While 300-700 people sounds massive, it's out of 33,000 or about 1-2%. It's not hard to believe that 1-2% of a company were bad hires, couldn't/didn't deliver, or weren't a great match for the job anymore.

Admittedly it's a small fraction. To me, while not a communist by any means, I do think that cos. often simply think about he employee-employer relationship as unidirectional: the employee owes the employer but I see more and the company owes society at large to support its workers, where it can. Not saying they should carry inept unqualified workers, but that they should make some effort to place mal-assigned workers. Make it work for everyone, in other words.

Projecting responsibility for societal well-being onto for-profit employers is crazy. If we think everyone deserves something, we need to provision it directly as a society.

Corporations are poor stewards of our welfare, and trying to coerce them into this role (i.e. minimum wage, healthcare mandate, obligation to hold on to unneeded workers like you propose here) has the nasty side-effect of inhibiting potentially beneficial transactions (pushes employers towards automation, encourages them to split decent full-time jobs into several shitty part-time jobs to stay below eligibility thresholds, locks the lowest-value workers out of the market entirely, keeps the product category well below its potential i.e. taxis, etc).

If we think people should have at least a certain income (and I do), we need higher taxes and a stronger welfare system, not more labor regulation. If we think everyone deserves good healthcare (and I do) we need single-payer, not an employer mandate. If we think people shouldn't have to face loss of income due to economic conditions, we need to strengthen unemployment insurance, not pressure companies to keep workers they don't want or need.

Going down the path of engineering a perfect society by attaching obligations to the employer-employee relationship just disincentives employers from starting those relationships if they can help it.

I completely agree. It's the single responsibility principle, applied to society. In Italy, for example, the mistake of not following the SRP has produced such an entanglement of the responsibilities of businesses with those of the State that the result is a mess of spaghetti code with exceptions layered upon exceptions, almost impossible to reform and still not providing everyone with the same basic stuff (as an unemployment benefit, for instance).

If corporations are suddenly liberated from labor regulations they are not going to reverse their decisions and sell the robots to employ more people or make part-time employees full-time. Cost cutting is a war of multiple fronts.

Labor regulation has the same effect as taxes, the money just doesn't go through the government. Higher taxes and no labor regulation would have similar consequences in corporate profit-seeking decisions, because corporations are the ones paying most taxes anyway.

Besides, there is no clean separation between government and corporations, I think it is improbable that taxes are raised after getting rid of labor regulations.

>Labor regulation has the same effect as taxes

Not really: taxes are percentage-based. They turn profitable transactions into marginally less profitable transactions, but stop at zero. Minimum wages and benefits set an absolute floor below which the transaction is not worthwhile.

Even if you're not upset about the loss of low-paying jobs (and that's fair), if we think everyone deserves something, getting it should not depend on finding a job.

I don't know how much of this I agree with but I definitely agree with most of it. I also hadn't considered the fact that we have forced businesses into the role of government because our government is underperforming.

Without knowing the details - which we never will - we don't know which of them were just in bad positions for them or if they moved 10, 100, or 1000 to better fitting roles or if there were the "better fitting" roles for this group.

There is some truth there but what you say really only makes sense if you are talking about massive layoffs that would have a major effect on the local labor market.

Not to waste time pointing out what you already know, but I think it's worth adding that you can be fired without being dead weight. Many firms (especially in law or consulting) have chosen to have pyramid structures with up-or-out policies that fire half the employees every two years. Even if the fired employees are good, this keeps everyone motivated and allows you to churn through employees to find the really excellent ones worth developing. The system is not inherently good or bad, as long as all parties are aware of it.

> Even if the fired employees are good, this keeps everyone motivated and allows you to churn through employees to find the really excellent ones worth developing. The system is not inherently good or bad, as long as all parties are aware of it.

Everything about these statements is wrong. Take it from someone who worked at Microsoft before and after they finally smartened up and ditched stack ranking: it's horrible. It creates an atmosphere of paranoia, where people sabotage each other at great cost to the company instead of working together towards common goals. Worse, contra your claim that it weeds out the worst and lets the best rise to the top, what actually happens is the best quickly get sick of the bullshit and leave, while the ones rising to the top are the ones most adept at politics and gaming the system.

Stack ranking has no redeeming qualities whatsoever, and if that's really what Tesla is doing it's enough alone to make me more bearish on them. It's that bad.

I don't know if OP meant stack ranking, but I've definitely seen approx 20% annual turnover at a well known consulting firm, by design. Either you go up or you are out. Not stack ranking, just performance review. Cut throat environment, but the upside is the firm is able to keep the very sharp ones. Also the alumni usually end up at other firms that can potentially become future clients. Seems to work very well for this consulting company.

