SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce
latimes.com
latimes.com
Rocket reuse became a normal occurance, probably earlier than the majority of the industry anticipated. Their competitive pricing took the market by storm, changing the equation of sending anything to space. There are less new payloads to launch in 2019, because it takes much longer to contract and build a satellite than to send it to space, and the market hasn't yet adapted to this new mechanic.
Their need for manufacturing new boosters scaled down greatly because of reusability. You cannot reasign all engineers to other projects, some must go.
On top of that SpaceX is moving to new risky projects like the Starship, and they need to cut any fat that poses risk to their long term plans.
Lastly, as few pointed out, it's a great opportunity to get rid of underperforming employees and restructure the company.
These layoffs are a direct result of SpaceX's recent failures to raise money.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1181412/000118141219...
Positions are made redundant, not people. Individual performance is irrelevant, if not the company needs to be taken to the cleaners at a tribunal.
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.
The oddness diminishes when you look at their open jobs listing [1], as it looks that they have >300 open positions.
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.
Anecdotally, sales times have MUCH higher attrition rates than this - if they don't they're probably retaining too many underperforming staff.
Maybe in a fairy tale. In the real world, the 20% that were laid off are unlikely to be the 20% that should have been laid off.
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.
[1] https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=35254.0
If they lay off 10% of their workforce, how do they ensure that their trade secrets are kept safe? Lay off only low-risk employees? NDAs? It was my understanding that the degree to which those can be enforced in California is limited.
[1] https://www.nasdaq.com/article/is-elon-musks-spacex-protecte...
SpaceX doesn’t hire non-US citizens due to how hard it is to get the security clearance needed for them if they try to go to China they will likely get caught maybe not everyone, but enough to prevent any real knowledge transfer and more importantly the first one that will get caught is going to be made an example for the rest.
It’s harder but they can work on ITAR information too.
However the point stands that those people are vetted and tracked. How effective that is once they are in China or Russia etc I don’t know.
I’m sure some special cases do happen but the bulk of their workforce is US citizens.
And again you assume that they won’t get caught going to Russia or China to begin with or that they won’t be tasked with assets in country once they arrive.
We’re talking about 500-600 people here out of them it’s not clear how many would be really critical for technology transfer prevention but say it’s 25% so what we have is about 150 people or so that need to be tracked say 10% out of those will be contacted by a foreign entity that’s what 15 people?
It’s really not hard to track them at that point.
In fact I would guarantee you that this likely will be covered by their exit interview, they might even get a “scary” federal agent explaining them the do’s and don’ts and likely many of them already know them.
And again this isn’t a new thing, NASA and the defense industry have fired people before it’s jot like it’s the first time that 500 people with security clearances lose jobs.
But then a job is nothing compared to what China can pay them for a thumb-drive full of Tesla's secrets so even highly paid employees might do it for money. (Tesla is opening a factory in China though...so they might be ready to have some secrets stolen /priced in)
California limits non-compete agreements and anti-moonlighting clauses however, as far as I know, does not limit NDAs.
In typical NDA you specify a defined period of time to avoid the risk of a court declaring that an NDA is too restrictive. This should not apply to trade secret. Trade secret lasts indefinitely even after NDA time period expires if all other conditions for trade secret are met.
There are some cases where NDA expiring invalidates trade secret but it's mostly due to specific circumstances or badly formed NDA. You should inform the employees when they are dealing with a trade secret and use all means to keep them secret.
1) Maybe brought on themselves: 'hey, design/build the thing, then fire those who designed it' type thing, which definitely happens. It happens to companies in a crunch, or those who just put the outcome ahead of everything else.
2) A decimation: let's use this as an opportunity to drop anyone we feel is not cutting it - and teams that we created/hired we realize we don't want/need.
3) General organizational shakeup.
4) A true and real opex cutback ahead of anticipated future needs.
The thing is - outside of human terms - it's a big cut but it might be highly rational.
'Pruning' I think is a essential aspect of any healthy organization, forcing entities to rethink, to shake them out of their settled positions, getting rid of organizational cruft.
Of course, there are humans behind every decision which makes it quite fundamentally something else.
But if you could imagine they were 'robots', as if to remove any issues of compassion and concern for externalized outcomes, and this were simply a simple dispassionate re-org ... then you can see where the economics might be pointing.
We also don't know the terms of the layoff: maybe some of them are voluntary. Maybe the payouts are huge. Sometimes these things work out well for a lot of those involved, obviously it doesn't for others.
