Tesla to Cut 10% of Jobs
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
"Tesla expanded massively during Covid, as of now half of the dev team(including me) don’t have parking space or desk. It’s physically impossible for everyone to return to office.
"Should I ignore the email, or should I drive to the office and sit under the stairs?"
Commenters' general feeling was that it was a soft layoff, and some speculated that it might amount to constructive dismissal.
Anyways, they can and will buy office space to put the desks when needed.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/kvgtok/lan_party_ga...
I love how now they are justifiably out of fashion when just a few years ago only staid companies had cubicles or offices!
So in tesla's case, they'd just fire all the people who leave their desks in a fire?
And the desks were doors on sawhorses.
Summer was a challenge because the A/C couldn't keep up at all.
Later we upgraded to a room with twelve people in it where you had to ask at least two other people to stand up and move their chairs out of the way if you needed to get up for any reason.
I just realized that the Tesla could eject the worker a couple miles before the charging station, calculating the workout and charge duration so that the employee would have to run at the correct rate to retrieve their car before it was done charging. The vehicle could self clean while empty on the way to the charging station.
I can't think of any downsides to this.
Exciting times for the future of work!
EDIT: If your job in Tesla is on the line proposing working out of a Tesla is your best bet to save it.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-reportedly-sleeping...
Nobody is disagreeing that systems built around transit/biking/etc are better than car-oriented ones. They're saying that an individual in the latter system may still need to drive. In case you've forgotten, your original comment was in response to a specific individual, suggesting that he didn't need to drive.
Live closer? How do people in Germany get a gallon of milk? Or Japan?
How is it that every country in the world is able to do this except us?
Ultimately physics will win here and we're going to run out of cheap gasoline and fossil fuels and you're going to wish you could walk a couple blocks to a neighborhood grocery store. Milk is going to be $7/gallon and gas is going to be $7/gallon and you're going to effectively pay $15 or more to drive to the store 30 miles away and buy that gallon of milk. The whole reason you're were previously able to live 30 miles away from a place to buy milk is because we've had cheap, subsidized fossil fuels. This is going away. There's no amount of oil we can drill for that will change this reality over the long term. No political party can "fix" this. Republicans can't open enough pipelines. It doesn't matter anyway. If you choose to live 30 miles away from the nearest house or grocery store, you also will incur the associated costs of doing that. Townships and other entities aren't going to be able to afford to repair roads. They don't have the money unless they raise taxes by a lot. Better get ready for that too.
Public transit isn't feasible in many places, nor are bikes. Why is that? It's because we've decided to make sure that this is the case and we've spread out towns and cities, and used zoning to make sure that there are no stores within walking distance of the suburbs just so we can keep wasting money building new roads and buying new cars. It's a hidden tax going straight to shareholders of construction companies, automobile manufacturers, and government officials who green light all highway and road projects with your tax money even when we could just change a few things and reap huge savings. It's mind-blowing every time I see these comments. "How am I supposed to do this? See it doesn't work? Well yea because you've decided to make it not work and then tried it and you're like "oh the thing I made not work doesn't work! See??".
Nobody is interested in "taking your car" and nobody is interested in forcing you to live in a place that looks like Hong Kong. What many people are interested in though is building in sensible ways that include cheaper and more effective transit options, like walking, biking, light rail, and possibly busses. 90% of your day-to-day needs should be within a distance that you don't need a car for. Everything else is incorrect and just won't work in the long-term for most people.
Needing to travel 30 miles for a grocery store applies to only a tiny, tiny minority of Americans here.
edit: some data to back up my point: https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2019/june/us-shoppers-a...
> When the ERS researchers looked at rural food store access, they found that the median distance to the nearest and the third-nearest food store was 3.1 miles and 6.1 miles, respectively.
6 miles is pretty far to go by bike each way, no doubt, though 3 miles isn't too bad, especially if you use an ebike, and those are steadily becoming more affordable. That would be in the range of 10-15 minutes each way.
That said, the bigger problem right now is having decent bike infrastructure to actually get there, rather than the distance.
Is that even a serious argument?
Public transportation networks are designed to serve urban areas, with specific solutions catered to specific combinations of travel distance and throughput.
Hand-waiving by pointing out isolated individuals live in isolated areas means nothing. Mass transportation is designed to serve the masses, not hermits who chose to live far from urban centers.
Meanwhile, all those person's filling in those two-digit-lane highways live somewhere, and if they can pack a highway they certainly can be served by a suburban railway service.
Subway systems work well when people commute from the edges of a city to an urban center. Throw US suburbs into the mix, and you get some strange complications, like:
* suburbs that from adjacent cities that sprawl together -- the residents there may commute to different cities
* suburban office parks -- this makes it difficult to effectively meet people's needs with an affordable hub-and-spoke model, because large numbers of people commute not to the urban center, but between adjacent suburbs
Sprawling suburbs can be, and often are, served by public transportation. The critical factor affecting the US approach to public transportation, which is purely ideological, is the neoliberal belief that public transportation services are only worth considering if they are provided by private corporations and only if they are profitable right from the start.
Meanwhile, in the rest of the world these services are either public or public-private partnerships, and subsidized with clear externalities in mind. For example, if I recall correctly the Tokyo subway network is operated by a few private companies which profit not by the direct exploration of their railway lines but from real estate investments coordinated by the expansion of their railway lines.
Consequently, we have european capitals which coordinate urban planning (i.e., where suburban sprawls can and cannot be built) with coverage of their public transportation services, including investing in extensions of subway lines to deserted places where medium- and high-density housing projects have been approved.
> Subway systems work well when people from the edges of a city to an urban center.
Subway is not a good example in discussions over public transportation in urban sprawls. The main purpose of subway networks is to enhance mobility within a urban area. Consequently, typically you see subway networks with subway stops at 500-800 meters and travel speeds of around 50km/h, which just happens to be slightly better than traveling by car. Park-and-ride stops are only another aspect of the main goal of eliminating car traffic within the city.
The standard strategy to serve urban sprawls with public transportation is to cover them with bus routes which feed into a high-throughput mass transport systems such as commuter rail or bus rapid transit, also serving as park-and-ride stations.
> suburban office parks -- this makes it difficult to effectively meet people's needs with an affordable hub-and-spoke model, because large numbers of people commute not to the urban center, but between adjacent suburbs
This is not true. I happen to have worked for a company located in a suburban office park which wasn't served very well by public transportation, but the office park itself organized bus services from one of the city's multimodal hub to the office park.
Also, this is so common and mundane that I know for a fact that even some Ikea stores in europe located in industrial districts offer free bus services connecting public transport hubs to them.
Very ineffective though, very limited hours, akward stops where you have to walking stretches with the sun beating down on you and the annoying unsettling noise of cars rushing past you on a main road, worst case the particular place they’re at doesn’t have sidewalk for a good stretch and they have to hug the grass line to stay out of the road and out of peoples yards.
I’ve lived in several small cities/large towns with primarily suburban areas, as well as highly sprawled MSAs and this describes any suburban bus system I’ve seen.
I worked a job for several years where I could have taken either bus or light rail to work. I still chose to drive because I already had a car, my car had more privacy, I didn’t have to go outside in the weather, and I had more autonomy.
For public transit to compete, it has to be someone’s best option. Being usable is not good enough to cause people to switch.
Yes, you could build it all anyway, and that’s probably the only long-term solution. But it’s not politically popular. If not for budgetary reasons, then because people don’t want construction interfering with their drive.
In the end, I feel like we’re better off just concentrating on public transit in the neighborhoods that want to use it.
The traffic to the office is always awful, so a pleasant ride to the office, skipping traffic via dedicated bus lanes on the route, without needing to drive, sounds great to me in principle. I WANT to like this. I WANT to use this. But, there are several problems with it in practice.
For me, the bus is still significantly slower than driving because of all of the stops, even though it skips car traffic. For my wife, who needs to walk 10 blocks from the bus stop to her office, it's even slower.
My wife and I both get motion sick, especially if I don't get a forward facing seat.
Other people riding the bus smoke drugs, don't clean themselves & smell awful, scream loudly & incoherently, etc.
On the 10 block walk from the stop to her office, my wife saw homeless folks fighting, some screaming, and other smoking fentanyl. As a small woman, she did not feel safe, and informed me she wouldn't be taking the bus again. With our car, she can drive directly to the secured parking garage in her office, no safety risk.