> Seems to work very well for this consulting company.

But is it working for the rest of us?

Maybe. Maybe not. Those who chose to work for that firm know full well what they're getting into. They hope to make it. 20% of them won't. Not much different than startups?

The top three management consulting firms are ranked #1, #3, and #11 on Glassdoor's best places to work. Clearly their up-or-out policies aren't seen as horrible by their own employees. And as a consultant who works at one of those firms, I've never seen anyone sabotage someone else's performance, not once. In fact, you are probably rated best when you help support those around you. Certainly the policy causes stress, but these firms are top destinations for MBAs regardless.

https://www.glassdoor.com/Award/Best-Places-to-Work-LST_KQ0,...

People with MBAs have a very different mindset from auto workers. When you've had "this is an optimal system" drilled into your head at school by people you've been told are very smart and you should look up to, you're probably going to think it's a good system. Especially when you know that the probability of harsh financial consequences for yourself and your family from this policy is essentially zero.

The situation for auto workers is very different on both points.

These Best Places to Work awards don't really tell me if a place is actually a good place to work. It is, however, a pretty good indicator of how strong the kool-aid is at a company.

My understanding was that tech (and I consider Tesla tech even if it's inherently auto) companies were getting away from the stack rank evaluations (save a few). So I'm a bit surprised Tesla is going in that direction.

High demand workers have more opportunities and those that can (the good ones) will find a diff job that does not play this kind of churn game. So I'd thought.

There is no stack ranking involved (as far as I know, at least in SW). That's why when an engineer is evaluated as under-performing this is really about their own (manager-perceived) performance vs the expectation, and there is no question about whether they'd be in an exceptional team. Now instead of a formal PIP that we know won't get anywhere, HR isn't shy about letting go dead-weight. My impression is that the default approach from HR when a manager rate someone as under-performing is that we should let them go, unless the manager wants to setup some sort of PIP.

Occasional underperformance is normal variance as is overperformance. If you can't handle these cases you don't belong in management, and if you fire everyone for underperforming once (your suggestion) you will soon have no workers, and you will cause everyone remaining to underperform.

I think you missed the essence of my comment which was "there is no stack ranking and being evaluated as underperforming is then not a result of stack ranking".

I'm not sure what you mean by `occasional underperformance`? I'm talking about a yearly performance evaluation, in my opinion an overall underperforming for a year is not "occasional", it shows something systemic. The truth is that sometimes we make bad hiring decision (in my group it has been 2-3%). We try to work with them for a few months, set goals, but ultimately you can't always recover everyone.

A single occurrence is never systemic.

You haven't defined what you mean by "single occurrence"? To me being low one month, or during a two months project can be a single occurrence, but that wouldn't lead to a "bad perf review" (at least not in my team). Being clearly underperforming for a complete year without changes after setting up intermediate goals for improvements is not a "single occurrence". When a Sr. Staff which is less productive than other junior engineers, and requires the same level of guidance, something isn't right.

A single bad review.

> The system is not inherently good or bad, as long as all parties are aware of it.

There's a lot of problems with stack ranking, not least that it discourages cooperation and encourages direct or indirect sabotage (e.g. declining to hire new prospects who you suspect might be better than you). Wikipedia discusses many of the issues: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Vitality_curve

There is another problem with stack ranking -- I saw this at a previous employer: some people are hired into "4s and 5s" from the onset. I heard some hiring managers upset that they would have to force rank their hand-selected elite team into 1-5 ranks, and upset at the situation, they purposefully hired weak workers with the intention of slotting them into 4 and 5 ranks. Their argument was (i dont agree):

- these weak workers wouldnt otherwise have a job

- these weak workers get an extra year of employment they "dont deserve"

- the strong team members get the 1,2,3 ranks they deserve

- the hiring manager is "forced" to do this

All that said, seems incredibly unfair to hire people directly into the chopping block without the expectation set from the start.

Wow, that sounds awful.

It's a losing situation all around, between the company not getting what it intended (firing the pre-existing dead weight, and getting rid of scapegoats) and, of course, the employees who are duped into joining just to be fired later.

Which companies do this?

It’s an oxymoron.. ‘we only hire the best and stack rank the rest’.

> dead weight

Calling real people "dead weight" is insulting and dehumanizing.

Any term for being awful at your job (either in skill or motivation) is going to be insulting. What would you suggest to avoid being dehumanizing?