Could also be that they consider themselves “done” with major design phases of the heavy, while the people mover stuff is too far away to engage mid level designers with effectively?
No. Don't.
Edit to add: I understand you were using this as a thought experiment. Sorry for knee-jerking.
If you're employing people to do something robots can't, you need to understand that the way to treat them is also different. This goes double if your mission is to improve the world instead of outright capitalism.
And if you're employing people to do what robots can do, you can treat them as robots?
That’s OK if you hire contractors and pay them premium contractors rates. It’s sleazy and underhanded to make people believe that job security is part of the “package” then bait-and-switch.
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2019/01/10/more-17000-un...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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:
Now do this for contracat manufacturing.
If you create a company, you take care of it and all of its members. If you have to cut expenses because the company needs to be "leaner" then you cut the salaries starting from the top executives. Eventually you fire management, because the state of the company is in part the result of their decisions in the long-run.
Will the 10% of the employees be the ones who are already in the less comfortable financial and social situation in their private life ?
The cancellation of a major project also might make a whole department obsolete.
But a blanket lay-off of 10% of the work force for a company which claims to be healthy, that is quite employee-unfriendly.
At my company I ensure that everyone is always borderline burned out!
"Comfortable" doesn't mean that they have a nice house and are happy with their life at work. Comfortable in this context means they no longer have any concern about their own job performance, knowing they have a "sure thing" and underperform in their duties.
In particular, I'm ranting against the use of the word "comfortable" for describing unmotivated/shitty employees. It's perfectly achievable to have a company that consists of people who are motivated, comfortable, and extremely productive.
It's a ridiculous Americanism that the only way to motivate employees is by making them "uncomfortable" (eg through fear of losing their jobs, like your example, or through other means).
The SpaceX employees that got laid off are going to get other jobs and continue making more money and having more money to spend than their European counterparts.
Edit: A few reasons. One is that, since it's easier to switch jobs, good employees have more leverage. Another is that, since it's easier to fire bad employees, the expected value of a new employee is higher and you can afford to pay them more.
I think a big part of American prosperity is a result of companies being able to fire people. It's probably the most important bit of employment non-regulation that this country has, and it's a big aspect in which America is more worker-friendly than European countries. Other missing regulations, like working hours limits, vacation time regulations, don't benefit workers as much (or at all).
“Western” Europe is on average rich, Eastern Europe is still recovering from Soviet control and brain-drain. But even Western Europe is spikey, old Welsh coal-mining towns are poor, the old universities are rich.
Even apart from the location income variability, what money gets you varies; health costs much less in the UK than the USA, housing is cheaper in poor places than rich places — even PPP exchange rates aren’t perfect because the ratio of two different goods isn’t constant.
There might be multiple things going on here though. While I'm sure there are people who will settle into a job and underperform because they are virtually guaranteed their position, I'm guessing there are a lot more people in a situation where compensation isn't even matching inflation/CoL. In the latter situation the employee may just not care since the company doesn't care enough to compensate them 'fairly'. Depending on a lot of factors it may be difficult for them to find a new job somewhere else, so outwardly it might look like they're just 'comfortable' and underperforming.
Companies are not created to take care of their employees. They are created to make profit and/or accomplish a societal goal. If a company is non-profit then it's just the latter.
As someone from a post-communist state, it's plainly obvious to me that people on average don't work as well as they could if the threat of termination does not exist. My parents told me anecdotes about their coworkers who were reading books on the job, even playing videogames, and that's in an aero-space design bureau in the 80ies, in less elite organizations systematic alcohol consumption by groups of employees on the job was not something to be surpised by. And that pattern repeats itself in many countries where employment is semi-guaranteed.
If this continues the remaining employees try to hire new employees with a fatal flaw so when the next wave comes they will be the first out.
You seems to imply employees are the resources to be used to achieve goals. I do not see an issue in this arrangement if Employees have the same negotiation power as the employer.
Termination due to non-performance can also hit a performer. Human beigns and hence their social systems are not perfect. N% layoff is performance related termination, because it's an impossibility that all employees pefrorm at the same level, are of the same value to the company. It's absurd to imply that N% layoff is absolutely random, that companies use lottery techniques to choose who to fire next.
>You seems to imply employees are the resources to be used to achieve goals.
They are. Within the constrains of culture and law.
If everyone is meeting the success criteria, then still trying to fire lower 10% is Darwinian view of the world. This also means objective enough criteria exists to judge the poor performers. In reality, that guy in the corner with his head down get fired because he is too busy to make connections and show how valuable he is.