We're going to stick to the safety, security, and speed of the car, thanks. It's not the lack of infrastructure, public transit is just a much worse experience.
None of this will get better, our transit agency doesn't even have the guts to reduce fare evasion via real enforcement because of the wacky political climate here.
https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/sound-transit-fare-...
Find a way to make public transit clean & safe and we'd probably ignore the other negatives listed above. Unfortunately, the political climate in the US in areas with adequate public transit makes that impossible.
On a different note, I rode Sound Transit buses to Redmond every day pre-pandemic and it was a pretty good experience. The seats were really nice and some even reclined! I think it is a bit slower than driving but I would rather sit on a bus for an extra 10 minutes reading a book than be driving in soul crushing traffic.
Fare evasion is a symptom; the real issue is it being politically unviable to have a police force actively riding buses and light rail.
Everyone chooses where to put homes and workplaces with transportation in mind.
In the UK people who commute by rail commute an average of 235 miles per year. [0]
I’ve had commutes of 150 miles per day. (Or 30,000+ miles per year) although that’s on the high end of what Americans might do.
The typical commute for people in my last office job was 30-50 miles per day. About 10,000 miles per year. About 1-2% of the people in our office lived in the same town as the office. This is in a top-50 metropolitan area of the US.
[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/466097/average-distance-...
> Even though average miles travelled for commuting purposes has declined to 799 miles travelled per person in 2020, a decrease of 37% compared to 2019 (1,276 miles travelled per person) and an overall decrease of 43% compared to 2002 (1,400 miles travelled per person)
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/national-travel-sur...
So, still close to an order of magnitude less than my anecdotal data. The bottom line is that the US definitely has a lot of sprawl.
Yeah, the American desire to have a large grassy lawn surrounding their house means density is far too low to make public transit viable.
I don't know about Austin, but with Fremont's public transit, it would take at least 40 minutes to get from the Fremont BART station to the Tesla factory on public transit. That doesn't count the time needed on BART from someplace with a lower COL (Fremont itself is a $$ place to live). For that, add at least another 1/2 hour (for nearest lower COL in Castro Valley or San Leandro). So, it wouldn't be unheard of to have an hour+ commute to Tesla Fremont on public transit.
Large and wealthy Bay Area employers like Tesla therefore run private shuttles for employees for this reason (a practice started in the current era by Genentech way back in the early 00s I think, and later Google popularized it among tech co's)
Maybe Austin has world class public transit, though I kind of doubt it.
I actually would give Tesla a bit of a pass on this since it is a factory purchased from GM/Toyota and it inherently needs lots of space, so you can't expect a train station at the factory gate.
Tech campuses like the Googleplex, the Apple spaceship donut, Oracle HQ on the edge of a marsh are where the failings of the public transit system are most apparent.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/3500+Deer+Creek+Rd,+Palo+A...
Isn't your Tesla supposed to be robotaxi, driving around autonomously while you work ? Why do you need parking spaces ?
It has since been learned that he had been reached by Business Insider to comment about the sexual abuse case beforehand. He already knew that an article against him was coming so he framed the narrative before it even reached the public.
I would not be surprised this was the same here. Tell everyone "Leave if you don't like it or we will fire you" when you very well know that 10% of the workforce will need to be dismissed.
This is pure speculations but would not be surprising at all. I cannot imagine that the company's management is unable to do the math on number of employees vs. number of workstations.
From the person that said one of his companies can fix Spinal and Brain injuries?: https://youtu.be/cgyFL5Hzy-s?t=1312
Surely...
Seconds later, the youtuber goes on to criticize Musk's disclaimer of "I'm not saying this is going to solve everything... it's something that _might_ be helpful."
You just can't win with these "skeptics".
The guy doesn't say anything, yet he makes everyone believe he did. Genius. The best salesperson in the world for sure.
So they will be content of spending the first decade "just" fixing spine and brain injuries: https://youtu.be/cgyFL5Hzy-s?t=1116
Then Elon Musk says he will solve Schizophrenia, Depression and Morbid Obesity: https://youtu.be/cgyFL5Hzy-s?t=1137
Yes,...really what is with the skeptics? Can't the recognize a genius when they see one?
Let me be clear: Musk is human. He has positive and negative qualities. His Thailand pedo comments were, to put it bluntly, fucking retarded. His autopilot timeline was wildly optimistic. His behavior on Twitter is infantile.
And yet this is not carte blanche to twist his words into something unrecognizable. You can't just criticize someone for not being nuanced, then criticize their disclaimer that happens seconds later. That's intellectually dishonest. At that point I stopped listening because it is clear (to me) that the youtuber has an agenda to push.
As to your comments, I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Is it incorrect to believe that brain implants may lead to solutions to these problems?
Lots of technologists speak about the potential of technology/industry/science. Roasting Musk for dreaming big is the best you can come up with? Especially given the other material he gives you?
It's a common South African insult, in fact I've heard classmates say it to one another in early high school for dating girls in late middle school. It's a word, people sometimes say it. There's a context. It wasn't a formal accusation. One in thousands of comments, you actually expect perfection from Musk and police?
Let me tell you as someone who has pulled off exactly that in 28 conflicts, as if they were 28 chess matches, I haven't fucked up this whole time. It's fucking impossible in the long term. Narrowest odds imaginable. That's not fucking up at all, much harder than merely winning 28 times in a row, which is already staggering. You have to let us fuck up sometimes, let it go. Someday I'll fuck up. Especially due to manipulation eg a racketeer as a last resort, when arrest was imminent, angled his back to get injured by police, in order to get a lighter sentence by countering the guilt of crime with an accusation of police brutality (SFPD police didn't fall for it, not even close).
The bad guys want us to fuck up, it's not easy to foil them every single time. Saying this is possible implies strict inferiority on the part of the bad guys.
And if you expect perfection from the police, you ought to tell them that next time you call them to come vindicate you. So they know you might yourself accuse them of brutalizing your victimizer.
“It is not the critic who counts, not the one who points out how the strong man stumbled or how the doer of deeds might have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred with sweat and dust and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, if he wins, knows the triumph of high achievement; and who, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”
-- Theodore Roosevelt
Obviously.
There is a big difference between Elon Musk pre and post-March 2018. For reasons that would take weeks to explain.
https://www.foxnews.com/tech/elon-musk-calls-diver-who-helpe...
If there's a big difference pre/post-March 2018, it would be nice if you could point people in a direction.
Potty mouth is not a mortal sin.
Being called a cunt by some jackass Australian and being called a pedophile by a wealthy influential individual are probably going to have wildly different effects on your life and how people see you. being a cunt alone is not a serious offense that ruins the lives of everyone involved.
The whole "pedo guy is just a generic insult" is a laughable lie that Musk tried to float in court. The evidence is that Musk tried to ruin a guy because he had the audacity to call out his publicity stunt when directly asked during an interview. You need to stop defending Musk on this because what he did was incredibly dick-headed and vindictive.
Nobody comes across looking pretty here, sure. But it's a real struggle to care one way or another about it. Sounds like that's exactly what the jury thought.
> Nobody comes across looking pretty here, sure. But it's a real struggle to care one way or another about it. Sounds like that's exactly what the jury thought.
The jury found for Musk because Musk didn't name the guy in his tweets. Thats why the diver lost. I don't think you can extrapolate from that verdict to "actually they were both equally bad."
I would argue it's the strongest.
"Pedo" is one of those accusations that sticks around associated with your name, often even when it's false.
Knowing that, Elon Musk, one of the best known people on the planet at this stage, called this to a real person. This can ruin a person's life. Did he have any evidence, even circumstantial? Nope. Did he have a reason for this attack? Only that he felt slighted.
So Elon Musk is ok with potentially ruining someone's life if he even as much as feels slighted.
I think even is the strongest hint of what his character is like. And character is, you could argue, the most important predictor of future behavior. I took this hint of character at face value, and after that I've never been surprised when I've since heard accusations of fraud or sexual harassment. No surprise whatsoever.
So if your reaction to this is Elon Must has potty mouth, you're either breathtakingly stupid or dishonest.
Same with Cybertruck and the Semi. They will come out eventually. It might be another 2-4 years, but they will happen.
