That's pretty much a totally different category of employee, though: "Tesla is laying off 229 data annotation employees who are part of the company’s larger Autopilot team [...] Most of the workers were in moderately low-skilled, low-wage jobs, such as Autopilot data labeling"

Data annotation can be cheaply outsourced or scaled up and down without much affecting progress on self-driving. Karpathy leaving says more about that progress to me.