This specific case seems harsher because a lot of these people assembled under Mr. Musk's banner because they thought they were working for a cause. I am sure many of them have took paycuts, toiled above and beyond expectations because they thought they were working for a cause. In my view this is not a fair at all.
> They are. Within the constrains of culture and law.
Agreed but every lawful and culturally acceptable things are not right necessarily.
Says who?
Societies create the conditions under which companies are allowed to exist, therefore societies get to define what responsibilities companies have.
Also, who says that the right of the company to exist >> the rights of the employees?
Not allowing companies to easily shed workers is a way of putting extra fitness pressure on companies, meaning the less fit companies perish and the fitter companies thrive. This is of benefit to society. See Schumpeter, Creative Destruction:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction
You will note that some of the most highly efficient/competitive economies have pretty strong worker rights. Of course there has to be a balance, excesses in either direction are usually not good. However, in this particular case I don't think any of these SpaceX employees were systematically drunk on the job, or playing videogames instead of working.
Why would someone ever hire if they wouldn't be able to terminate the contract if it's ever needed? And this goes both ways, I do want to be able to quit (with a "short" notice)
Other answers gave plenty of good reasons: employees underperform, projects change, companies close, etc
It's a job, not a marriage, and even those are becoming shorter.
Note I'm not proposing "at-will" employment, I don't think that is good as well (even if employers like it, I don't think it's good for overall labour relations)
If you lay off 10% because times are worse and there is less work, then interestingly you are more or less required to re-hire the same people when you hire again (typically that would be negotiated so you’d buy them out instead).
The 10% you fire also has to be the 10% last hired, you can’t fire the 10% worst performing (again, this can be negotiated so firing an older underperforming hire quickly becomes very expensive - think 1-2 years salary or similar)
Is this perfect? No. But it makes employers think hard about hiring for better or worse, and it means you plan far ahead to ensure you have enough work in bad times, and don’t go on a hiring spree in good times.
That's what you get when you have a high qualified and restricted (in numbers) workforce. But let's see if it keeps being that way or it goes the way of France and Italy
(So how's that idealistic view working out in their real estate market again?)
Again, it's a job, not a marriage. Some stability and regulation is welcome, sure, but jobs for life don't exist anymore.
It's important to note that these countries (Sweden, Japan) with higher employee protections and guarantees are very different in terms of culture from the hyper-individualistic US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante <- basically an invese of the American culture
However, how much stress you can be exposed to in those 8 hours isn't mandated. You can run many businesses understaffed with fairly little impact if you are willing to regularly replace employees suffering from burnout [1]
I find it entirely unconvincing that optimizing for "employee care" is overall more beneficial to humanity, including for the long term well being of the exact same employees and their families, than the alternative.
It may stifle impractical get-rich-quick strategies and customer scamming, but that's not a bad thing.
The idea that upside potential of an organization's efforts can/should never make it into the workforce and the effort to ensure that it remain this way is extremely sad and corrupting and makes for a world where misaligned incentives and exploitation are much more likely than they 'should' be.
Some of the ways to achieve goal X are via layoffs, some aren't. You cut some possible routes to X, but you add more routes.
Not all routes are equal. Cutting a particular employee might mean that a vital convergent point is no longer possible to enter, meaning all routes now lead to failure.
Some of the optimal routes to X may require that management get paid a fair wage (rather than 40+ times the median), and that they reconfigure the company to enable them to keep all employees - everyone gets hours cut by half-a-day, say.
TL;DR - in short you're committing petitio principii, assuming the best way is layoffs, and thus concluding the best way can't be taken without layoffs.
It's not necessary that the number of actual paths available is reduced by the imposition of "no layoffs", it can actually be increased. It seems counter logical. A restriction can lead to greater innovation that is stimulated by the restriction, there were I'd warrant far more places to get an alcoholic drink under prohibition than prior to its institution.
>you have less options, and therefore less paths to success //
A priori it seems right, but the successful paths aren't randomly distributed; perhaps there is a key employee who leaves under layoffs and the business fails (another business succeeding).
You can apply basic set theory to chaotic and complex psycho-temporal interactions.
But I agree, as I think you surmise, that we can't simplistically mathematically impute the "best" route will be with(|out) layoffs.
This kind of small scale lay-off is mostly a stunt, or just sign of incompetence.
“Don’t want to leave” is good, “can’t get hired anywhere else” is bad, and the presence of the latter makes it more desirable to leave even places which used to be fun.