I even think full self driving will eventually be achieved. It might be another 10 years, but we'll get there.
I personally think we can assume slimy tactics from everyone involved.
Did Musk do what he was accused of? Knowing his attitude most likely.
Did someone also have very large shorts opened on Tesla right before the story dropped, to expire a day later? Yep.
https://twitter.com/unusual_whales/status/152743945535046860...
I think Elon himself helped to spread this conspiracy, when he would be fully aware it’s complete BS. This demonstrates to me that he is willing to engage in the dangerous game of pushing fake news on his blind followers to get them to go after his enemies, even if it makes no sense. These are the exact sort of people who should not have any power, because they’ll happily abuse it to cause societal harm.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/sep/29/axel-springer-...
Nobody I saw claimed he owns BI. He's a cofounder and the current CEO though and therefore does run BI. Just had to call you out on that for spreading a falsehood by trying to twist someone else's words while trying to make a claim about "fake news".
But I also never said it was him either, someone else did. I have no clue who it is and don't even want to get into a guessing game of it. It could be Elon himself for all we know. I was just pointing out that someone knew and opened the short.
I think we've seen recently with the Amber Heard case that it's better to let these things shake out in court first.
He said, "I am switching to the Republican party, expect political hit pieces."
He has turned his legal issue into a Republican vs Democrat issue. That's slimy regardless of the veracity of the allegations.
That's not the ordering of events I'm suggesting. People have commented over time how Elon has been "moving right" for some time now. I'm suggesting it's possible that the accusation re-surfaced in response to how his political alignment shifting overall. Him saying he's "switching parties" is a soundbite for the last 5 years of his politics.
Am I imagining that Trump and Elon were portrayed in the media as having a good relationship? Wouldn't you consider that leaning more Republican, especially considering Trump's radioactivity?
A certain side of the political aside has been unhappy about Musk trying to acquire Twitter. We've already seen how the media treats the views of this group of people. A certain supreme court nominee hearing comes to mind. It really, really isn't a stretch to think they'd attempt similar things to Musk.
That is, if the allegation is actually false. If it is true, it is another matter. Musk isn't as pure as the wind-driven snow. But these sorts of things have to be based on evidence. The actual story was second hand information and the fact of a settlement doesn't prove guilt.
For years, he's donated to both political parties (as most of the ultra rich do). But for years, for every million dollars he's donated to the GOP, he's only donated just over 100,000 to the Democrats.
The only thing "liberal" about Musk is his attitude to weed (well, for himself, not his employees). Anti-tax, anti-regulation, anti-trans, etc., etc.
Oh but who could have seen this coming except oh wait everyone.
The schadenfreude has been hilarious. Twitter has been blessedly devoid of the kind of chest-thumping he typically elicits and it has been glorious.
Brian Chesky directly ripped off a popular free product called CouchSurfing then said “ok same thing but I get to be a billionaire, local housing markets lose long term rentals in exchange for teenage keg parties, and I get to buy virtue signaling billboards all over SF cause I get to be rich AND morally superior.”
Then after we lionize those guys we can make fun of the Musk fan club.
It’s crazy how one sided HN is. Seems entirely subjective and political. If one were to read the comments here, the only conclusion would be that Elon is the force of evil and a reincarnation of satan.
1) Political incongruency.
2) Character flaws.
3) Actions and actual impact.
These 3 things mix together in a toxic cocktail of hate (or love) depending on which side of the table you’re on. The sides of the table are primarily determined by 1) and the 2) and 3) are glued together to fit the narrative.
I am expecting more from HN tbh.
In a previous comment you(an HN user!) framed all comments or discussion that might portray EM in a negative light as painting him as:
> "...the force of evil and a reincarnation of satan."
A pitch-perfect example of a straw-man argument, and now you're claiming the level of discourse is not up to your standards?
I do expect more from HN than vitriol of this sorts.
Speaking of one sided... I'd argue there are many more nuanced conclusions you could derive.
I'm sure there have been comments towards him that are ad-hominem accusations of "evil", but in general and this thread specifically I think it's his virtue signaling around "free-speech" and "innovation" rightfully being called out for what they are; self-serving and quite vanilla capitalist maneuvering.
Setting up straw-man arguments like you've done is the same kind of defensive, fallacious reasoning his aforementioned zealous followers engage in.
Like Rick & Morty and Jesus, the worst thing about Elon tends to be his fans.
No one is exploiting anyone. It is at-will employment. Provides a living wage to thousands of employees to raise their families.
If wealth was stolen, then we'd not have any growth in GDP. 90% people lived in poverty in the 19th century. Capitalism improved lives of millions of people. Every single person is better off today than in 18th century.
You simply cannot become a billionaire without providing value to millions. Exceptions are inheritance and crony capitalists (often in bed with Gov).
Sergey Brin is rightfully a billionaire. He made the world better and so did pretty much any billionaire. I feel like media has been feeding people "Billionaire bad, socialism good" and people have stopped thinking for themselves.
One has to separate feelings about Elon from objective reality. Seems like a difficult thing to do for most comments here.
He’s Always been a sci go nerd who backsolves his narrative.
English is my second language and I am curious on how you would achieve this.
From my point of view it is as barebone as it can be with 125 words, 7 sentences and 4 paragraphs.
TIL and now that I know the term, I think I've had several employers use similar tactics.
There has been a sudden uptick in return to office talk (despite plenty of reporting that covid is actually much worse than people realize now). Other people on HN have mentioned it and all of a sudden the leadership at my office, who were always extremely pro-remote work have suddenly started making mention of how valuable in-face communication is.
So the feeling of a "soft layoff" might be the intended effect.
The "good worker" narrative is there to justify management's decisions and reduce survivor's guilt, but you'll see when layoffs come amazing talent and mediocre talent are equally removed. Management has zero problem laying off incredible people en masse.
In the case of the return to office dynamic, you're specifically filtering out high-quality workers who also prefer to be remote, and the results are retention of all low/medium quality workers regardless of remote/office preference, and high quality workers who don't mind or have some reason that keeps them in the office. You don't filter out low-quality workers whatsoever because they'll at least go to the office to keep their job assuming they don't have options (or else they'd be higher quality workers or maybe they just leave the work force).
...everyone for whom a full return to the office is a breaking point. You assume that correlates with capability of the employeeto perform their job well.
That does seem reasonable, but it remains just that: an assumption. And you know the thing about assumptions : they make a donkey out of U and MPTIONS.
All this to say here in response that I'm increasingly irritated at the, what's the right word? Polarization? Radicalization? Politicization? Of work options and how those options are creating new tribes and battlegrounds.
https://covid19.sccgov.org/dashboard-wastewater
A week or so ago, it didn't look too bad. It is indeed much worse than I realized right now.
>These findings translate to one in five COVID-19 survivors aged 18–64 years, and one in four survivors aged ≥65 years experiencing an incident condition that might be attributable to previous COVID-19.
> Finally, the study only assessed conditions thought to be attributable to COVID-19 or post-COVID illness, which might have biased RRs away from the null. For example, clinicians might have been more likely to document possible post-COVID conditions among case-patients. In addition, because several conditions examined are also risk factors for moderate to severe COVID-19, it is possible that case-patients were more likely to have had an existing condition that was not documented in their EHR during the year preceding their COVID-19 diagnosis, resulting in overestimated risk for this group.
It also seems very possible that people with COVID diagnoses would be more likely to be on edge about their health / long COVID type symptoms. It also would have been nice if they differentiated things that can actually be tested for vs. things that can’t.
I’m not saying there isn’t an effect. I had bad cases of COVID twice. The first time I didn’t have any apparent effects afterwards other than my sense of taste taking a while to come back. After the second time - Delta - I definitely had some after effects.
We just need to be careful about claiming how many people get them. People are placeboing themselves into actually having symptoms (or thinking they do), and it’s hard to design studies to get around that.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1529477481127759872.html
Many of these are amenable to direct observation though. Research has already had many objective findings such as lung fibrosis, kidney function damage, abnormal liver function tests, shrunken brain matter (UK biobank study), etc. So the overall number might be debateable, but this is almost certainly going to have a significant impact on the number of healthy workers, not to mention the personal tragedies behind those statistics.
You need to draw a line between Covid and colds, or else count colds like Covid.
