its purely done to lure the poor employee away to avoid any odd mails afterwards. Pretty lame and distrusting honestly.
Space X seems to still trust everyone fully, most companies dont.
That's overly dramatic. I'd prefer an impersonal email over an uncomfortable and humiliating meeting with an HR employee where emotions are running high. What's to be gained by being laid off in person - other than discomfort on both sides and humiliation by laid-off employee?
Just send me an email with all the options and terms and contact information for HR. If I need clarification, let me be the one that seeks HR out.
Also, HR exists to protect the company, not to be your friend. There aren't there to offer compassion. That's not how business or HR works.
But maybe it's because I'm from the younger generation who grew up with email, text, IM, etc. I can see older generations being used to and preferring face-to-face interaction.
If they're at all afraid of retribution via your computer, notification via email would be impossible - you can only get the email if you still have computer access.
No offense but I completely disagree. I would prefer an email over a 1v1 conversation. The employee is not getting fired, they are getting laid off. There are no conversations that need to be had beyond severance discussions.
As I mentioned above - it is 10% from the company perspective.
However, it sounded like every employee at SpaceX went home on Friday thinking "Do I still have a job come Monday??". Because no other information seemed to have been imparted as to the selection criteria for the redundancies, every single employee wouldn't have known if they would keep their jobs or not.
Unless they knew they were blatant underperformers or had lots of black marks against them on file, their chances of keeping their jobs was the same as the chance they could be on the 'hit list' for redundancy. 50/50. I am willing to bet that even employees who thought their job was as safe as houses and that they were considered good employees would find them self on the 'let go' list.
I've been laid off twice, once in a one-on-one meeting with a manager, and once via an email. The email was much preferable. (Both were in short-term positions, so not really a fair comparison)
Do we know that is necessary? Why would it take all weekend for 700 emails to be delivered? Why not send an email to all the remaining employees to reassure them they are not being fired? That may have happened, we don't know.
From the reddit comment there's no indication they said when they will be sending the email.
It would have been far more practical to quietly go into each department "Jane, Jack come with us we're putting together a team" "Sally, Quan come with us we're putting together a team" take them all to an area "we're very sorry but we have to lay you off, we have counselors that we can refer to you if you need to talk to someone. We've also got some headhunters we can recommend. It's not personal, we just have to cut costs, you'll find that your company accounts were deactivated at the start of this meeting. We will be more than happy to ask your supervisors to write you letters of recommendation if you'd like, just put on this form where you'd like them sent for your records. Please think of anything that you are in the middle of and type it out in this word doc on the laptops over there".
Not "Hey everybody, go home and wait to see if you get to come in Monday".
Notifying your employer, that's giving you 2 months of severance, what you're in the middle of doing as to prevent everyone else on your team from having the nightmare of trying to figure out what you were doing as well as providing you with access to counseling and a job placement service is terrible?
The end result is the same and either way it sucks but certainly doing it in face to face seems to generally be considered more personal and perhaps less cowardly.
1. Prepare the e-mails in advance for each employee that
2. Schedule the "Town Hall" meeting for an important announcement at 4pm on Friday
3. Start the meeting by talking about the company, vision, challenges, recent wins, etc. [Insert a positive announcement here]
4. Tell everyone at 4:20pm that the company will be laying off 10% of the workforce, explain why, etc.
5. At 4:25pm, as you prepare to wrap up the town hall meeting, tell everyone that they will receive an e-mail either letting them know they will be laid off or that they will remain with the company. Thank everyone for their hard work for the company.
6. [Insert another brief, unrelated positive announcement about the company].
7. At 4:31pm, as people walk out the door, have IT send all of the e-mails at the exact same time to everyone who's being laid off. Review the list of employees compulsively beforehand to ensure no mistakes are being made.
8. Together with step 7 send another e-mail to everyone who remains with the company ensuring them they are not being laid off.
My employer has done the same. They have done more than one round of layoffs, and it's always the same - you get called into a 1-on-1 meeting, and you never return to your desk.
How else would you resign then writing an email? Are you writing a piece of paper? Written seems much more professional then just verbal, leaves no doubts. Sure, you can tell before in person but email seems the best way.
If you've got to do it by email, how about "go back to your desks and check your work email" instead of "go home and stew about it for a while"? Extending the delay is sadistic.
Yes face to face with the person who made the decision (presumably your direct or skip manager) not the random hr person is “less cruel” (really it’s about integrity).
Last time I experienced something like this there was a company wide meeting for an hour and a half where everything was explained. When we went back to our desks, there were pink slips waiting for anyone who got let go. No waiting or wondering, no dragged out second guessing.
My preferred method if this were to happen to me would be:
1. Receive notification not in person
2. Have the option of discussing with my manager in person after I had a chance to process it.
Big news like that takes a while to process. I believe I've read before that if you are firing someone, you are supposed to tell them and then not say anything else until they do. That seems unnecessarily cruel to the person getting the bad news since it puts them very emotionally on the spot.
But I've never been on either side of that, so who knows.
From what I've read about Musk, doing it this way is part of his management style. People's feelings come second to getting things done efficiently. Well, efficiently as he sees it.
There is nothing efficient about ruining people's weekend while they are being fired. This could have been done by sending out the emails at the end of Friday without making people nervous and worried over weekend.
I actually like what Musk has done, technology wise, but if this management style doesn't point to him possibly being on the spectrum, I'm not sure what will.
I disagree. What would be more cruel is to keep people guessing for weeks, or to do several smaller layoffs. That's how it's usually done, and it utterly decimates the morale, and causes the best people to leave.
The best way to do a layoff is to cut once, cut deep, and do it quickly. And of course to not be an asshole and offer severance compensation to folks who were laid off.
You can still tell everyone immediately at the end of the day. Or just send the email on the weekend. You don't have to say you're going to do it first and keep everyone worried.
You can't when you're dealing with 6000+ people. Likely even the managers didn't know so as to avoid feeding the rumor mill. They'll now need to make up their minds about their reports whom they wouldn't mind losing.
No way are the managers going to all stay late on Friday and figure out who to fire on Saturday. Those discussions have already happened, and they know who is being let go.
Are you saying top executives selected 10% out of all 6000 employees without consulting their direct managers who to fire? That would be a random 10% sample at best. Obviously managers would be involved in deciding who is worth to keep or not.
No, I'm suggesting that managers might have been made to select them on the spot. I worked as a manager. This is usually a very easy question to answer unless your team consists entirely of rockstars, which I haven't experienced in practice. As a manager you are acutely aware of who's producing and who's dragging their feet.
