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Comment by inverted_flag | Hacker News Reader

Firing an employee and then begging them to come back because of how essential they are? Art of the deal.

I once got let go from a company, and then, 2 weeks later, they offered to re-hire me. They acted like they were doing me a favor, boasting that they'd even pay me the same salary. I declined, as I was planning on quitting anyway. Then, a few days later they sent me a threatening letter, claiming I stole company proprietary data, and they were gonna report the situation to the district attorney if I didn't contact them. I didn't respond and never heard from them again. I heard from former colleagues that no one knew the admin passwords for their critical systems except me. That's true. I told management, over and over, that the whole sysadmin operation revolved around me, which was doomed to fail. That's actually why I was planning on quitting. Oh yeah, when they let me go, I offered to stay on for a short time to cascade to whoever was gonna replace me. They declined and rushed me out the door.

> Firing an employee and then begging them to come back because of how essential they are?

Typical Elon style - Fired entire Supercharger team, then hired right back. Maybe for PR. Same stunt with Tesla stores and Twitter. He fired Twitter's 80% team is a lie.

I wonder if the former employees' salary expectations have changed.

Also, completely expected: it all happened already at Twitter. I’d have hoped that they would be a bit more careful with nuclear safety, though.

Too bad it wasn't Tony Schwartz, the actual author of that book, that was elected.

I think that's basically the Elon playbook. He did it with the supercharger team as well at Tesla.

He did it at Twitter also

"If you don't find yourself in need to add back at least 20% of what you removed, you didn't remove enough". Elon's word. Sounds like an excellent engineering principle, with some caveats of course.

> excellent engineering principle

Imagine structural engineer thinking like this.

I talked to a McDonnell Aircraft structural engineer in the 80s. He said something like Old Man McDonnel told us to design for a 0.85 factor of safety on the F101. If anything broke during testing, we'd redesign it.

I'm not sure if that was how it really worked out.

I'm looking forward to Elon applying the same strategy to aviation. I wonder how many crashes it'll take for him to realize that this is a horrible engineering principle?

That's as much as an "engineering principle" as him thinking minimum character level of an item is more important than the actual attributes of the item in PoE2. He's just saying stuff his target audience thinks are smart, and whenever checked on it he lashes out. He's got nothing.

> Sounds like an excellent engineering principle

Then you are wildly mistaken about the field of engineering.

Imagine needing to add back 20% to a bridge because you removed too much, or a rocket ship, or a team of nuclear scientists (like is actually the case here).

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