Here's the protocol: https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/surveillance/wastewater-sur...
Also, there is no common variant of COVID that is anywhere near as mild any virus we call "common cold". In the best case (Omicron for a young, boosted individual) it's comparable with influenza in terms of severity.
Here hospitalization and deaths are not following the infection curve at all. They are still following the end of the earlier omicron curve.
I imagine, too, if there are "100x engineers" (or whatever their role is) there may be compromise otherwise that's not generally applied; I would however think that someone who's that production - unless it's somehow a mostly solo role - would necessarily need to be on-site to utilize whatever resources necessary.
Should be enough time to evaluate whom to keep and not offending anyone directly by stating economic issues
Another instance of Tesla violating labor laws, this time to get out of paying unemployment....
So people who claimed less than 24h ago it was at lest partially a way of creating cheap layoffs, were proven right pretty swiftly.
Seemed to work out well for them.
I don't think it was a good decision, but Yahoo had/has way more issues with its business than whether or not it allows employees to WFH.
Even for IT workers, I guess that sometimes you need to test on the actual hardware, and the factory is where most things happen.
I am not saying that working from home is impossible, or that banning it is a good thing, but you can't really compare Yahoo and Tesla.
For me personally, the train has left the station and I would not expect to ever consider a non-WFH job again in my career.
But that's a completely different question than asking whether companies that require physical attendance can in some cases out-compete those that don't. I think we have a tendency to project our wishes onto this debate, and not make an honest attempt at figuring out the truth.
But a company shouldn't have to mandate in-office work permanentely and for all. It should be obvious from the job profile and the working conditions, when it is advantageous to be in the office rather than at home.
This is exactly why gross profit margin typically excludes R&D, because the measure is usually used to see “is this business profitable on a per-unit basis”. That is, would you make profit if you decided to stop the long term investment.
So some of it is recognized as profits right away because the car drives into a tree autonomously in a parking lot, or grinds the wheels against a curb when asked to self park, or when it slams on the brakes randomly when going under an overpass while the lane keeping cruise control is enabled. Each new feature allows them to claim more of that $10k as profits, but they still haven't gotten their FSD delivered out of beta so they don't get all of it.
I really like my tesla, BTW. It doesn't quite live up to the promises but it is quite lovely for everything I use it for.
If someone in software dev is in an office at a different address from the factory I don't see how Tesla having a factory is relevant.
Maybe a software company should have 1/5 days in office (for meetings/dicussions/onboarding/...) while a manufacturing company might need 4/5 days for desk workers to be on site. But to say 40h of 40h should be at a desk doesn't seem like a sensible treshold.
Right now my time is 6PM and I'm at my office desk. Because I'm home. Granted, I'm writing on HN waiting for some tests, but if I had been at my office, I would have taken a 2h lunch and left at 2 or 3 this afternoon ...
Whatever Yahoo's issues were they were going on for a LONG time. Even when they HAD WFH...
The man has bought Twitter for the purposes of distracting and manipulating the public.
Business insider gave him a heads up because they asked him for comment before publishing the story.
How would you tell?
Additionally, the existence of the settlement would likely make any suit for defamation fun afoul of the anti-SLAPP laws.
The world is really complicated, and figuring out the truth from subtle signals is really hard. At best it's a game of probabilities, and I don't think we're often seeing the best in short-form comments on the internet.
A lot of commentary I see regarding the most successful entrepeneurs really triggers my suspicion for fallacious thinking, most often confirmation bias for a worldview where "the rich" are out to get everyone else and therefore are expected to lie all the time. I think that generally, the most correct explanations for the comments and behavior or entrepeneurs like Elon Musk are much more complex than that.
One thing though; I've become quite jaded towards this after seeing the firehose of lies and distortions regarding the Model 3 production ramp-up in 2017-18. It's hard to take any direct skeptical claim at face value after seeing that; the best I can do it noting that someone said this and concluding "not enough information yet to be certain".
Occasionally, there really is a conspiracy, in the sense that a lot of people have a vested interest in having things perceived a certain way. Don't dismiss the idea just because it has the word "conspiracy" in it.
This whole attitude of expect political attacks on me is disingenuous at best. Anybody with power should always expect their personal faults to be reported, whatever their political colour.
To be fair, twitter ownership is not required to use twitter for this purpose.
I understood that remark as a reference to the way Musk's bid to buy Twitter with no intention to follow-through, in light of other shameless PR ploys like the absurd political persecution claim, looks like a shameless attempt to distract people from other problems affecting Musk, such as Tesla's tanking stock price.
Two days ago the "Who is hiring" thread here had something like 20+ software engineering positions for Tesla.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31585021
More erratic decision making from Mr Musk. Like, I dunno, the time he told Twitter he was taking Tesla private while tripping on LSD. He needs to step aside from Tesla at this point.
Move fast and break things might have been fine in the early days. Seems to me like the company needs to 'grow up' and demonstrate responsibility to shareholders and customers, and to do that it likely involves significantly sidelining Musk, who clearly behaves very erratically.
Shareholders paid him tens of billions to stay after he wanted to step down as CEO after Model 3 push.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/apr/21/elon-musk-s...
Elon Musk is golden goose for Tesla shareholders.
Find me another car executive that would have been bold enough to do something like Tesla Giga Castings before Elon decided to go for it.
There are 4 entities to date that delivered people to Earth orbit:
- Russia - USA - China - SpaceX
There is only one entity that made rocket reuability profitable: SpaceX
There is no person alive with better track record on delivering things that were believed by experts to be impossible.
Shotwell is absolutely awesome, but she did not came up with the initial capital or the idea of rocket reusability and Mars settlement. She did not convince Tom Muller to join SpaceX etc. etc.
The fact that Elon noticed Shotwell and gave her COO position is an example of excellent leadership skills from Musk.
For contrast, Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin is an excellent example of bad leadership.
Boeing is also an excellent example of bad leadership.
It's been proven over and over! (not really)
But so far the results haven't been spectactular. Their goals for 2025 look like Tesla's goals for next year.
That could change, though. Ford in particular has been making a lot of solid moves recently, and unlike GM there seems to be more movement than talk.
"No idea what they're doing" is probably a bit harsh on my part, but I stand by my opinion that Ford seems to be in a better position moving forward. The F-150 Lightning is a compelling product that went from announcement to consumer driveways in the span of a year. The Cybertruck still has no ship date in sight, and feels like it was designed to appeal to people buying Brodozer's rather than people needing something to do truck stuff. And from what we've seen so far, Ford does not seem to be suffering from the same chronic quality control issues as Tesla.
This specific pattern, switching suddenly from "thousands of open positions" to “freeze and maybe layoffs” is typical for large large, mature, professionally managed companies.
Elon's been off his rocker the last couple weeks. But this is just honesty. At the end of the day, this is the CEO's job. Some dress it up with more corporate speak. Others, like Elon, are more direct.
I have a ton of respect for what he's accomplished, but from my perspective, I think he's been pretty chaotic in communications for years.
True. But he was less impulsive in his actions. The Twitter acquisition is a boondoggle. He could have just tweeted about it.
Oh, and this was immediately after the Thailand cave diver pedo fiasco, and immediately before the Joe Rogan marijuana controversy.
Two years before this, in 2016, Tesla bought the unprofitable SolarCity at a price that's truly ridiculous considering Tesla's share price today. I hardly think they've made more than a token profit in the eight years since. The thing seemed like a spur-of-the-moment decision.
I don't think we're seeing a difference of magnitude in Musk's impulsive big decisions. Pretty sure they're strongly correlated with the personality traits that's given us the successes of SpaceX and Tesla already. I think everyone should just lean back, relax and enjoy the drama if that's what they're into. Or read a good book otherwise, and check back on the progress of Musk's companies in five years.
Also need to point out that the Twitter purchase hasn't closed yet. Musk pulling out of that at the last moment would not be very unexpected.
I want to push back on this a little: Tesla Energy's revenue was $2.79B in 2021, while SolarCity's revenue topped out at $735M in 2016 just before acquisition. SolarCity had seen 82% YoY revenue growth 2015-6, and apparently averaged 30% YoY growth for the next five years. That's not necessarily a great purchase, but it's not terrible.