There is no great way to do it. If they told people in person, people would frame it as being humiliated and then forced to walk through the office with everyone knowing. If they did not warn people, they would complain about being blind sided. Layoffs are a terrible thing to go through and all things considered I don't think this was a bad way at all. No one had to do the walk of shame, everyone had a day or so to prepare themselves for it.
But that is just my preference, others would prefer something else. Everyone though would prefer not to get laid off. Unfortunate for all involved.
Agreed. There is no way to do layoffs that doesn't suck and doesn't harm morale. This avoids some of the worst of it and also keeps it somewhat private.
You want to minimize the time where employees who are not being laid off are wondering “am I being laid off?”. Ideally you want that time to be 0, because it can wreck havoc on morale and those 24 or 48 hours of doubt can be enough to push people who are not getting laid off to reach out to their network, recruiters, etc. Now you’re losing high performers.
If indeed everyone was told “check your email over the weekend to find out if you’re laid off or not”, that’s terrible. Tell people who are being laid off that they are being laid off, tell people who are not being laid off why there are layoffs and that they’re not a part of it, but don’t keep everyone in the dark - even if it’s “just” for a day or two.
> I disagree. What would be more cruel is to keep people guessing for weeks, or to do several smaller layoffs. That's how it's usually done
No it's not and you're presenting a false dichotomy. They made the decision who to fire (to "cut once"). The question is email vs. having managers meet with their impacted direct reports which can definitely and is regularly done inside of one day.
You are correct about the false dichotomy, but the correct way of doing it would have been to let everyone know who was being let go before they made the announcement. No reason to leave people wondering for any period of time.
> No reason to leave people wondering for any period of time.
Play that out a bit. Is the notification a scheduled slack message or email for those terminated? Or do you want each employee being let go to be notified in a face-to-face conversation with their manager and where the details of financial arrangements, healthcare continuity, and other aspects are prepared and with a chance for the employee to ask questions, and for HR and leadership to assess if they appear in a condition to commute home and offer other transport or acute support arrangements if needed?
I think the latter is more appropriate, but a series of those things takes time to execute [longer if managers or layers of managers are being eliminated], and the time between when the first such meeting ends and the last such meeting begins, people are left wondering.
I've been at a company where the 1-1 firings occurred over a morning. I was fortunate to keep my job, but I can tell you it was a pretty awful day for those staying (obviously not as bad as for those leaving :(). There's no good way to do this, layoffs of this sort are awful. I actually am not sure this is better or worse. You have a horrible Friday night, with untold stress, but at least you're not sweating at your desk with people being walked in to the back to be canned, afraid of the mere mention of your name or a tap on the shoulder.
There is a right way to do this. You announce it to the staff and at the same time you let those affected know. It's best to do this at the end of the day.
Telling people "you may or may not still have a job, you'll get an email within the next 72 hours" is ridiculous. So what happens if it's Monday morning and I didn't get an email? Am I still employed? What if there was a glitch? What if I show up and I'm escorted out?
> You announce it to the staff and at the same time you let those affected know.
To do this you would have to already have finalized this list of people to let go. Specifying that list beyond rough department targets to actual individuals probably requires involvement of many managers and might be what happened in those 72 hours, but I'd love to hear from someone with actual experience. Could larger organizations actually prepare that without leaking the layoff anyway?
I worked at a company that did layoffs. They basically sequestered everyone in there work areas, killed Internet access so people couldn't go online (pre smartphones), and walked people out one at a time. It was pretry lame.
I agree with you. Uncertainty and fear brings a horrible toll on the employees.
I was a teenager in the 90s and my mother worked for IBM. My parents were divorced and I lived with mom. She came home every day exhausted and scared, not knowing when the axe would drop. It went on for years. No one knew the logic of which departments were next; solid performance reviews didn't protect you, seniority, skillet, being management: nothing made you safe. Everyone we knew went to work not knowing if they would make it to lunch.
It was horrible. I'm sure everyone would have much rather the SpaceX method than months or years of agonizing waiting.
Oh of course, anyone that disagrees with you must be an idiot taking the perspective of a bad boss, even when they're talking about their experience being fired.
How would you execute a 10% layoff at a company sensitive to employee sabotage? I agree I would prefer a face to face personally, but I don't see another way here.
To drag it out another way would leave the company and its operations highly exposed to those individuals leaving in my opinion.
> this way of doing it is just unnecessarily cruel
The right way to lay off varies culture to culture.
I worked on a trading desk. 1:1 personal lay-offs followed by security cleaning out your desk seemed unnecessarily cruel. An e-mail out of hours—and an offer to schedule a phone call—seemed far more gentle. In other cultures, the human touch matters. Given SpaceX’s results-oriented culture, their approach seems appropriate. The goal was to prevent those not getting laid off from seeking new jobs while keeping those being laid off from panicking those staying. Letting everyone go home, finish their after-work schenanigans, and then—before recruiters have a chance to nip—deliver the news is a good balance for the relevant parameters.
That's brutal. Back around 2008 my OpCo laid off employees for the first time in it's hundredish year history at the time when our current owner laid off people from every OpCo.
It was almost as savage, they went around the office of 70-80 people and grabbed some people at what seemed like random, took them in one door of the conference room and asked them what personal belongings they needed immediately, got those items and had corporate security see them off the property with their severance information. At least that wasn't "go home and worry all weekend" though.
If you are affected by the layoffs in Los Angeles, working in software engineering (esp. on ERP and internal tools), UI/UX, or supply chain — my company, Lumi is hiring https://www.lumi.com/jobs
Oh my gosh. You solved one of the two most painful parts of selling a physical product. I’m frustrated right now just thinking about how frustrating packaging was for me as CMO of a fast growing CPG startup.
> We had an all hands meeting and were told to go home and wait for an email that basically says we stay or go. (from reddit post)
I'm surprised about that idea. At that size I expected them to follow "your account is locked immediately before you're told" policy. Guaranteeing people have access to company emails over the weekend and are told they're fired, sounds like a bad idea for IT to deal with.
IMHO, If I could guess announcing it all employees tells that you all are expendable. If you are doing that is not important for the company. You could be sent home forever. Gives a sense to everyone to pull up their shocks. Two days to think about your short commings
This isn't the first time SpaceX has done a 10% layoff round [1]. It seems like they do this at key inflection points where they're relatively sure they can make the next tech leap, and need to retool their workforce.
SpaceX is not a tech company. Aerospace/defense contractor companies have frequent layoffs. Usually this occurs when one of these companies don't win a contract or new regulations cut back on defense/space programs.
If you're affected by this and would love to work on a dedicated team developing spacecraft orbit simulation software, my company is hiring. Please send me an e-mail at stefan.novak@ai-solutions.com.