If you want to roll the dice on a new employee then fire the old one. This kind of 10% cut results in losing your best who don’t wait around and just start looking on day one. Worse, they often leave after your round of cuts as getting an offer is outside of your timeframe.
Such world exists and can be found in most socialist countries. It's not bad per see but not that exciting either. I personally believe the workers should be given more opportunities(i.e advance notice so that they can find another job in a timely manner) rather than social care.
There are many social contracts tied to the word 'employee'. Expectation of livable vage. Expectation of stability. I liked the way patio11 once explained it (I think, and definitely am paraphrasing): "If you employ people and business is good, you get all of the profits and only owe them their wage. If business is bad, you still owe them their wage."
I am concerned that many companies are trying to weasel out of this unspoken contract. I remember McDonalds document specifying that they assume their employees have second jobs. Or that many game companies fire their QA teams every time a game is shipped.
Like, I get the incentive, I just don't like it.
To be honest, I wouldn't miss Tesla or Space X if it turns out they can't manage their employees.
If you fire 10% of your staff every 3 or 4 years, plus 1% the other years, that means the average employee has decades of job stability. That's probably enough.
The point is that sometimes you really need less people to do the job or you can find them in other places without affecting the final product or service. There is nothing that can prevent a company to do that, not even employee friendly European legislation.
Safe to say I left that place of my own accord not long after.
In periods of "low order" for things like shipping/mining a company may put the employees on leave that the government pay, but this is only temporary. It's a method to avoid hire/fire waves.
There's another crucial point: that this need is forecastable many (many) months in advance. If people are joining (or continuing to work at) a company with an expectation of investing in the 'long haul', but the company knows that this 'startup phase' isn't likely to last more than another nine months, there's a strong temptation for executives to deceive their employees.
As you say, 'nothing that can prevent a company to do that', but along those lines, there's nothing that prevents seeing this for what it is: an adversarial relationship where companies are doing their best to trick their employees.
I believe in worker rights, and the ability of a person to live in relative economic security. But should a company not EVER be able to restructure when it realizes it has too many workers, or too broad a mission?
Is 2 months pay and medical not a decent send-off for workers who provide little value to a company?
I wish healthcare were publicly provided, but besides that, if the alternative were for SpaceX to file bankruptcy or to go broke for lack of competent management, I'll take some laid off workers.
In America it's actually better, close to 30%. Everywhere else it's much worse. In the Middle East, Africa, most of Asia it's at most 10%, and usually less than half that.
That means that you could, not in 50 years when the robots have taken over, TODAY, kill 85% of the population and the net effect on the world would be ... nothing. GDP wouldn't drop by so much as a dollar. Today, 85% of all humans alive are useless for the economy (some are school children and will become useful, but you could assume that to be ~10% and you wouldn't be far off the mark).
So for doing everything we do today, and for guaranteeing the future, we need around 25% of the human race. Everyone else is economically useless.
Note that this figure has been dropping for 40%, and has been for essentially all of history, with only short blips where more of the human race is actually useful (like the 30 or so post-WWII years). Even 15% economically useful population, historically speaking, is actually high, not low. What I mean to say is that the neutral expectation should be that that number is going to drop, not rise.
So: no, a company should not ever be able to restructure. Every month, every day, every second we can keep that number up by even a small amount gives use one more month, one more day, one more second of the society we currently have, where people are actually somewhat useful. The alternative, if you think it through, I'm sure you'll see, is war.
Or to put it another way: we need these people to have a job much more than we need a few extra dollars of GDP.
We live in an imperfect world, and not everything has a utility function that is measured by headline figures
According to [1] unemployment in the EU-28 is actually 6.7% as of November 2018. Of course, there are some European countries that are not in the EU, but I doubt that including them will cause the figure to rise to 20%.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
> So for doing everything we do today, and for guaranteeing the future, we need around 25% of the human race. Everyone else is economically useless.
No, that does not follow. For example, a stay-at-home spouse who takes care of the kids may be "economically useless" in a very shallow sense (i.e. they do not appear in GDP figures), but that does not make them useless.
But they do not appear in the GDP figures of course.
Also why should we artificially extend forcing most humans into agency-less drudgery for 60% of their sentient healthy waking hours? I think the sooner we embrace having 15% of the population producing the net economic output and providing the rest of the society with what they need, the faster we can figure out a significantly better and fulfilling society for everyone.
The vision and strategy that lead directly to layoffs? Seems like a reasonable thing to me.