>the Twitter purchase
More than anything, it was astonishingly bad timing. Few investors have ever managed to buy effectively $40B worth of tech stocks right before the whole NASDAQ collapses. But even fewer can time the market!
It was literally to save a company his brother was heavily invested into from bankruptcy, and using Tesla to do so.
Pretty sure he's malding over the fact that Chelsea Manning is boffing his ex.
But Tesla is supposed to manufacture more cars than it manufactures now. It is supposed to grow its capacity to explain its valuation, at least partially. I think they make 1 million cars per year and want to make as much as Toyota + Volkswagen combined who make probably around 20 million cars per year.
So how some short term cuts by 10% connect to the idea that Tesla will grow by 1000%?
Of course in every company you can trim some fat, but isnt Tesla supposed to expand to at least partially explain the valuation?
Also if they wash out people who can get a better job, they are left with those who are stuck there (there is a difference between firing non performers and making best people leave - I define best as someone who can find another job). Will their quality stay the same? Their competitive edge was markering and (supposedly) better technolofy / engineering / programming. Losing top staff in exchange for engineers who accept working as in a sweatshop doesnt sound mature for me.
It all depends on context though - for a company as massive as Tesla, 20+ open postings for SWE is nothing. It certainly doesn't warrant alarm bells, I think.
20 open positions, especially for an in demand profession like software, is the norm at companies at such size who are doing well.
The absolute worst thing you can do is go into a "soft freeze" mode where new hires slowly stop getting approved, backfills aren't happening, middle management gets told that hiring will be revisited next quarter, etc. Non-management employees will notice this and you'll start getting rumors circulating and people leaving.
Look at this situation, even. Elon says he's going to cut 10% of Tesla's jobs. You're a Tesla employee. Is your job on the chopping block? Should you start looking? Nearly every person at Tesla is now living with fear that they might not have a steady paycheck in a month. To me this is a way shittier situation because you're stuck in limbo for a month or more. Isn't it a lot better to have a single all-hands meeting where you announce layoffs, the people who are affected will be contacted by their manager with severance information, and the plan going forward? Rather than just having this stuff linger for months?
The long slow method gives more time for people to bail the hell out. As a worker, I think I prefer the time.
I call bullshit on the inclusion of "upper management". To think upper management cares about anything other than short term profits (and their own bonuses) is just naive. When COVID hit, the company I worked for laid off 40 people (we were just a couple of hundred employees in total). You know how they laid them off? One morning they simply asked the sysadmin to turn off their logins.
It is not a "hard decision" - to them, it is just like throwing away a chair or a table. Remember that dude who laid off 900 something people on a zoom call and shit talking them later? You mentioned morale, what do you think happens the morale of the people who found half of their (small) team laid off with zero warning, like it happened to my team?
There may be exceptions of course, but it is safe to say most companies don't give a shit about their employees, even their star employees.
I am not complaining about layoffs here (though the way they do it is cruel). Just pointing out that companies are not as heartbroken about it as you seem to think. It is just business
But thinking that being a C-level automatically means you're a Patrick Bateman style sociopath treating people like furniture is an immature take, especially for a forum like this, where so many people are entrepreneurs and upper management themselves. They're still people.
Everyone is judged on the basis of their actions, not their words. When you're a CEO managing 10 people, you feel the weight of every firing. When you can tell your lieutenants "slash headcount by 10%", you don't feel the weight as much. It's the difference between hand-to-hand combat and firing a drone missile from a command center thousands of miles away.
Companies have all sorts of fake job openings, even when things are good now. They view it as a form of marketing, showing that they're growing. That it wastes applicants' time applying is an externality. It's not hurting them.
> Isn't it a lot better to have a single all-hands meeting where you announce layoffs, the people who are affected will be contacted by their manager with severance information, and the plan going forward?
Well, maybe. But if my employer announced layoffs, I would be looking for a new job the next day regardless of whether I was included. For one thing, 10% layoffs is unlikely to correspond to 10% reduction in total work, so my workload just grew by 10%, and somehow I doubt I'm getting a 10% raise to compensate. For another, the company has now lost its ability to attract top-tier talent, for several years if not forever.
I thought it was short-sighted. There were a small number of qualified people for the positions and we constantly complained that it was hard to find them. If one of those qualified candidates applies to a position and gets ghosted, they may never apply again, either because they lose their confidence or out of spite.
There is an art to wording the communication in such a way that it does not lie outright, nor does it spell out a hiring freeze.
This reminds me what I once read about the challenges of zookeeping big cats. They tend to appear very often perfectly healthy until one day they just die. And when you do an autopsy on them you realise that they were sick since weeks or even month, but it often does not “show” in a way you would expect.
The speculation is that since they are not incentivised evolutionary to show that they are hurt. In the wild they are often solitary creatures so no one would or could help them, on the other hand if they appear hurt that would invite other predators to challenge them. Sounds like the incentive structure is very similar for companies.
Big cuts like that, in my experience, happen when there is an either mismanagement or an external shock that requires action faster than what can be achieved with natural turnover.
Otherwise, headcount targets can be reached by managing the hiring rate. There is always natural turn-over. If you need to grow, hiring rate>turnover rate, if you need to shrink hiring rate<turnover rate.
I'd be the last person to defend Elon Musk, I don't know the guy, but just want to point out that when you're at his level of wealth and power you also have very wealthy, powerful enemies.
I see ongoing, what appears to be coordinated, attempts in the mainstream/social media to paint him as crazy. I have no special access to the truth but I'd be unsurprised if those stories are 100% politically motivated and have no basis in reality.
The parent never used the word crazy, you did. His behavior is erratic. I don't know how that's not obvious to anyone watching him. Does it make him crazy? I don't know, but he is most certainly erratic.
As a reminder, this kind of thinking lead to the worst atrocities of 20th century history.
Elon has Asperger's syndrome. So no, it's not "pushing things a little to far" if you read up on what the Nazi's did to children diagnosed with the syndrome.
We’re not arguing against some point Musk made, we’re arguing against his fit for his role, and his erratic behavior is absolutely a factor to consider, and in particular it is not an “ad hominem.”
It is absolutely pushing things a little too far to make the jump from “this person is behaving erratically” to anything resembling what the Nazis did to children with Aspergers.
It’s incredible you can legitimately think it’s comparable.
We were literally talking about his character - that was the argument and the point and nothing else.
So it's pretty clear why these interests would want to badmouth Musk, but this doesn't really change the viability of the fundamental business models of Tesla and SpaceX. Basically, this is an industrialist model, not a financialist model, and that's the opposite of what the likes of Warren Buffett have been into. Industrialist models are really what the USA needs, the whole neoliberal financialization game has been a disaster for most of the country.
There is a lot to criticize about Elon Musk but he's too influential for any of that criticism to reach the majority.
When you're that wealthy you can also circumvent the law. During the pandemic, Tesla "threatened" to move from California to another state if they wouldn't be allowed to reopen their factories. This caused the state of California to basically make an exception for them... so they circumvented the law which other smaller companies could not do.
Personally i can't understand the obsession with someone like Elon Musk or even someone like Bill Gates... It's easy to control your image when you're a billionaire, so you don't actually have to behave and live ethically.
You realize that much of our opinions aren't from critical think but are simply assigned to us by elites.
Do Musk's own tweets fall into this category?
Musk is certainly an elite.
The elite that I had in mind, however, were the establishment elite.
He went a bit too far with the Twitter buyout stunt.
Honestly, he should just get off social media and take a vacation or something. But of course he’s too egotistical to do that and will try to muddle his way through it. Its amusing to watch as an outsider but I can’t imagine its a lot of fun for people at Musk companies (+ Twitter).
And from all that... to this?
From a much admired and respected 'inventor' to a cringeworthy Twitter 'edgelord.' Just been a crazy ride.
[0] https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/03/elon-musk-post-series.html
There could be all kinds of other factors, but I have been a Musk watcher for a decade and I have a theory on the timing.
There was a major shift in Musk’s public behavior, and his state residency, around the time he was about to have to pay a lot of CA state income tax.
Having to write a ten digit check to the government appears to make most people lose some of their rational thinking abilities.
They seem to go into a siege mentality for one thing.
It appears to me that humans are just not evolved to handle his level of wealth/resource disparity.
