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Comment by Nothorized | Hacker News Reader

To give a scale, Tesla has more than 30 000 employees [1]. That is just a little above 1%.

[1] https://electrek.co/2017/06/01/tesla-elon-musk-employees-har...

It has nothing to do with "scale" but everything to do with Tesla trying to prevent people from organizing and fighting for their rights and interests, 19th century style.

I found that number surprising, although I also know very little about what it takes to manufacture things. Any idea what the employee breakdown looks like in terms of profession and area of focus (since they have solar city too)?

Wondering what the ratio is between Tesla HQ functions, Tesla Manufacturing, Tesla charging infrastructure servicing, Solar City HQ, and Solar City installation/maintenance/servicing.

would be interesting to get a count of engineering staff at least.

No more than 3k would be working on the assembly operations, and maybe a good deal less (based on knowledge of other automotive assembly operations).

That 3k would include line assembly workers, material delivery, quality inspectors as well as skilled trades like electricians, pipe fitters, tool and die makers (for stamping operations)

Another 1-2k assembly staff (IT, Quality Engineers, Controls Engineers, Material Coordinators).

Tesla does a lot of in-house component manufacturing, so that may be another 3-10k (I'm including gigafactory in this estimate, but I have no real clue here, as I don't know how much of this they actually do).

Then you have people like automotive designers, engineers, and buyers, no real clue here, but almost certainly less than 2k.

Then you have corporate functions: accountants, hr, IT, other back office, another 500?

Then you have the sales side - not sure how they structure this, but they have a lot of show rooms with a good number of people working them - another 1k?

3 + 2 + 10 + 2 + .5 + 1 = 18,500

They're doing a lot of plant construction and equipment installation; generally in the industry most or all of that is outsourced, but Tesla seems to prefer strong vertical integration, so maybe those are straight Tesla employees as well.

1k seems pretty low for sales staff if we really are including the showrooms. I'm counting ~100-110 showrooms listed on Tesla's website, so that would amount to 10 people per showroom. Doable, I guess, but still low.

Are janitorial/maintenance staff considered to be employees in this count? Or are they contracted out?

Janitorial would almost certainly be contracted out at any other automotive company.

Yea seems like the more interesting title/angle for the article would be "Tesla misses model3 production by 5-6x", rather than "Tesla fires 1% of workforce".

1% is a hell of a lot of percent for a company of 30000.

The typical headline making layoff % at a Fortune500 type company is ~10%, fwiw.

Some of them just routinely fire the bottom 10% every year.

Popularized by Jack Welch, called Rank-and-Yank. He has a couple of books but I'll not be making the effort to link them.

Also "Up or Out" at the professional service firms, though I believe the percentage for this is around 3-5%.

That feels like a good reason to fire 100% of whoever is in charge of interviewing/hiring.

I'm not a fan of firing the bottom 10% of annual 360 reviews, but, do you think that having a 10% false-positive rate on interviewing/hiring is outside the realm of possibility?

EDIT: Just so you know ... the cumulative quarter average (done annually) cull of the bottom 10% (people who have been put on improvement plans 3 quarters ago), is done by people that have nothing to do with interviewing/hiring. You'd probably be firing the wrong folks.

Outside the realm of possibility? No. But if 10% of my work (I'm a warehouse worker) had to be thrown out I'd have been fired within a month.

Actually not fired because then Target might actually have to pay out on unemployment, I would simply have been scheduled for 4 hours a week in perpetuity.

Your work is a lot more predictable than that of either the folks doing the hiring or the folks being hired.

Well over 99% of my work has been thrown out. (I'm a software engineer & entrepreneur.) I think I calculated that when I was at Google, the half-life of my code was roughly 1 year, i.e. after a year, half of my code would be ripped out and deleted. So after 5 years there, 97% of it was gone. The remaining 3% had made a few hundred million dollars in revenue. It's been similar (but worse) in the startup world, where I had 4 ideas that all failed in my startup before Google, and 10 so far in the startup after.

It's definitely not a layoff, and FYI 10% is also very high for a F500 layoff.

This is a 'company on the up' dropping people, which is quite a different thing from a 'company who can't afford to keep people and letting them go;

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