Do you keep the salespeople that you hired, or do you cut management for getting in the situation that salespeople weren't creating any value?
Also,
> laid off anytime for arbitrary reasons
They are not arbitrary by any stretch of the meaning of that word. There are business reasons, changed or evolved business goals or market conditions. Those are all real objective phenomena which play very important role in the life of a company, ignoring which would be very fundamentally detrimental for companies and for markets in general.
That is literally the inverse of what arbitrary means:
existing or coming about seemingly at random or by chance or as a capricious and unreasonable act of will
Now:
> I didn't have to wait for the old company to not pay me the agreed upon salary, spend months offering them a "compensation improvement plan", and documenting their failure to follow it in fear that they might sue me for leaving for the "wrong" reason. It's amazing how people pretend at-will employment is somehow equal for both sides when only employees can actually terminate the employment at-will.
Where I live you have (it's the law) to keep on working (and being paid for that work) for a certain number of weeks (depending on how long you have been working at that company). So the company can find a replacement, so you can wrap up things and pave the way for the transition. It's not rare that you can come up with an agreement that let you do that from home (because you are leaving on bad terms) or that the employee takes his vacant days or extra hours to fill up that period.
It's not like he chose the new company because the logo is red.
Do you think that "they cost too much" is an "arbitrary" reason? Or is it the "intrinsic nature of the decision" like in the "I leave because they pay me more elsewehere" case?
They cut the bottom 10% of weak performers because they weren't up to the standard.
Second, specific to SpaceX, they actually succeeded in making reusable rockets. They used to need to build a new rocket for every launch. Then they needed to build their reusable fleet up. Now they don’t need to build hardly any rockets. I think this is what success looks like for them right now. From this point of view a 10% reduction is pretty low, and is only so low because they still have even bigger plans.
As a counterpoint, Germany has much stronger employee protection laws and unions and has a comparable unemployment rate. That said, resizing is still possible there, it just has some lag.
My mom got laid off after a bit over 15 years of employment and got about 2 years salary as severance pay.
On top of that stuff like healthinsurance isn't a "benefit", but a social security and taken care of even in unemployment.
I don’t know if it’s better or worse, just different.
https://www.dw.com/en/debunking-the-myth-of-low-german-unemp...
Barriers to firing also make it harder to justify hiring higher-risk candidates (e.g. former felons, high school dropouts).
You can also leave for any arbitrary reason, anything else is slavery, simply put. This goes both ways.
>If you create a company, you take care of it and all of its members.
If you create a company, you have a fiduciary duty towards your shareholders. A company only exist when it is profitable (either now or in the future) and it can only continue to exist if it can do so profitably. Companies don't exist to "take care of its members", those are what unions are for ... oh ... wait ...
>Will the 10% of the employees be the ones who are already in the less comfortable financial and social situation in their private life ?
How is this even relevant? You provide a service to the company and they pay you for it, they can decide not to do business with you and vice versa. Empathy has little to no place in business, unless it generates more profit of course.
Being a slave entails more than just having to fulfill your voluntarily agreed-to, contractual obligations. Using the term "slavery" for this trivializes actual slavery – i.e., ownership over a human being.
In the big picture, your job security as a producer trades-off against your right to be a disloyal consumer.
A company purpose is to make money, not to take care its member. Its the government job to take care of its citizen. Using basic income, universal health care, cheap/free housing, etc.
No. A company doesn't have members, it has employees. Americans should know by now that a company has no loyalty to them and they should have no loyalty to the company. If they don't know this, it is their fault for being naive (or a Boomer).
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.
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.
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.
Laying off (firing) individuals; or, if a change in strategic direction, laying off entire groups -- that's business.
But 'doing a Jack Welsh' -- that's Poor Management. I can only imagine that Bezos and Branson and ULA will be able to pick up some great employees.
And as for 'cutting the low performers' -- in my many years in industry, I've only seen this happen once. Every other person was 'let go' due to 'political' reasons.
My major point: This move signifies a colossal management fail. I'm looking at you, Elon.
> 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.
I've seen this first hand in my own company since they started laying off people on a regular basis. People try hard to keep things working, but quality inevitably degrades over time. In most areas, it's not necessarily obvious. In rocket engineering, on the other hand...
I'm still skeptical of Starlink but I hope this all works out.
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.
https://electrek.co/2018/06/12/tesla-layoffs-workforce-restr...
If you don't have a firing heavy culture sometimes this is the only reasonable way to lean teams up again and ensure your best team members are not dragged down by mediocrity.