The SoCal aerospace job market is hot right now. The driver is multiple large program starts at multiple contractors who are competing for people. This should make it possible for everyone to land on their feet. (I've reached out to my former colleagues who left to join Space X)
What's odd is why SpaceX is cutting staff with the new development underway on the larger rockets and the satellite business. I'm curious about how they're going to increase development while cutting staff. The big aero firms have room for improvement on productivity. But SpaceX has been lean from the start. I wonder how they'll get more out of an already highly productive team. That'd be something to learn from.
SpaceX has like 7000 employees, about twice as many as ULA (their domestic competitor). There are reasons why (Dragon, BFR, Starlink, in-house engines, higher flightrate, more in-house everything), but that's a lot of people.
What I hope is we'll see new startups form out of these folk. What I'd like to see is an ESOP/co-op newspace company bent on similar goals. A lot of these employees have vested stock (or likely will vest soon) that might help capitalize such an effort.
Well, Space X costs less than half than a ULA launch. I suspect that ULA spends that additional money on large sub-contracts to Boeing and Lockheed for the Delta and Atlas vehicles. This makes me think that when we add up the employees on the subcontracts the space X staffing number will be much more impressive in it's leanness.
I hope they all join my company, we've got a lot of work they would find interesting. With the retirement rate increasing it's the time to change things for the better. I want their experience at Space X on how to do things faster and better. But perhaps that's wishful thinking...
hmm. So they could be losing money on each launch? But, why would they would they choose to sell at a loss when they could beat the competition at twice the price?
I don't beleive this, but it's possible that SpaceX are selling launches at below cost to drive demand so that they can get up to a scale where they're economical and in order to establish a dynamic in the industry where known low cost launches enable new projects that will cause higher demand in the future.
> But, why would they would they choose to sell at a loss when they could beat the competition at twice the price?
Because they promised to cut prices by an order of magnitude. Following a promise like that, you can't just offer a 10-15% price reduction.
Plus, if they offered at twice the current price, I don't believe they would be competitive. Part of the reason they offer a low price is that they have still-new, not-fully-tested technology. Clients accept the increased risk, but they expect significant savings in return.
Also, for certain flight configurations, SpaceX's pricing isn't particularly competitive even at its current level.
> What's odd is why SpaceX is cutting staff with the new development underway on the larger rockets and the satellite business. I'm curious about how they're going to increase development while cutting staff.
The oddness diminishes when you look at their open jobs listing [1], as it looks that they have >300 open positions.
Yep, attrition was over twice that last year at some firms in the area. Partly demographics, lots of folks who can retire do. The rest due to competition for staff.
Well, naturally every company has talent drain. The rockstars will not work long in one company and jump from one gig to the next. But if you have bad luck and hired some slackers, which will happen with the tightest of hiring schemes, then they will certainly stick around.
Thus over time you still have to re-hire people you really need, but get a bigger and bigger amount of people who are just there for the social benefits.
So what can you do to achieve your ambitious goals? Reduce the workforce and try to find a cutting point where you get rid of mostly parasites while keeping your ambitious work bees around.
Usually at the same time of the cut, some of the work bees also get raises and promotions, because then there's some free budget. So if you are an ambitious work bee, then "cutting staff" is actually also good news.
Finding the right cutting point is really the important point and hardest part. For instance you don't want to lay off people who really are performers but for some reason or another (e.g. they just got a baby) they don't perform right now. So at least in the companies I could look inside until now the cutting point is usually well inside the slackers group, so that the people who would recover and then start performing again have a chance to continue.
In the end, even the most tyranical ass-hole leader wants to have as many people as possible work as hard as possible to achieve his goals for him, in exchange for an amount of money that in most cases is peanuts for him. And not all leaders are even tyranical ass-holes.
You left out the part where managers are held accountable for failing to help their staff be productive. It’s easy to rant about slackers but in my experience they’re rare (and 100% protected by management) compared to people who are given conflicting or bad incentives or – by far the most common – work which appears simple only from a distance (e.g. how enterprise software developers can take 3 months to add a button because that involves 600 edits on 20 servers and a labyrinthine test plan).
In many companies slackers are the norm, they cover each other and help them promote to cover even better. It happens a lot in non-technical companies where techies do the work, but the think layer of management and other positions are mainly paper-pushers and PowerPoint champions.
> in my experience [slackers are] rare (and 100% protected by management)
Can you give an example of how you see slackers being protected by management? I wonder if we have the same definition of the word slacker.
In my experience the people protected by management are not doing much in terms of daily work, but they work a lot to always stay on top when it comes to prestige and taking credit from other people's work. So from my perspective they are working hard, just not to improve the teams results. That's why I call them parasites. They suck out the value of the team for their own gain.
What I call a slacker instead tries to do nothing but reading facebook (or HN) all day. Most of the time these are people who have given up hope to improve their careers for one reason or another. In many cases it is connected to a parasite sucking too much out of them and them not being able to recover self-motivationally.
I bet at least before readign this post your understanding of slacker and my understanding of parasite would be similar, right?
My thought was just that this doesn’t happen in a vacuum: their management should know that they’re not performing, irrespective of exactly how. I’ve seen some egregious examples (e.g. F500 online store which was down every morning from 5am to whenever the DBA rolled in, a dude who’d head to the bathroom at 9:30 with a coffee mug & the newspaper, someone who went out to lunch 10-3, regularly being VERY drunk, etc.), and in every case this was well known but there were reasons why nothing was done (members of the same frat, having an affair, being drinking buddies, too lazy to do the paperwork, being high enough in the management hierarchy that you’d have to explain not having acted before promoting then, etc.). So while I blame the person for taking a paycheck they weren’t earning, I attribute more blame to the people whose job it is to correct problems like that, especially since they’re paid more and given greater status and authority for [theoretically] improving the performance of the larger group.
SpaceX switched from carbon fiber construction for their next rocket to stainless steel. My guess is at least a big part of this workforce reduction relates to people involved in cf which are no longer needed. Additionally they had a lot of people working on crew dragon which as it now nears it's launch might not be needed any more( e.g. pica heatshield, electronics, software developers etc). Same goes for the now mature f9( block 5 was supposed to be the last iteration but there might have been some small improvements. Furthermore with the speed up on the Starship timeline the potential need for an elongated 2nd stage is reduced). So it makes sense for these divisions to move people to the new projects and at least some of them end up getting fired, either due to expertise or performance or whatever.
I just don't buy the Carbon Fiber vs Stainless construction. They aren't used for the same thing (low weight structural stiffness vs heat conduction, radiation & appearance).
