Tesla employee of nearly 5 years was sacked over the phone while on vacation | Hacker News Reader

Tesla employee of nearly 5 years was sacked over the phone while on vacation

businessinsider.com

74 pointsmetadat41 comments

Upside of working for Tesla: Build cool machines. Musk sees the upside of systems, automation, and metrics as potentially unlimited.

Downside of working for Tesla: Be treated like an obsolete machine which must be deeply manipulated in order to work like the needed object. Musk demonstrates that he sees humans as fundamentally lacking and suspect, _especially_ insofar as they represent themselves as serving his aims.

Musk is also continually caught demonstrating that he respects renegade iconoclasts and their opinions more than the rational needs of his own hardworking employees.

This is a really dangerous dichotomy for his businesses right now, since the world is rapidly changing its opinion on manipulators, and tech is a really convenient place to start with that, since it is mechanistic by default and must build on a foundation of broad ethical agreement. Once the ethical agreement fades and the group is mistreated, that foundation is gone.

IMO Musk should immediately take steps to demonstrate that he can build and support ethical community frameworks. They should be directly informed by those who help him make all of his systematizing dreams come true. (If this sounds boring or silly to him, he should find his place of best fit in the overall system of business development, probably focusing on continually starting projects from the ground up with simpatico groups.)

The rest of his ethics focus (support for individual values, freedoms, & positions) is way too personal and will continue allowing group-ethics blind spots to go neglected. It's long-term drawing way too much goodwill from his employees, their families, drivers of his cars, the investors, etc.

Building electric cars is the definition of ethical behaviour.

It goes to show that sometimes a descriptive title doesn't capture the whole reality of the person to whom it is bestowed.

Which is exactly what his employees do, not him. Creating a toxic work environment for ethical workers is not ethical.

Nothing more ethic than using batteries for which raw materials were dug out by children.

https://www.mining.com/tesla-apple-google-microsoft-dodge-co...

> Musk should immediately take steps to demonstrate that he can build and support ethical community frameworks

That might be good advice, but is hinging on one massive prerequisite: I am not sure he actually can.

Hes an asshat, and proud of it -- even if he could creat an 'ethical' community, he wouldn't want to.

Yeah I'm sure the richest people in the world that still spend ridiculous amounts of their time trying to get EVEN MORE wealthy are going to stop everything and focus on ethics.

Musk has his flaws, but he's not hiding them like a Bezos, a Gates or you know all the de mortuis nil nisi bonums.

Bezos, I think, is less ethical than Musk. He gets some flak but it's less visceral than what Musk gets. Maybe it's because Musk is more of an iconic figure than Bezos who's seen as a grubby business guy.

> Upside of working for Tesla: Build cool machines.

Only if your definition of "cool machines" is a touch screen.

I am nitpicking - I think the touchscreen is built by someone else.

> Musk demonstrates that he sees humans as fundamentally lacking and suspect, _especially_ insofar as they represent themselves as serving his aims.

Musk sees himself in others.

> "During this call, my manager told me that I would receive a severance offer over an e-mail and urged me to sign a separation agreement to get a severance payment of one week's salary."

> The separation agreements also contain a clause that prevents laid-off staff from bringing legal claims against Tesla, per the plea.

Nickel and dime your shadily-terminated workers at the end. Classy.

What I've never understood is the type of person that tries to convince people they've worked with for years to sign a document like that. How do you baldly screw over somebody you know? Just because your own boss told you to?

I was in a situation like that once (designate percentage of your staff for the chopping block "in case the order comes"), and just told my boss no.

How do they sleep at night?

I am guessing they sleep very well at night knowing that their job is still there. There are many ways you can spin this to convince yourself that you didn't do anything wrong.

The introspection you're talking about requires a strong moral compass and sadly its existence is not as common as you think/hope.

"Tom went aboard one of the big transient boats that night with his heavy satchel of miscellaneous plunder, and slept the sleep of the unjust, which is serener and sounder than the other kind, as we know by the hanging-eve history of a million rascals."

Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson, end of Chapter XV.

"Fire them or you're fired" works wonders.

> Just because your own boss told you to?