In the US (and many countries) we don’t actually have work contracts as full-time employees. Offer letters aren’t contracts, as an lawyer will remind us.
Companies can, and will, change employment terms and compensation as they want.
Tesla does have an exception process for remote work, though.
Any kind of competent HR department will be able to manage a paper trail sufficient to dismiss at-will employees in a bullet-proof way, especially in a general business turndown.
A well-executed termination of at-will employees because of a change to the business environment is basically never going to fit into any of the exception categories to at-will, again assuming a competent HR department. Pretending otherwise doesn't help anyone.
Edit: If you’re looking for SWEs, I’ve spoken to three at Tesla who are looking for new opportunities. They’re an org to target for talent acquisition.
I've seen this claim a few times now. Are we actually sure it's true? Or does it just shift long-term spending trends?
For example maybe people don't go to lots of inner city coffee bars in business districts any more but local cafes near residential areas are thriving.
Maybe people don't stop in big stores on their way home from work but home delivery services are thriving.
Maybe bad managers who don't understand how to support and motivate their teams are having problems with people slacking off at home. What if good managers who look after their people and engender a degree of trust and even loyalty are improving their team's performance by making their people's lives better?
It seems far too early to draw broad conclusions about the effects of population-scale remote working but early enough to be confident that some people really like it but it's not for everyone and that some types of businesses benefit from the shift away from the office while others lose out.
My observation though based just on traffic patterns is that debates about remote work are something of a bubble at this point. When I've had to go into the relatively nearby city a couple times lately rush hour traffic seemed as bad as ever although train/subway seemed relatively light.
People don't buy coffee on the way to work, people don't buy coffee on the way home, people don't buy sandwiches and snacks, people don't spend money on commuting, people don't spend money at resturants for launch, companies stop having team lunches.
People don't go to cafes locally because they have a coffee machine at home. Most people buy coffee and drinks on the way to work out of ease not that they taste better.
> Maybe bad managers who don't understand how to support and motivate their teams are having problems with people slacking off at home. What if good managers who look after their people and engender a degree of trust and even loyalty are improving their team's performance by making their people's lives better?
This talk of having good and bad managers makes no real sense. Companies aren't just going to fire managers. That would be unfair.
> It seems far too early to draw broad conclusions about the effects of population-scale remote working but early enough to be confident that some people really like it but it's not for everyone and that some types of businesses benefit from the shift away from the office while others lose out.
Too early? Two-years in?
Yes. It's been two years when so many other things haven't been normal though--and to some degree still aren't. And it takes time for people to, for example, commit to working remotely on a more or less permanent basis, e.g. by moving to a location that doesn't have good local job prospects.
Remote work is also mostly a topic for a relatively limited number of "knowledge workers." If anything, it looks like the change will be less than some were expecting. (Though even relatively modest changes can, at scale, have fairly significant knock-on effects.)
We used to be better about cooking meals for the week and bringing them to work, right now we only sometimes eat last night's leftovers for lunch.
I've got more restaurants within 5-10 minute drive of my house than near my old office.
Coffee is a valid point though. We mostly make that at home now. But then again at the office I just got coffee from the Keurig in the break room, so not much difference there either. We still get Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts coffee about twice a week, usually on the weekends.
Starbucks, at least, seems to have completely recovered its dip in revenue in 2020 and was making more revenue than ever (until the slight dip this most recent quarter, due to the national economic downturn) and doesn't need any extra help:
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/SBUX/starbucks/rev...
And this money just goes poof instead of being reallocated elsewhere?
> People don't go to cafes locally because they have a coffee machine at home. Most people buy coffee and drinks on the way to work out of ease not that they taste better.
This is the broken window fallacy. Just like you can't improve the economy by breaking people's windows to get them to spend money on window repair, you can't improve the economy by forcing people to go to work to get them to spend money on coffee and gas
Plenty go to work from coffee shops which they wouldn’t if they were in an office. Coffee shops with WiFi are thriving. They still buy take out lunches. Or they buy more groceries so they can cook and eat healthier food. They have more time due to lack of commute and allocate it to spending on something else (like a hobby, meeting friends, keeping fit etc).
The money is just be reallocated elsewhere.
So your argument that remote work harms the economy is because it hurts businesses that sell coffee for at least a 10x markup over what it would cost to make it yourself when the one advantage they offered - convenience - ceased to be relevant? Should we also mourn the demise of the horse and cart? That's not how economics works. The money that was being spent on coffees doesn't just disappear. It becomes available to spend on something else and the greater efficiency is a boon overall.
As for things like transportation of commuters that's a clear win for both quality of life (less time wasted on journeys) and the environment (less pollution and consumption of resources for unnecessary journeys). And again economically what is lost in transport infrastructure might be gained in better communications infrastructure and technology that enable better working from home and bring other benefits as well.
People don't go to cafes locally because they have a coffee machine at home.
There's a cafe just down the road from my home. It's a family-run business that employs local people. Everything is made fresh and the quality of the food is significantly better than the average chain sandwich shop.
They now have so many new staff working for them that I don't even know everyone's name any more. It must be at least 3x the scale they were pre-COVID. They are busy throughout the day with tradespeople stopping in on a break or parents with young families getting out out of the house for a while. Of course at lunchtime they are packed and even with the extra help and redesigned kitchen they now have there is usually still a bit of a wait at the peak time.
My impression is that even when working from home a lot of people still like to get out of the house for a break now and then and still value the convenience of having a decent lunch made for them. I don't see the market for this kind of local place going anywhere. On the contrary the growth in demand has been obvious.
Companies aren't just going to fire managers. That would be unfair.
It's unfair to fire people who can't get results when literally the only reason to employ them is to improve results and they are demonstrably incompetent? That's an interesting perspective but I'm not sure it's going to result in a lot of groundbreaking economics papers getting published any time soon...
Too early? Two-years in?
Of course. Since COVID started we've seen huge changes in our lifestyles. We've seen patterns in property markets sharply disrupted. We've obviously seen business arrangements change fundamentally for a lot of knowledge workers. The way we shop has changed. The way we socialise has changed. Use of technology (by non-experts) has changed. Education has changed. How we think about our health and provide healthcare has changed.
I would be surprised if we know what the "new normal" looks like before at least another 5-10 years have passed. I doubt it will ever be the same as the old normal no matter what a few dinosaurs in business and government might think about subjects like remote working. They'll simply be outcompeted by employers who offer a pleasant working environment and take care of their staff whether that's in a company building or at home or on the move or some mix of those.
I generally agree although a lot of things have generally drifted back to business as usual.
However, other patterns still need to play out.
The degree to which pre-pandemic office work for knowledge workers who can work remotely goes back to pre-pandemic patterns still has to play out and I suspect, for many, there will at least be greater flexibility in the future.
Many US cities were still losing population 25 years ago. There's certainly no law of nature that younger educated people will continue to reverse this trend as they have the past couple of decades.
Things like big in-person business conferences have come back to some degree but it's unclear if they'll ever be back to business-as-usual.
The list goes on. I'm not sure the disruption will be as great as some envisioned but a lot of things were paused and it's unclear they will look the same as they unpause.
Early on in the pandemic, there were lots of predictions about what pandemic activities would stay and which would be dropped/be much diminished. The evidence seems to suggest that things today are a lot more like the before times than they are different.
> I've seen this claim a few times now. Are we actually sure it's true? Or does it just shift long-term spending trends?
Yes. This is a very good example of what is known in economics as the "broken window" fallacy. It's very easy to only account for the effects you measure and ignore what might otherwise have happened. [1]
"It is not seen that as our shopkeeper has spent six francs upon one thing, he cannot spend them upon another. It is not seen that if he had not had a window to replace, he would, perhaps, have replaced his old shoes, or added another book to his library. In short, he would have employed his six francs in some way, which this accident has prevented."
[1] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Essays_on_Political_Economy/T...
It very much matters when a Judge who is politically appointed as they are in the US has to decide if you're right or wrong. Then what is better for the economy and for corporations will win out.
2) given that this sort of thing is very common during a downturn, I think Tesla's lawyers probably have a well worked out method on how to do it; I'm not saying it's kosher, but it's common. The only reason this gets so much press is that it's Elon Musk.