From what I understand it was a water tank contactor that did the hopper in Boca Chica... and it will never face lanch/re-entry stresses. That won't replace anyone.
The old BFR design had a large carbon-fiber hull, the new one has a stainless steel hull. Unless I'm missing your point, that's a major piece of the rocket that's no longer made with carbon fiber. (The giant molds that they were building for the BFR hull, for example, are now redundant.)
From what I understand, the plan is for the production Starship to have a stainless steel skin. I'm sure it will be a much more refined construction than the hopper, but skinned in stainless steel nonetheless.
The starhopper( test article) is indeed made by a water tank contactor. The actual starship will be made by stainless steel in LA as confirmed by Musk on twitter. Also he mentioned something about stainless steel having better properties than cf.
> What's odd is why SpaceX is cutting staff with the new development underway on the larger rockets and the satellite business.
You're missing that they finished up falcon heavy development last spring, falcon 9 block 5 a little later, and crew dragon is finishing up now. That's a lot of development manpower freed up. To much for starship probably, and I don't know if many of the launcher skills are applicable to satellites.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 323 ms ] threadWhat does it mean? It more or less officially confirms that Starlink is the only way they can finance the plans for Mars and BFR. There isn't going to be a huge uptick in launches in the coming years, such that that will be enough to dent their capital requirements. Musk has been attempting to finance some of SpaceX's capital demands with debt recently to avoid further diluting his stake, because it risks pushing him below a controlling interest. It's very questionable whether he'll be able to hold the line on that if the launch rate is going to remain fairly stagnant versus 2018.
If Starlink, OneWeb, etc were cancelled tomorrow, it's likely GTO launch demand would pick back up significantly.
Starlink is both the cause of and solution to this problem.
1. May 2014: OneWeb (formerly 'WorldVu') receives its initial $500 million in funding [1]
2. January 2015: SpaceX's satellite constellation is announced. [2]
3. December 2016: OneWeb receives an extra $1.2 billion from SoftBank and existing investors [3]
4. March 2017: Blue Origin signs OneWeb as a customer [4]
If SpaceX was a neutral transport provider, there's little reason that OneWeb would have chosen Blue Origin over SpaceX. Blue Origin is probably offering very low prices, but SpaceX arguably could match them.
[1] https://spacenews.com/40736google-backed-global-broadband-ve...
[2] http://old.seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/20254807...
[3] http://fortune.com/2016/12/19/softbank-oneweb/
[4] https://spacenews.com/blue-origin-gets-oneweb-as-second-new-...
As to why do it themselves as opposed to just be a provider to OneWeb, I think this is a sneaky way to do some price discrimination - SpaceX, like everyone else, may have some spare launch capacity, so having an internal (hopefully-profitable) project to soak up that demand rather than cratering launch prices may be worth it.
It doesn’t help that there’s been little warning (though I guessing a lot of these employees had some warning that they are going ormtheir teams are getting thinned).
I hope for the best, the people leaving SpaceX have certainly got great resumes to recommend them to new employers!
Just because you don’t consider a 2t payload launched to a Mars-crossing orbit to be “real” doesn’t mean the payload wasn’t launched.
> The company employed at least 7,000 people in late 2017 when COO Gwynne Shotwell last gave a number — which means around 700 will lose their jobs.
> SpaceX, citing a need to get “leaner,” said Friday it will lay off more than 10% of its roughly 6,000 employees.
I somehow had another article on the same topic open, from TechCrunch.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/11/spacex-will-lay-off-hundre...
> SpaceX, citing a need to get “leaner,” said Friday it will lay off more than 10% of its roughly 6,000 employees.
And no further mention of number of employees. Perhaps a previous edit had a typo.
1: https://www.edd.ca.gov/jobs_and_training/Layoff_Services_WAR...
Also, given that Falcon 9 is now essentially "done", I expect there probably is a fair bit of internal capacity that's accumulated during its development which can be cut. For example, SpaceX is famous for building a lot of components in house, but perhaps they'll move more to using subcontractors for Falcon 9 parts. That might free up money to spend on R&D. The challenge will be to become leaner and save money in the core launch business without compromising standards. It'll only take a couple of accidents to trash their reputation.
Down stream impact of how to cope with that loss is another factor. Fire your book keeper and does your remaining engineering team have to spend 10% of their time doing invoices and reconciling bank accounts?
On topic, probably just cutting out the fat (I'm sure most companies can fire 10% and a month later very few would notice the difference). But then, why not move them to R&D? I doubt SpaceX has cash problems to fire (more or less) essential workers.
10% usually means 10% to 40% of company productivity is affected shortterm. 10% leave, 5% wanted to get fired but didn't, 25% will think they are next and change how they work (some positive some negative).
It is usually a signal for top performers to start moving on. In this case the story is spacex is growing conflicts with the layoffs.
Moral is low and the office has been pretty damn quiet. Meanwhile we just raises earnings forecast today...
In certain circumstances, once the means of production are created [most of] the workers are no longer needed, but the means being privately held (by a narrow group of owners) means they alone can benefit going forward.
You can make a feast together and share it; or you can make a feast together, kick out most of the helpers and gorge yourself.
Capitalism says the second option is better because you get to have more.
In a system with healthy incentives, we might expect Option 1 to be the sensible capitalist equilibrium, because capital needs to be maintained and the builders/maintainers become the same people.
Don't forget that, in theory, the workers can become capitalists themselves if they aren't getting a good share of the benefits. In my view usually when they don't it is because of government interference (eg, the pre-Uber situation in taxis, or how regulation tends to entrench existing players).
As an example, someone who switches from working as a landscaper to running a landscaping business has switched from a worker role to a capitalist role — even though they likely spent less money doing so than a software engineer worker owns. Being a “capitalist” is defined by capitalizing ventures, not the mere volume of capital.
I would argue that the reason society has become so disequitable is that we’ve made it difficult to transition between worker and small capitalist — that is to say, that we’ve undermined small and lifestyle businesses.
No, capital expanding has social benefits in reducing consumer prices, which increases purchasing power.
I have the quarterly cycle. I find it extremely bad for both the society and companies when nobody takes the long term view.
"Early Friday, GM said 2018 EPS will exceed previous guidance of $5.80-$6.20. It also expects to surpass an earlier view of adjusted automotive free cash flow of $4 billion."
California WARN act applies to any site that has at least 70 employees and lays of at least 50. When this is triggered, the employer needs to provide at least 60 days notice.
Everyday the company is already risking that.
It only takes one. Risk to the company is much bigger when you’re building rockets than your typical software shop, too.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Always negotiate severance up front as part of any job offer, and consider 4-6 months as an absolute minimum for junior or mid-level employees, and at least 12 months of pay for senior employees. Simply turn down job offers when a company won’t offer this and take a longer time to find an offer at one of the (many) companies that will.
