Tesla employees reveal how they were fired

https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-employees-reveal-how-they-were-fired-2018-6

by uladzislau • 8 years ago

54 40 8 years ago

ggm2• 8 years ago

If you leave voluntarily, I can see your contract could plausibly deny you points on sales completed after you walked.

If you are on commission and the tail payment is not paid because they sacked you without cause, I would be surprised if the payment was not still due. It feels like its a part of the conditions of employment you can't avoid by firing somebody simply to downsize.

Doubtless some truly shitty employment law loophole means this assumptive, pathetic "but thats unreasonable" idea is wrong, but thats what I'd assume: the work was done for payment on completion, how can it not be paid, if the customer completes? If this was true, then the history of commission selling would be littered with lawsuits leading to some law to clarify.

If its clearly at-risk payment subject to retained employment, thats a huge rip-off, which makes me glad I have never, ever worked on commission.

lovich• 8 years ago

You can only bring a lawsuit if you have the money for a lawyer in the first place. If your employer is not paying you, then you are already out a lot of money you could have used to defend your rights

everdev3• 8 years ago

Some lawyers will take a strong case for a percentage of the settlement.

gnicholas• 8 years ago

If you leave voluntarily, I can see your contract could plausibly deny you points on sales completed after you walked.

There’s also a very good chance that it you are terminated and offered severance, your severance package is contingent on your waiver of all potential claims against the company.

ggm2• 8 years ago

All I can do is repeat how glad I am to be bound to salary and pension benefits with legal strings on termination. Commission income feels like a deal with the devil.

JonRB• 8 years ago

Actual Link: https://www.businessinsider.com.au/tesla-employees-reveal-ho...

lucb1e• 8 years ago

Without proxy: http://www.thisisinsider.com/tesla-employees-reveal-how-they...

_Microft• 8 years ago

Thanks!

vezycash• 8 years ago

This is how clueless but innocent individuals suffer for (whimsical) promises / decisions of leaders.

Musk promises profitability - sale's not picking up, production is far behind, cost of production isn't reducing... the low hanging fruit - employees.

I am waiting for how the employees would respond to the increased pressure. If I worked there, I'd have already blasted my resumes months ago.

candiodari• 8 years ago

The counterpoint of course is that without whimsical promises / decisions of leaders many jobs wouldn't exist for them to lose.

Which isn't to say they don't go too far on occasion.

I've always found the self-interested "safe" leaders to be the worse kind. They're also 99% of them.

omeid2• 8 years ago

"font-weight: 400;"> is proofreading not a thing anymore?

Rjevski• 8 years ago

Probably an bug of the AMP auto-conversion. I bet the full version of the page displays fine.

MaulingMonkey• 8 years ago

It doesn't.

lukeqsee• 8 years ago

It doesn’t. This is also in the full version.

melkiaur• 8 years ago

It was probably proofread before they inserted the ad just in the middle of that paragraph.

TekMol2• 8 years ago

My vote for a 'convert submitted amp links to normal links' automatism on HN. Or simply a block like 'You are trying to submit the amp version of a page. Please submit the original'.

By the way, shouldnt amp versions automatically have a 'Go to the real page' link on the top or something?

I see a totally absurd version of the page on my 30" monitor. With no obvious way to go to the normal page.

Not even the url has a clear indication where the normal version is. Guess you have to read it from the rel="canonical" link in the source code.

AYBABTME2• 8 years ago

AMP pages load faster on suboptimal internet. I'm pretty ok with OP having used this.

sparewalking• 8 years ago

The irony. The original site loads instantly without JS but the amp one takes longer to load and will not display anything (also without JS).

pasta• 8 years ago

From The Netherlands:

Original [1]: 585.51KB, load: 1.31s

AMP: 918.44KB, load: 1.56s

[1] http://www.thisisinsider.com/tesla-employees-reveal-how-they...

TekMol2• 8 years ago

Amp adds nothing to make a site faster. The opposite. It adds some mandatory libraries. It just imposes some restrictions on what a page can contain. So the version companies make to be included in amp might be smaller then their original version for that reason.

