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Comment by mjr00 | Hacker News Reader

Not defending Tesla or Musk specifically here, but this happens all the time. Until you're ready to announce to internal staff (and publicly, if you're large enough) that you're in a hiring freeze and/or doing layoffs, you need to keep up appearances that things are operating normally, even if that means keeping up the recruiting pipeline for positions that you have no intention of hiring.

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.

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> you need to keep up appearances that things are operating normally, even if that means keeping up the recruiting pipeline for positions that you have no intention of hiring

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.

That happens with house cats too. They’re good at hiding signs of weakness.

I've experienced similar at a large tech employer. During a brief, now-forgotten market downturn, we froze hiring but kept open all of our position advertisements, in order to keep the pipeline 'warm'.

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.

Why would you ghost them? You should politely let people know that it was not a match at this time and hopefully in the future you will get back to them.

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.

While this may be true from the perspective of upper management, it is a very shitty way to treat the people who work for you, or would like to.

What's the alternative? Telling all of your employees "hey we're thinking about layoffs that may or may not happen, and we don't know who will be affected" would be a massive morale hit and make people leave. Until the final decision is made -- and this is a hard decision that everyone, including upper management, wants to avoid making until absolutely necessary -- it's best to keep it close to the chest. Just because you've planned for it doesn't mean you'll execute on it.

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?

this is a hard decision that everyone, including upper management

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

I'm not going to pretend that layoffs are harder on upper management than employees or anything. Getting laid off sucks ass and there's no sugarcoating it.

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.

If you're at C-level at a company of Tesla's size, you are still a person, just compensated as though you were 50 persons. That is going to change how you're perceived, like it or not.

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.

You don't see those folks taking a paycut to keep the furniture around though.

Once you've started layoffs, the possibility that there will be layoffs in the future is much higher. Anybody at Tesla who doesn't get hit in the initial round should be thinking about what if there's a round 2. I'd personally be grabbing my parachute, or at least sizing one for myself.

The long slow method gives more time for people to bail the hell out. As a worker, I think I prefer the time.

Well, one alternative is not to get into that situation in the first place.

> 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.

While it is possible some people are trying to do the right thing, it seems more likely they simply don't care.

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.

As a worker, I'd prefer to have the time to prepare. By, for example, job hunting. Or at the least updating and polishing my resume.

"This happens all the time" at badly managed companies, or perhaps at well managed companies if there is a huge macroeconomic shock like in 2001 or 2009. Given that great software is what supposedly gives Tesla its competitive advantage, it's really bizarre to me to go from having 20 open software dev positions to a layoff within 48 hours, because Elon Musk "has a very bad feeling" based on no new data points as far as we can tell. Unless he learned something this week that he isn't telling us.

People always leave. Isn't people leaving the desired result?

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.

This was very insightful. Thanks for that.

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