Most companies will negotiate severance with you but you have to ask and make it clear that in-writing severance details to serve as protection against unexpected unemployment from layoffs is a dealbreaker for you.
Most candidates won’t negotiate this, which is why most companies don’t have to offer it except to the few special case people that require it.
If we all, as candidates, unilaterally make it impossible to hire us without adequate severance, we’ll all be better off.. instead of just the minority of candidates who put forward the effort to negotiate it and aren’t afraid to turn down offers that don’t include defined severance agreements.
Have you put this into practice? It'd be a nice contingency to have in place but seems like it'd put a damper on the tone of the negotiations ("I'm already thinking about being let go and want to make it really expensive for you to do so").
But I gained a lot of experience regarding how to negotiate it and talk about it, and ultimately found that most companies are perfectly happy to negotiate it as part of the job offer.
That would still leave them with many thousands of redundant employees. Falcon 9 is done and the production is dropping due to reusability. Recently, they had a 3rd re-flight of the same core, which, coupled with the slowdown of the global launch market, means that in the next years they will need to produce a third to a half of the number of cores they used in 2017. The same for Merlin engines.
They basically fulfilled their mission and drastically reduced the cost of getting into orbit - which for the space industry is dominated by labor costs. Without a greatly increased demand, they can't justify keeping those people around.
And they can't roll all the Falcon production workforce towards BFR, Raptor and Starlink since those are still strongly R&D dominated projects and the skill set is incompatible. At the same time, they have hundreds of engineering positions open for those projects.
I would have put them on other Musk projects to keep them from going to the competition. SpaceX doesn't have a monopoly on low cost launch. The next place to figure out how to 3d print a tungsten titanium copper nickel chromium iron one piece rocket nozzle will also have that advantage.
He also said that he joined Tesla to help jump start the electric car revolution by a decade and his total asset liquidation in 2008 to support Tesla and SpaceX seems to support that this attitude is not just some PR move, but who knows for sure.
The same thing is used to train a talent pool in a vendor eco system, hire contractors to build demo apps and integrations, but cycle them out after every project. All those people can now put Tech X on their resume.
SpaceX definitely transformed the entire endeavor of space travel.
It's pretty clear Musk sees his for profit endeavors - Tesla, commercial and government launches, Starlink - as cash cows for a long term investment into something no one in the market is yet ready to finance. Until that changes and Mars becomes an interesting commercial proposition, Musk will ruthlessly pursue his business and leave nothing on the table, precisely to acquire the funds to bootstrap his vision.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_Starr_and_the_Big_Sun_of...
This all goes up for grabs when the treaties expire in a few decades and it's presently an environmental issue to try and get them resigned rather than have an oil rush there.
Musk does seem to believe in occasionally "trimming the fat" when the numbers get tight. SpaceX did this exact thing in 2014, and Tesla has done it recently (and is now back over the headcount post-layoffs).
In large engineering organisations, laying off 10% makes no difference at all on anything apart from the ego of managers whose teams shrink.
On the topic, wasn't Jack Welsh/GE that popularised the idea of firing the bottom 10% every single year? Not saying that this is necessarily a good idea but that shows the amount of slack in large organisations.
Edit: In any big corp, there are usually many employees who act as "barriers" to others. Either because they feel secure enough in their job and don't really care about performing, or because they lost sight of why things are being done, and are focusing on bureaucracy and "processes" for the sake of those two things.
If the decimations have been going on for some time, I'd expect them to reliably hit low-performers, but only because the obvious low performers were hired as sacrificial lambs in the first place, which puts the whole exercise deep in "cobra effect" territory.
When I was told that I wasn’t good enough by my new boss and should look for another job on my first day, I thought it was ridiculous, and that it would be possible to change her mind. She was not my hiring boss due to a reorganization that happened just before I started. I hung on for a year and the stress literally nearly killed me, I ended up quitting for health reasons. I got the lowest ranking you could get in what I believe to be the shortest amount of time in the company’s history.
The funny thing is is that I’m a freakish prodigy at my work and after a successful stint at a different company, I ended up back at the same company at much much higher position.
Hating companies like this is like hating a snake that bit you... it’s a snake. At least in the US the money is better.
If I could give advice to anyone who finds themselves in a similar position it would be that failure is not the end and not always your fault. And probably find a new job sooner rather than later.
That's true, but in this case it's pretty clear that one defective personality in particular was responsible.
Stack ranking is a failed experiment, and by now I think all companies realize that.
No cooperation within teams (one of you has to go, one of you gets a good bonus, the rest get nothing).
No cooperation between teams either (for similar reasons, and besides, you're busy enough trying to shine within your team).
Any innovation that requires a solid team and cooperation just doesn't happen. Lots of innovation that can be done by just one or two people doesn't get approval from mgmt because they don't get it and are busy measuring the wrong things.
So you're forgoing all the best innovations while building a toxic work environment. Your best and brightest will either stay and game the system, or go elsewhere and be happier.
Stack ranking is a highly destructive tool of management. I would recommend it to my competitors, and only to my competitors.
Maybe it's possible that that type of culture and system made Immelt the best candidate to take over? Or influenced his own decision-making?
As noted, it creates a really unhealthy intra-team sabotage mindset as everybody competes to avoid being at the bottom of the stack. It puts managers in a horrible spot, having to rank 'n' purge when maybe their team was humming along wonderfully all year. It creates an atmosphere of awful fear and dread that distracts from the work.
As one of my buddies said back when MS was still using this accursed system -- "If they'd used stack-ranking at Los Alamos, hell, Oppenheimer would probably have had to fire Feynman!" {obviously not reflective of the historical reality, but I think pithy nonetheless}
This seems pretty accurate to me, just imagine what would have happened if the top 10 people in the organization were put on the most important team, and then stack day rolled around...
At what point will business schools please start teaching that stack ranking is a bad idea?
Last year, SpaceX had big plans for new rocket designs, a satellite constellation, and more. Unlike a ravioli canning plant, SpaceX has an option other than cutting down to maintnence staff once cash flow positive. If the worst possible interpretation of this news turns out to be true, they will end up managed like a ravioli canning plant and the hockey stick growth projections will go out the window.
This is because high launch costs demand extraordinary levels of design and Q&A: there may never be a second chance. Unfortunately, these supply chains have flexibility baked out for some time, perhaps predating the Apollo era.
Lowered launch costs and increased launch opportunities offer increasing failure tolerance to an increasing number of projects which can now afford second chances and backup plans. However, these corporate cultures take time to adapt, they've been built around single-shot opportunities for decades.