I can come in at 7AM, crush it, and leave at 2PM. Here is the thing, however - the guy who came in at 10:30AM and is sitting at his computer for some reason at 7PM is going to be viewed as the "hard worker". It's all bullshit.
If this is what Musk is doing, he is going to shed some of his most productive workers and leave those in place who are just good at fronting.
Different.
2007/08 was a financial crisis, and global banking infrastructure almost imploded. Here we're talking about deglobalization, supply chain issues and, well, a war.
What's interesting is that the main problems may not be US focussed, it may happen around the world (although no one will be safe). For example, hard to imagine the Canadian real estate sector isn't going to melt down...
That said, wonder what's going to happen with cost of living and property market going thru the roof everywhere. Riots? Ain't got time for that when you need to feed yourself.
How are you measuring this? By conventional metrics, it's less than 10% [1].
That could be $3000 of spending reduction for me that isn't replaced with $3000 of other consumption, but rather a significant portion of it goes into savings/investments.
I think that was true during lock-outs, for obvious reasons, but now? On the contrary, people have more money to spend and the opportunity to spend it.
Funny enough I probably go out more now than I did before, something about WFH is a lot less draining and I don’t feel the urge to take a unexpected nap at 6pm.
It will be far worse since we're still in the unresolved credit bubble that created that crash. We never actually solved the core problems that created that crisis.
What we're seeing now is the beginning of what we have avoided for over a decade, and narrowly dodged during the pandemic, start to finally unravel.
Is it just bias from such a long, fun ride that tech has had that make people unable to see this? Back in 2019 there were plenty of people deeply worried about our credit system and the fragility of our global economy. Our actions to avoid catastrophe in 2020 only allowed the issue to become worse.
We've been living in a fantasy economy so long people have started to believe that nothing is real (just a few days ago there was a post claiming that "natural resources" don't exist and everything is fantasy). But a variety of factors are coming together that so that we'll see the revenge of reality. I don't think it's going to be pretty.
Unless you're deep in the financial industry you couldn't have possibly known the details of what was coming in 2008 in 2007. However you easily could tell, if you were paying attention, that something wasn't right in 2007.
Plenty of analysts and economists much smarter and more informed than me have been worried about the massive credit bubble we're in and the consequences of that popping.
While I agree, it would be far more interesting to know exactly what is going to cause the system to snap, it doesn't mean that observations that something is deeply wrong and we are very likely in for a lot of trouble are invalid "doomerism".
Additionally, what's your evidence that this will be less severe than 2008?
We'll now see who will survive this correction, no matter how long it takes.
Robotic factories, Fool Self Driving, Machine Learning on huge real-world dataset, etc, etc.
One of those moments where the typo feels a lot more accurate than the correct word.
A lot of people have the capacity to set aside morals/ethics for a bit of chump change.
The work is interesting. I'm sure the people making nuclear bombs probably said the same thing. Or the death star. "It is such interesting work" Yeah ok.
And everyone is acting like the best employees are going to be the ones quitting. Nah, the best employees are highly engaged employees not ones that are technically talented but will flee just because they have to go to an office. Your most technically talented employees are often not your best employees nor your most valuable. They're important and expensive, but the person in ops that gets paid a low salary but knows the ins and outs of everything and knows how to troubleshoot everything to the point that stuff is fixed is vital. A software developer who is really smart can and will be replaced.
There will be HR people working on retention of top employees as we speak. https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/m-and-a/our-insi... gives an insight into this when it comes to M&As
Also, have you ever worked in a company affected by consultants like you suggest? They don't have capability to recognize or motivate good people .
You better bet there is some amount of dead weight/low rated employees who have been interviewing around for there own reasons and haven't been getting any decent offers, so they just rest and vest. They'll happily return to office while the high performers get some $700k offer elsewhere
This is exactly why Netflix decides to pay very nicely for you to quit, if you reach out to your manager about that. They don't want you to stay an extra year trying to pass hard interview loops elsewhere
It talks about employees that were very productive and happy hitting a stumbling block and suddenly realizing that "hey, this isn't the same place it used to be", and then leaving.
Saying "no work from home" and "10% layoffs" are much bigger triggers for this than getting rid of free sodas.
Sounds like that ops guy should be paid more...
It's hard not to be long Tesla and take this financial turbulence as that, turbulence.
This is an investor perspective though, not an employee perspective. When it comes to jobs, "just sit and wait" is not necessarily the best strategy.
Sometimes large layoffs mean absolutely nothing - for example, if a company lays off a loss-making division that's nothing to do with your work. If you work on advertising for Facebook and they lay off the entire VR headset division, your job might remain entirely secure.
Sometimes layoffs mean the company is short of money - that products aren't bringing in enough revenue to cover costs, and investors aren't looking to pump in more cash. This might mean there will be further rounds of layoffs in the near future; subsequent layoffs might be less generous; and there might be a freeze on raises or promotions, no matter how well you perform.
On the other hand, I've known people get big promotions at failing companies, as their superiors leave for greener pastures. So your employer being in decline doesn't always mean freezes on promotions!
Some layoffs mean the bosses think bad hires have been made - that the company has too many indolent employees putting in just enough effort to not get fired. Maybe that colleague everybody knows is useless will finally get fired. On the other hand, if the bosses think people like you are dead weight, that might not bode well for your career.
Sometimes layoffs mean the company has changed strategy and areas that were seen as money-makers (like adding new features to the product) are now seen as cost centers. This may indicate there will be less work developing new greenfield code and worrying about chasing the cutting edge. If you're near the end of your career that might be fine; if you're early in your career, it might mean this isn't the place to keep your skills up-to-date.
Tesla has some solid engineering to their credit, but they also have a reputation for poor quality control (in fit and finish in particular). It would be one thing if Elon Musk showed some initiative in addressing these QC issues. The recent Twitter diversion however along with other erratic behavior by Musk seems to indicate a lack of focus, at a time where a strong focus at Tesla is sorely needed. Tesla can no longer coast in the EV market, they will be far from the only player in the future.
For who?
So yesterday when it was Coinbase [0] announcing cuts the reaction was, 'ha ha crypto bad', 'worst of luck to them' and now when it also affects companies like Tesla, now the reaction is 'Shocking', 'everyone is doing it now', 'I wouldn't read much into it. A 10% cut is completely normal and healthy for a company the size of Tesla.'
This to me sounds like some form of cope that many thought the market was always going up forever.
The recent market rally of 2020 had to come to an end.
Mostly because of utterly insane injections of cash into the economy, whether by unsafe lending practices creating money out of thin air (which ended up causing 2008ff) or by the central banks creating money out of thin air and buying up assets.
Now, especially after two years of pandemic-related bailouts, there's no government whose balance sheet hasn't been hit hard... governments can't take up more debt to inject into the economy, and the central banks cannot because inflation is already skyrocketing across the world.
Additionally, the people are fed up with social inequality worldwide - they saw that a lot of wealth was redistributed from the bottom to the top stock owners over the last two years. It may very well be that governments shift focus from propping up the stock markets to preventing social unrest, not to mention climate change which is bound to send a lot of companies' worth towards the bottom as their business model becomes outdated (e.g. car manufacturers, oil/gas companies).
The startups who are paranoid of the markets and prepare in advance for profitability will continue to survive and the startups constantly raising money each week and making little to no revenue will be caught swimming naked when the market retraces. Fast is a prime example of this.
We could have another dotcom style crash and it may take another 3 - 4 years to get back to the same all time highs again where that is still possible.
I wouldn’t be surprised if we just go sideways for a year or two in the market as fed tries to balance inflation and growth to get out of the Covid bubble without a disaster
I took a macro economics course at university that year, taught by a professor who was just about to retire after 40 years of teaching the subject. He was blunt with us: "I don't know what's going to happen, but I bet it's going to be interesting!".
I don't even know if he's still alive (he was in his 70s then and still teaching!) but I bet if he is, he's saying the same things now.
Basically, you sell a call option, and use the proceeds to buy a protective put option.
You can buy a protective put directly, but that costs money. This helps offset the cost buy selling a call. You can play with the strike prices of each to get more/less insurance depending on your risk tolerance.
For example, you might sell a call 5% above current prices (expiring in a year), buy a put for 10% below prices (expiring in a year), and pocket the difference.