We should downrank slow bloated sites directly instead. Then companies would have an incentive to make their sites fast from the start.

pi-squared• 8 years ago

I first noticed the weird no-margin page, but didn't bother looking at the URL but after:

"font-weight: 400;">Musk said in an email on Monday...

I got suspicious. Took a look and stopped reading. Flagged the post. I don't know what else to do but GOOGLE you are reaching levels of EVIL.

javawizard• 8 years ago

As much as I'd love a reason to snip on AMP, that's also present in the full version.

ww520• 8 years ago

Is this why the TSLA stock has been going up and up this week?

Jdam• 8 years ago

Yes and because Elon artificially inflated the price this week with buying stock with his own money.

cornholio• 8 years ago

I don't think there will be enough business for the staff levels that they have," she said. "I would be scared to lose my job if I still had one.

This seems consistent with the company's statements that they are restructuring to boost profitability, as opposed to a frantic move to conserve a dwindling cash reserve.

xivzgrev• 8 years ago

Sounds like the company is suffering from poor management. They can develop a product people love but sounds like everything (mfg, delivery, sales) after is chaos.

prawn2• 8 years ago

Some of this seems like they're trying to find criticism where it's barely warranted. When are you supposed to notify someone of a meeting in which they'll be fired? Too late and it seems like it's last minute. Too soon and they might anxiously stew on it for a week.

Not enough indication of what the meeting is about, and they'll be surprised. Give them too much indication and their anxiety will balloon.

I've been on the receiving end of this as an employer in a really small business. e.g., a keystone employee was leaving and with awkward timing. There's no brilliant way to do it.

everdev3• 8 years ago

Exactly. As an employer, I don't want to pay (or demean) someone by telling them to report to a job they know they will lose and have no chance to save. A severance is supposed to ease the transition, but you don't want disgruntled employees in your office.

majewsky• 8 years ago

What about this part?

A third employee, an engineer who still works at Tesla and asked not to be identified by name, said he discovered his manager had been fired after the manager didn't show up for a meeting on Tuesday. When a colleague of his attempted to email the manager, the email bounced back.

Seems very odd not to notify employees when their manager gets fired.

prawn2• 8 years ago

What day were they fired? Given that's one case, could it have been overlooked by another manager or by HR dealing with bigger fallout?

Are these types of stories written for every round of layoffs at every other automotive company? It strikes me that the media is quick to find drama when it's Tesla.

ummonk• 8 years ago

The company broke promises more than once, she said, adding that she was not reimbursed for mileage, as promised

Isn't this a good example of something that merits an NLRB complaint?

everdev3• 8 years ago

Musk said in an email on Monday that the company was laying off people now so that it would never have to do it again.

Sounds like another promise waiting to be broken. Never is a long time.

lafar6502• 8 years ago

Dont give up on Tesla, America, hand them some public money instead

XorNot• 8 years ago

This has been coming for a while. In public Elon has been using "eccentric millionaire" to dodge Tesla finance questions which is a sure sign the numbers look bad.

Given they'll need to refinance and I'd bet the Model 3 sales after reservations are low due to the cheap one not being available yet, the company must've been looking at a financing crunch for a while now.

This is very much a move to clean house so they can do another round.

gaius• 8 years ago

There’s no good way to do a layoff, but a good severance package goes a long way towards “doing the right thing”. 1 month per year or part year of service, plus notice period, is fair. Statutory minimum, in the U.K. at least, is a sick joke. That’s all that IBM offers.

jillesvangurp• 8 years ago

This is how big layoff rounds work. Tesla just fired 9% of its people in a hurry. That means somebody had to come up with a huge list of people and make tough choices based on cost, budgets and spreading the pain across departments, etc. Usually that involves quite a bit of bartering between departments, quotas, etc. The main reason here is cutting cost; not performance of the individuals.

Looks like a job well done to me. Minimum amount of fuss and the they got it over with in a day or so. Most people did not see it coming, which means they contained the chaos nicely. Having disgruntled employees panicking ahead of this kind of stuff is very bad for morale. And once it is done, you basically want these people out of your building ASAP. Tesla is not a charity and dragging this out for weeks or months while they went department by department would have been very bad.

Tesla employees reveal how they were fired

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