TLDR: satellite markets are anything but nimble at this point, due to historical reasons. This will change, given time.
To be a bit hyperbolic: if launches were cheap enough you'd have amateurs launching stuff hacked together in the garage, knowing if they fail it doesn't matter - they can just try again.
So you've got, say, 3000 people on that team.
That project basically ends, and now you have A) a satellite design and production project, and B) a green field rocket design project.
What you're saying is that you know for sure that all 3000 of those people could have an immediate role on one of those two projects?
https://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/akins_laws.html
See Article 3: Territorial Scope (https://gdpr-info.eu/art-3-gdpr/). Useful terms: "data subject" is a natural person to whom the data relates, "processor" refers to an entity that works with the data, "controller" to an entity that "owns" the data. e.g. you would be a data subject, the LA Times would be the controller, and Google Analytics would be a data processor.
==================================
1. This Regulation applies to the processing of personal data in the context of the activities of an establishment of a controller or a processor in the Union, regardless of whether the processing takes place in the Union or not.
2. This Regulation applies to the processing of personal data of data subjects who are in the Union by a controller or processor not established in the Union, where the processing activities are related to: a) the offering of goods or services, irrespective of whether a payment of the data subject is required, to such data subjects in the Union; or b) the monitoring of their behaviour as far as their behaviour takes place within the Union.
3. This Regulation applies to the processing of personal data by a controller not established in the Union, but in a place where Member State law applies by virtue of public international law.
FAR less 'cruel' to give them an opportunity to plan their exit and give them the psychological space to get used to the fact.
EDIT: In light of the 'read the article' responses and downvotes, I wanted to clarify that my comment here is directly addressing the question "what is a less cruel way of laying people off" against the purported scenario above of people being told on Friday to go home and check their emails to see if they still have a job on Monday.
So SpaceX is giving employees two months to focus their full efforts on finding their next job. This seems less cruel than telling them they will lose their jobs and then expecting them to keep working.
My response above was to do with the fact that employees who were NOT terminated were also subjected to the psychological trauma of spending the weekend guessing whether they had a job come Monday. Not the best way to keep morale high.
Not requiring them to do any work whatsoever for that time is beneficence.
Acting like people are just gonna sit around and mope is not only highly disingenuous but is also a good way to fuck over the people having to fill in the knowledge gaps.
I honestly hope you never work in HR because your sort of attitude is genuinely disastrous to this industry. Acting like treating your employees with respect is a 'risk' is terrible.
Also, if I were laid off, why would I want to continue working for them for two more weeks? I don’t care about the company’s success at that point. I’m already getting two months severance; it’s much better to focus entirely on finding a job as quickly as possible. Half a month’s paycheck is not worth the emotional pain of seeing your non-laid-off colleagues continue to live their normal life, but act all awkward around you.
In fact, I’ll go ahead and say: I think your attitude that requests laid-off employees to keep working is disastrous. Nothing about making them come to work is respectful or beneficial to them.
Better just to cut ties as quickly as possible. They were given 8 weeks of severance and if they are really friends with the people, they can call them on the way home. They are not banned from communicating with their past co-workers.
I know it sounds harsh but there is no nice way to find out you were fired. This way mitigates the companies risk, provides decent (not great) severance for the employees and time to find a new job while being paid.
The only winners in a layoff are the shareholders.
So I suppose you can consider me highly skeptical when a commercial company makes the excuse that they're doing it for security reasons. Because to me, that sounds like pure bullshit designed to cover for shitty practices.
As for the logistics, each member of staff can be talked to by their immediate manager, making it scale easily. Matter of fact, this once happened to me, and my boss was as clearly upset to let me go as I was to leave. But everyone being let go was informed and given their notice as soon as the workday started, so there was no uncertainty or delay.
Employment is a business deal. If you consider your relationship with your manager to be personal then you have an unhealthy view of your job.
To subject ALL your employees to the 50/50 prospect that they will have a job come next working day is tantamount to playing Russian Roulette with them using a gun with a 2 bullet chamber - one loaded. The psychological toll even on the 'survivors' will be brutal.
What happens is you find out your department or wing of the building is next. You continue to try to do your job, meanwhile your manager starts walking towards you and stops at a couple cubicles down from you. You breath a slight sigh of relief. Meanwhile you and everyone else is prairie-dogging as others in the office start getting called out, and the VP strolls by and yells at everyone to "have some respect and quit gawking, get back to work". So now you keep your head down, and eventually get a tap on your shoulder from your manager.
You can't help but fight back tears, as you get lead to the conference room where an HR drone explains the package, benefits, and next steps. You are handed a box, escorted back to your desk, and put your personal belongings into the box while being watched like a hawk to make sure you don't do anything stupid. Some things you aren't allowed to put in the box until they are thoroughly examined. A forever half finished document is on your monitor. An email you were about to reply to is still visible, and will go unanswered. Your laptop is shut down, your accounts already locked.
Now you start on the walk of shame carrying the lonely box out to your car, start driving, and then your family wonders why you are home from work so early. But the look on your face tells the whole story, with the look of concern on your wife's face and the look of horror from the kids (of course, being kids, they start asking questions about how this will affect them). "Hey, kids, looks like we will be taking that camping trip a bit early, got some saved up for it, will figure out tomorrow when it gets here. It will be alright."
Have you ever sit across an HR person saying all the right things and putting an as empathic as possible face on, and telling you "it's not you, it's us"?
Personally I'd prefer the email, as long as, I have a contact to talk to for the next steps.
We don't know the content of the all hands, they could have outlined the support plan there.
Having gone through many layoffs, there is no way to do it where it doesn’t suck for everyone involved (those that stay or go).
However, doing it in a way that show management understands the gravity of the situation goes really far in reducing how unpleasant the experience is.
None of which is available to the employee in a 'fire by email' scenario.
I prefer email over HR walking past all the cubicles praying they won't stop at mine.
Also fire by email doesn't mean there isn't a definitive exit path or no financial support. The article itself states the email claimed a minimum of 8 weeks of pay for those laid off.
Also it's 90/10 not 50/50. If you were firing 50% of your workforce there is no avoiding a "brutal" psychological toll for the remaining.
If 90/10 from the company perspective. From the employee perspective, it sounds like everyone at SpaceX went home on Friday wondering "Do I have a job come Monday?". To each and every one of them, the prospect of having a job versus NOT having a job would have been 50/50 as they had no insight into the decision making process for the layoffs.