You’re seeing survivorship bias, whenever I’ve been in this situation and said no, I was canned as well. You’re also usually not gonna have your boss sit down your and explain how he was told to fire some % of you but refused

I imagine having children who want food, shelter, and healthcare is pretty motivating. People do a lot worse for much less.

Wow, I know severance isn't generally a legal requirement but effectively one day per year at the company...

“ separation agreement to get a severance payment of one week's salary.”

One week… dang that’s cheap.

Ever since return to office, I walk by the Teslas in the EV lane, and half of them passive aggressively blink their headlights at me and play the throbbing anus animation on the dashboards.

However, I'm still repeatedly shocked by how quickly that company is burning down its brand.

I'm extremely happy with my non-Tesla EV. It has a modern entertainment system (lane keeping/smart cruise are an option), but no touch screens.

It handles ridiculously well, and efficiency is comparable to the best Teslas (range is worse, but it was inexpensive used, and it's for my commute).

> half of them passive aggressively blink their headlights at me and play the throbbing anus animation on the dashboards

Alright man. I guess I'm not hip. What the hell are you talking about here? The Tesla drivers don't like your car and they have some sort of feature that moons you? I'm so confused.

Tesla's "Sentry Mode" feature records motion around the car, which is fine.

It can also be configured to blink the lights and display a warning on the big central screen that you're being recorded.

Given that someone sitting in their car and trying to bother passerby by blinking their lights is hilariously antisocial, I'm just counting down the days until we all decide it's ok to mask up and throw rocks through the windows of Teslas that are configured to do it autonomously.

Before I got to the end of your post I was thinking about how that makes me want to take a bat to the windshield of a car - oh, you're recording me? Watch how much the police care when you try to show them; I doubt the mask would matter. Not my best instinct, but man that sounds agitating.

Seriously, they do that? Which lunatic came up with that idea?

I think Elon asked it to be done after a slew of Tesla's got keyed/vandalized by people who hate EV's. It's gotten a few people arrested

https://futurism.com/tesla-sentry-mode-caught-vandal-model-3

> If the threat escalates to break-in level, the vehicle sounds an alarm and begins blasting music

Thanks. Well, on paper this sounds a lot more reasonable than what the parent described, but what they might be experiencing might simply be the difference between marketing speak and the reality of AI systems where the cost of false positives is practically entirely externalized, whereas anger about false negatives gets fed back right to the devs.

Edit: I saw some more reports, this does look like disgusting behavior that Tesla are trying to combat here. Just sad that the solution always seems to be more surveillance.

People who buy and drive Teslas think they are a gift to humanity, because they are "saving the planet". They glibbly ignore the amount of fossil fuels that were consumed in order to produce their shining homage to their specialness and of course their lord, Elon Musk, on the pedestal.

Come on. I’m not an electric car driver, but it’s obvious that centralising the emissions is a necessary step towards containing or reducing them.

And producing them now uses fossil fuels, but given critical mass of electric infrastructure and economy of scale for batteries then there will be a tipping point where the guy who drives the electric mining truck gets to work via his electric car.

Without any progress in these directions we will always have emissions.

Same thing happened to my friend at a small company you’ve never heard of. What do you think is the best way to handle this? If you’ve decided you have to axe X% of your employees to survive, odds are some of them are gonna be on vacation on whatever day the hammer comes down. Should they get immunity because of that? What’s the least shitty way to handle it?

Wait until they’re back home so you don’t ruin a good memory for them, at a minimum, I would think.

Don't pick up your phone on vacation folks. It's never going to be something good.

This is a bad way to treat people, but what is illegal here? Isn't this what at will employment means?

From TFA:

"They have asked the court to block Tesla from securing separation agreements with laid-off staff, arguing that by offering only one or two weeks' severance, Tesla is in violation of the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, and the company should provide staff with 60 days' pay plus benefits."

You should never be asking yourself if your actions are legal..... probably means your not very moral and acting with some bad faith.

I feel bad for the guy but isn't Texas a righto work state? No need to give any warning. And can be fired at any time for any cause. So what is the legal issue exactly? He's wasting his time at court and the attorney should be advising him as much. He should have signed the severance agreement and moved on with life.

Right to work relates to unions.

You're thinking "at-will" employment. That's pretty much every state.

You can fire someone with no notice. Layoffs require notice, for some legal reason.

Un-paywalled: https://archive.ph/J37Of

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