Other comments suggest a collar or TIPS which are both fine suggestions. I wouldn’t mess with options unless you know what you’re doing. I threw a bunch of extra cash into a TIPS etf with ticker “TIP”. I’m also selling puts on commodities futures, bought US energy stocks, and bought a house last year (as rent is skyrocketing and inflation will eat away at my debt). I STILL have a shitload of cash idk what to do with…
Some people like gold but I don’t get it personally. Don’t copy me I’m tolerating quite a bit of risk.
The article says "super bad feeling about the economy", and that their Shanghai factory hasn't been able to reopen. The former sounds like BS.
Then it talks about inflation concerns, but that's not a good reason to get rid of employees that will be locked into pre-inflation salaries for the next N years.
Other than "we're not fixing the factory any time soon", the only thing I can think of is that they're looking at early market share info, and expect to be steam rolled by the existing auto manufacturers in the next few years (to the point where they can make more cars than they can sell, which is currently unthinkable!)
[Edit: A sibling comment says this won't touch the manufacturing parts of the company. So, they're laying off sales, management and engineering, I guess? That's a better fit with Elon's ego. I guess the plan is to just coast for a few years during the downturn? If so, that's a textbook mistake big companies make during recessions -- when the economy recovers, they're surprised that they're not competitive anymore!]
I bet he is doing this out of spite. The man has been acting really strange in the past few months.
> Tesla will be reducing salaried headcount by 10%, as we have become overstaffed in many areas. Note, this does not apply to anyone actually building cars, battery packs or installing solar. Hourly headcount will increase.
This addresses any confusion about how two new factories could ramp if overall headcount was going to take a 10% hit. But to be fair to CNBC, they probably didn't have this context when they wrote the article and headline.
Source: https://twitter.com/WholeMarsBlog/status/1532728341865943040
Musk is a slave? Best conspiracy theory I've heard this month.
https://www.law360.com/articles/1324006/tiffany-lvmh-lower-m...
https://fortune.com/2022/05/25/elon-musk-equity-component-tw...
He's illiquid, not insolvent. Selling equity in Twitter or selling his equity in Tesla would be two ways to gain liquidity without leverage.
You're going to survive 10 months.
Suppose you fire 10%, so now you spend $99/month and let's say revenue is linear, so now you make $90/month. You're now going to last 100/9 = 11.11 months and that's more than 10% longer already.
Now if you fire from positions that you got in anticipation of them contributing but they don't then you could even go negative to positive.
So it's not 10% more days even in the worst case where you are running something like a consulting business where revenue is proportional to number of heads and for complex operations it can make you profitable.
He might be thinking he can get 5% of the people to quit just based on differences in values, making his remaining employees more homogenous and giving them a common culture.
He came as Republican not as a Republic. Give it a few more years.
WFH.. criticism about Twitter.. all things better discussed when economy recovers.. how convenient..
Also, this is supply chain related.
Do you find it odd that all the stories coming out refer to this single Reuters statement?
People are much more compliant when afraid of losing their livelihoods
It's a shame because the thoughtful, moderate commenters just leave and are less likely to come back.
And btw SpaceX laid off around the same pct of workers a while back and they're doing fine now. Same with a lot of companies, some of which I was working for at the time, and I don't think their leadership was evil.
HN comments have been going downhill for years.
Considering how bad Elon is at making predictions, this is actually great news.
Musk is the world’s wealthiest individual. I’m having trouble seeing see how being bad at making predictions results in that outcome.
On paper.
He bet big on EVs, which the market rewarded. Same happened with Microsoft and computers maybe thirty years ago, main difference being that Tesla is not holding a semi monopoly, and competitors are catching up quickly.
How do you measure that? All sales figures show the contrary.
Also, two days ago https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-01/vw-ceo-sa...
>Volkswagen AG said Tesla Inc. is moving twice as quickly as the rest of the industry that needs to pick up the pace in the shift to making electric vehicles packed with software.
"Covid will be gone by April 2020":
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1240754657263144960
"FSD will be achieved by 2018":
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/686279251293777920
"Neuralink in human brains by 2020":
https://news.yahoo.com/everything-know-neuralink-elon-musks-...
Being wealthy has also a lot to do with being at the right place, at the right time, inherited wealth, and outsourcing efficiently.
That being said, do you think the majority of the predictions he makes in going about his every day business are wrong?
To get to the point Musk has reached, it seems to me that that would, over a lifetime, require a person making billions (?) of small predictions that no one ever hears about. I think it must be the case that he’s very good at making those kinds of predictions.
I agree with you that being wealthy does confer a great advantage to people. I don’t think it explains everything about Elon Musk and the success he has achieved to date.
To be clear, I don’t believe in free will. It seems like an error to me to look at a successful person and claim that they achieved their success single-handedly.
OP is discussing his prediction about the economy though.
When they command the attention and loyalty of millions of people who believe everything they say, yes they matter a great deal.
"Work 80 hr weeks! Be just like me!"
Musk: becomes worlds richest person
Employees: laid off
What planet do you live on where you see this as a sustainable, world-improving system for the world and for compensation? Anyone that works 50 hr weeks for this dude is out of their mind.
Where did the OP say or imply that?
I seriously doubt the OP was surprised by the concept of at-will employment. What the OP said was "Anyone that works 50 hr weeks for this dude is out of their mind." In other words, they are doing it voluntarily, but it's still a bad idea for them, maybe even delusional.
If you've ever had a bad exit from an employer, you start to rethink the sacrifices you made for the employer while you were there.
Nonetheless, both China and Russia have switched from communism to capitalism while remaining violently bad, so it seems dubious that this is determined by the economic system rather than the political system.
"Tesla CEO Elon Musk has a “super bad feeling” about the economy and needs to cut about 10% of jobs at the electric carmaker"
"Musk has warned in recent weeks about the risk of a recession, but his email ordering a hiring freeze and staff cuts was the most direct and high-profile message of its kind from the head of an automaker."
"Musk’s gloomy outlook echoes recent comments from executives including JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and Goldman Sachs President John Waldron.
A “hurricane is right out there down the road coming our way,” Dimon said this week."
In other words, he's doing his job and preparing the company to weather a very likely recession. Judging from the tone of your comment though, I imagine you would prefer if he neglected his responsibility to the company and its shareholders in order to spare some of his workers the inconvenience of looking for another job. That way the entire company can suffer together and lose even more positions.
"Please don't comment on whether someone read an article." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Probably in this case the shareholder representatives on the board are privately pressuring Musk to do layoffs. People seem either ignorant of this fact or unwilling to comment on this fact, but the major shareholders (mutual and institutional funds) can be seen here:
https://money.cnn.com/quote/shareholders/shareholders.html?s...
Maybe the bigger point is that while blue-collar workers in the USA have been treated like disposable units for years under the neoliberal program, now the white-collar workers who thought they were above all that are going to get the same treatment, much to their shock and dismay. Should have seen it coming.
Now, if the shareholders were all working employees of the corporation, that would make sense. Otherwise what role do they serve?
I have nothing against employee owned corporations. If people want to get together and run and work for their own corporation then more power to them. I don't think it should be the only type of corporation though, we need a variety of models to adapt to changing circumstances and service different needs.
Most job are bullshit job these day.
A lot of companies are actively making society worse for their profits.
Almost all product fabrication have left the US for China.
Is that the case, though.
I for one don't care if Musk is the wealthiest person on Earth, or just some random middle class Joe. Fact is, he absolutely _loves_ to tout how much harder and longer he works than anyone else. That alone screams "bad leader" all around, and in my experience, anyone going public on matters like this, is overcompensating.
> ... it’s not just Elon Musk that gets this.
This is a very specific issue we are talking about. I cannot recall Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page... making public statements about how much more they work than their employees, or how lazy and entitled their employees are. So while other wealthy individuals may get some hate, it's certainly not because they very publicly insult their workers.
1. Musk didn't act like an asshole to his employees.
2. Even if he was an asshole to his employees, that is irrelevant.
3. Even if it was relevant, he is right about it, so it doesn't matter.
4. Even if he was wrong and an asshole, his supposed contributions are enough to forgive it.
5. In any case, _I_ would have behaved similarly about certain things (not true), so I'm a hypocrite I guess?
Gotta say, my parents don't love me half as much as Elon's fanboys love him. Must be nice to be him.
Of course you wouldn't.