Sure, for an employee who may have known they had made a lot of mistakes or were obviously underperforming etc., their knowledge that the chances of them being fired could have been skewed higher, but I am willing to bet that there will be many people thinking "My work is mission critical and I am a hard worker, I think I will be safe..." who will still unexpectedly get the pink slip on Monday.
The big lesson I try to pass on to everyone. Don't ever assume you will have a job next week. Be polite to any headhunters, assuming they are the professional kind, keep your resume up to date, network like crazy, have a few side project plans, don't be afraid of small jobs on the side, and most importantly keep a 3 - 6 month emergency fund. That fund doesn't have to be what you make in 6 months, but at least what your bare bones expenses are (mortgage, utility bills, minimum credit card payments), and try to keep your have-to recurring monthly expenses lower (mortgage / car payments, etc). That doesn't mean you can't spend on extra stuff, just make sure you can cancel them at any time.
You are most likely an at-will employee. You or the employer can terminate the relationship immediately giving any reason or no reason. Just have money saved up and don't be afraid to quit without notice to something better if you need to.
On top of that, there are security concerns with hanging onto employees and letting them have access to company property during a time that they know they will be fired. Especially for a company that performs services for top secret government projects.
The easiest (though you won't catch me arguing that it's the best) way is to hold a staff meeting, and then let corp IT churn through the 6000 person list over the weekend and remove access.
SELECT * FROM employees ORDER BY last_performance_review_score LIMIT 600;
On top of the lame SQL reference this diminishes the true severity of firing 600 real people. We have no reason to think the firing was this nonchalant. This diminishes the work and humanity of everyone involved.
It appears to be a weak reference to stack ranking.
Do you have any reason to believe this is probdbly how they identified people to be let go?
Also they fired 10% so there was a 9/10 chance they would be keeping there jobs.
No matter the method its done, everyone emerges from a layoff knowing that they are just a line item on a spreadsheet. Its unfortunate but true.
Space X seems to still trust everyone fully, most companies dont.
Just send me an email with all the options and terms and contact information for HR. If I need clarification, let me be the one that seeks HR out.
Also, HR exists to protect the company, not to be your friend. There aren't there to offer compassion. That's not how business or HR works.
But maybe it's because I'm from the younger generation who grew up with email, text, IM, etc. I can see older generations being used to and preferring face-to-face interaction.
How is it 50/50? It is 10%.
However, it sounded like every employee at SpaceX went home on Friday thinking "Do I still have a job come Monday??". Because no other information seemed to have been imparted as to the selection criteria for the redundancies, every single employee wouldn't have known if they would keep their jobs or not.
Unless they knew they were blatant underperformers or had lots of black marks against them on file, their chances of keeping their jobs was the same as the chance they could be on the 'hit list' for redundancy. 50/50. I am willing to bet that even employees who thought their job was as safe as houses and that they were considered good employees would find them self on the 'let go' list.
ANYTHING is better than telling the entire company "go home and compulsively refresh your email all weekend to see if you get to come to work Monday"
It would have been far more practical to quietly go into each department "Jane, Jack come with us we're putting together a team" "Sally, Quan come with us we're putting together a team" take them all to an area "we're very sorry but we have to lay you off, we have counselors that we can refer to you if you need to talk to someone. We've also got some headhunters we can recommend. It's not personal, we just have to cut costs, you'll find that your company accounts were deactivated at the start of this meeting. We will be more than happy to ask your supervisors to write you letters of recommendation if you'd like, just put on this form where you'd like them sent for your records. Please think of anything that you are in the middle of and type it out in this word doc on the laptops over there".
Not "Hey everybody, go home and wait to see if you get to come in Monday".
Start the process with a lie finish it with asking them to do some work?!
You've just been sucker punched with new team yay! wait not really you’re fired! Now please finish that document you were writing and GTFO.
What? Please think more carefully than this if you are ever in the position of influencing layoffs or delivering the news.
The end result is the same and either way it sucks but certainly doing it in face to face seems to generally be considered more personal and perhaps less cowardly.
2. Schedule the "Town Hall" meeting for an important announcement at 4pm on Friday
3. Start the meeting by talking about the company, vision, challenges, recent wins, etc. [Insert a positive announcement here]
4. Tell everyone at 4:20pm that the company will be laying off 10% of the workforce, explain why, etc.
5. At 4:25pm, as you prepare to wrap up the town hall meeting, tell everyone that they will receive an e-mail either letting them know they will be laid off or that they will remain with the company. Thank everyone for their hard work for the company.
6. [Insert another brief, unrelated positive announcement about the company].
7. At 4:31pm, as people walk out the door, have IT send all of the e-mails at the exact same time to everyone who's being laid off. Review the list of employees compulsively beforehand to ensure no mistakes are being made.
8. Together with step 7 send another e-mail to everyone who remains with the company ensuring them they are not being laid off.
I don’t blame him, as our employer has walked out 25 year employees with no notice.
We don’t know the details, employees may have known before walking out the door.
Obviously. It's still a shitty thing to do.
> We don’t know the details, employees may have known before walking out the door.
Huh? We have multiple SpaceX employees on Reddit saying they were told to go home and wait for emails. Some took hours, some are still waiting.
You can just admit that you didn't read the top-level comment that we're discussing, you know. It wouldn't look as silly as this.
Big news like that takes a while to process. I believe I've read before that if you are firing someone, you are supposed to tell them and then not say anything else until they do. That seems unnecessarily cruel to the person getting the bad news since it puts them very emotionally on the spot.
But I've never been on either side of that, so who knows.
The best way to do a layoff is to cut once, cut deep, and do it quickly. And of course to not be an asshole and offer severance compensation to folks who were laid off.
But that is just my preference, others would prefer something else. Everyone though would prefer not to get laid off. Unfortunate for all involved.
If indeed everyone was told “check your email over the weekend to find out if you’re laid off or not”, that’s terrible. Tell people who are being laid off that they are being laid off, tell people who are not being laid off why there are layoffs and that they’re not a part of it, but don’t keep everyone in the dark - even if it’s “just” for a day or two.
And if it turns our I wasn't I'd like to know that, too, so I don't lose focus of whatever it is I'm doing.
No it's not and you're presenting a false dichotomy. They made the decision who to fire (to "cut once"). The question is email vs. having managers meet with their impacted direct reports which can definitely and is regularly done inside of one day.
Play that out a bit. Is the notification a scheduled slack message or email for those terminated? Or do you want each employee being let go to be notified in a face-to-face conversation with their manager and where the details of financial arrangements, healthcare continuity, and other aspects are prepared and with a chance for the employee to ask questions, and for HR and leadership to assess if they appear in a condition to commute home and offer other transport or acute support arrangements if needed?
I think the latter is more appropriate, but a series of those things takes time to execute [longer if managers or layers of managers are being eliminated], and the time between when the first such meeting ends and the last such meeting begins, people are left wondering.
Telling people "you may or may not still have a job, you'll get an email within the next 72 hours" is ridiculous. So what happens if it's Monday morning and I didn't get an email? Am I still employed? What if there was a glitch? What if I show up and I'm escorted out?
This screams of mismanagement.
You still have a job.
>Am I still employed?
Yes.
>What if there was a glitch?
This seems rare, and it seems like people would double check to ensure this doesn't happen (and if it did, to re-send an email).
>What if I show up and I'm escorted out?
Sounds awkward at worst, but now you know.
To do this you would have to already have finalized this list of people to let go. Specifying that list beyond rough department targets to actual individuals probably requires involvement of many managers and might be what happened in those 72 hours, but I'd love to hear from someone with actual experience. Could larger organizations actually prepare that without leaking the layoff anyway?
I was a teenager in the 90s and my mother worked for IBM. My parents were divorced and I lived with mom. She came home every day exhausted and scared, not knowing when the axe would drop. It went on for years. No one knew the logic of which departments were next; solid performance reviews didn't protect you, seniority, skillet, being management: nothing made you safe. Everyone we knew went to work not knowing if they would make it to lunch.
It was horrible. I'm sure everyone would have much rather the SpaceX method than months or years of agonizing waiting.
How would you do it?
To drag it out another way would leave the company and its operations highly exposed to those individuals leaving in my opinion.
The right way to lay off varies culture to culture.
I worked on a trading desk. 1:1 personal lay-offs followed by security cleaning out your desk seemed unnecessarily cruel. An e-mail out of hours—and an offer to schedule a phone call—seemed far more gentle. In other cultures, the human touch matters. Given SpaceX’s results-oriented culture, their approach seems appropriate. The goal was to prevent those not getting laid off from seeking new jobs while keeping those being laid off from panicking those staying. Letting everyone go home, finish their after-work schenanigans, and then—before recruiters have a chance to nip—deliver the news is a good balance for the relevant parameters.
Seriously, can modern CEOs actually grow a pair and actually face their employees rather than hide behind tech?
It was almost as savage, they went around the office of 70-80 people and grabbed some people at what seemed like random, took them in one door of the conference room and asked them what personal belongings they needed immediately, got those items and had corporate security see them off the property with their severance information. At least that wasn't "go home and worry all weekend" though.
Great way to sabotage company-wide morale SpaceX.
https://medium.com/fuzzy-sharp/custom-manufacturing-should-b...
If you don't find something that fits in our job listings you can also name your own job:
https://www.lumi.com/jobs/name-your-job
Now do this for contracat manufacturing.
I'm surprised about that idea. At that size I expected them to follow "your account is locked immediately before you're told" policy. Guaranteeing people have access to company emails over the weekend and are told they're fired, sounds like a bad idea for IT to deal with.
[1] https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=35254.0
What's odd is why SpaceX is cutting staff with the new development underway on the larger rockets and the satellite business. I'm curious about how they're going to increase development while cutting staff. The big aero firms have room for improvement on productivity. But SpaceX has been lean from the start. I wonder how they'll get more out of an already highly productive team. That'd be something to learn from.
Good on ya.
What I hope is we'll see new startups form out of these folk. What I'd like to see is an ESOP/co-op newspace company bent on similar goals. A lot of these employees have vested stock (or likely will vest soon) that might help capitalize such an effort.
I hope they all join my company, we've got a lot of work they would find interesting. With the retirement rate increasing it's the time to change things for the better. I want their experience at Space X on how to do things faster and better. But perhaps that's wishful thinking...
Because they promised to cut prices by an order of magnitude. Following a promise like that, you can't just offer a 10-15% price reduction.
Plus, if they offered at twice the current price, I don't believe they would be competitive. Part of the reason they offer a low price is that they have still-new, not-fully-tested technology. Clients accept the increased risk, but they expect significant savings in return.
Also, for certain flight configurations, SpaceX's pricing isn't particularly competitive even at its current level.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14689610
The oddness diminishes when you look at their open jobs listing [1], as it looks that they have >300 open positions.
[1] https://www.spacex.com/careers/list
Thus over time you still have to re-hire people you really need, but get a bigger and bigger amount of people who are just there for the social benefits.
So what can you do to achieve your ambitious goals? Reduce the workforce and try to find a cutting point where you get rid of mostly parasites while keeping your ambitious work bees around.
Usually at the same time of the cut, some of the work bees also get raises and promotions, because then there's some free budget. So if you are an ambitious work bee, then "cutting staff" is actually also good news.
Finding the right cutting point is really the important point and hardest part. For instance you don't want to lay off people who really are performers but for some reason or another (e.g. they just got a baby) they don't perform right now. So at least in the companies I could look inside until now the cutting point is usually well inside the slackers group, so that the people who would recover and then start performing again have a chance to continue.
In the end, even the most tyranical ass-hole leader wants to have as many people as possible work as hard as possible to achieve his goals for him, in exchange for an amount of money that in most cases is peanuts for him. And not all leaders are even tyranical ass-holes.
Can you give an example of how you see slackers being protected by management? I wonder if we have the same definition of the word slacker.
In my experience the people protected by management are not doing much in terms of daily work, but they work a lot to always stay on top when it comes to prestige and taking credit from other people's work. So from my perspective they are working hard, just not to improve the teams results. That's why I call them parasites. They suck out the value of the team for their own gain.
What I call a slacker instead tries to do nothing but reading facebook (or HN) all day. Most of the time these are people who have given up hope to improve their careers for one reason or another. In many cases it is connected to a parasite sucking too much out of them and them not being able to recover self-motivationally.
I bet at least before readign this post your understanding of slacker and my understanding of parasite would be similar, right?
From what I understand it was a water tank contactor that did the hopper in Boca Chica... and it will never face lanch/re-entry stresses. That won't replace anyone.
The old BFR design had a large carbon-fiber hull, the new one has a stainless steel hull. Unless I'm missing your point, that's a major piece of the rocket that's no longer made with carbon fiber. (The giant molds that they were building for the BFR hull, for example, are now redundant.)
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BFR_(rocket)#Second_stage_and_...
The stainless steel hull is a viable design (though obviously given how many times it has changed it might not be final).
Scott Manley did a deep dive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVgEKBwE2RM
You're missing that they finished up falcon heavy development last spring, falcon 9 block 5 a little later, and crew dragon is finishing up now. That's a lot of development manpower freed up. To much for starship probably, and I don't know if many of the launcher skills are applicable to satellites.