You can always stack rank your employees and select some people at the bottom, regardless of how amazingly awesome your entire talent pool may be. Those at the bottom are not made awful at their job due to your having ranked them there. No need to label and insult them on their way out when you have to tighten your company's belt.

You will always have a worst employee, but that's not what "dead weight" means. To be dead weight at a company with good talent, you have to be multiple categories below almost everyone.

>No need to label and insult them on their way out

You never need to say when someone didn't do their job, but it's not a terrible thing to do so either. Don't go out of your way to be insulting, but if the basic facts of the situation are insulting, then so be it.

>when you have to tighten your company's belt.

They stated very clearly that it was not about belt-tightening at all. Do you think they're lying?

Only disagreeing that that "dead weight" even needed to be brought up.

> Do you think they're lying?

No, no, I implicitly trust all communications from corporate authority figures, of course.

> Only disagreeing that that "dead weight" even needed to be brought up.

I think it's relevant in a discussion of why a firing occurred. (And that overall discussion has a lot of upvote weight.)

> No, no, I implicitly trust all communications from corporate authority figures, of course.

That's a total deflection. Lack of trust does not let you figure out if any particular statement is true or not. Even dumber than blind trust is to assume everything a corporation ever says is a lie.

So is it your evaluation of the situation that this particular statement is a lie?

Lack of trust should mean the burden of proof is on the untrusted. Waiting to fire (not lay off) bad employees en mass at least smells funny, you have people who weren't fired saying it hurt morale, and possible ulterior motives. But no, no hard evidence, only justified lack of trust.

I never said that statement was a lie (your word not mine); I have no reason to take their claims at face value either.

So by all means, let's continue talking about how much those loser dead weights who got fired must have sucked.

You seem actively hostile to the idea of there being bad employees, and I'm not sure why. Such an idea is completely independent of whether corporations are involved at all.

But corporations are usually very reticent to say negative things about people, so for them to specifically call these people out as bad employees at least makes it plausibly true.

> You seem actively hostile to the idea of there being bad employees, and I'm not sure why.

Why do you say that? Of course there are (were?) bad employees. If they did indeed fire the worst performers, some of them were quite likely bad employees.

> But corporations are usually very reticent to say negative things about people, so for them to specifically call these people out as bad employees at least makes it plausibly true.

Also plausible that it's misdirection or that they're assholes. =)

I'm not classifying them as dead weight, Tesla is. If they are firing them, they must in some way believe they are dead weight in some context. It's not an indictment on the employees, it's an indictment of Tesla.

On the other hand I believe these people are not dead weight and are redeemable with the right effort.

> I'm not classifying them as dead weight, Tesla is

Then use quotes, that's what they are for. Otherwise you are implying you agree with Tesla corporate vocabulary.

Let's not be hypocrites, at the end of the day it won't change people's fate, however they are still owed a minimum of respect as human beings, they are not mere cogs in the capitalist engine, no matter what Tesla's management thinks.

They ARE deadweight as far as the employer is concerned. Nothing disrespectful to them. They may be very good in some aspects and decent human being, but they are at a wrong place.

Parting company should benefit both side. Layoff often come with severance package to give those who were let go time to find another job, at least I hope that's what Tesla does.

> They ARE deadweight as far as the employer is concerned

no that's just how the employer qualify these people, it doesn't mean these people are responsible for Tesla's shitty management or them missing their financial objectives. They are scapegoats Tesla uses to save face in front of their investors.

I wouldn't qualify them as that, and neither did Tesla. Not everyone is the right fit for the job they are currently working. People can struggle with a job for any number of reasons.

Companies will very rarely propose a pay-cut, but more likely they would just rather find someone else. Because they have specific jobs that needs doing and can't afford to have something done poorly.

Even if hiring was perfect there would still be rational reasons to fire sometimes. And hiring is far from perfect.

I agree they are scapegoats for bad management. They should start firing the CEO. He over promises and then grossly under delivers. Making people work in bad conditions will turn good people into bad employees/DEAD weight. They were DEAD weight because people need rest and time away from work to maintain optimal performance.

You seem so sure of your conclusions without any evidence (if you do have evidence then please provide it). I firmly believe in workers rights. I also firmly believe in evidence. California has some of the most employee friendly employment laws in the US. Germany some of the most in the EU. As long as these employees have reasonable severance and Tesla followed the law I don't see much room to complain. If however they were treated badly or illegally then I'm reasonably certain that a lawyer will help them on a contingency basis.

I'm not so sure of anything. That's the way it looks to me from reading the article. The way it looks to me from reading the article is that these employees were labeled as underperforming simply so the company could avoid triggering any sort of legal scrutiny. I could be totally wrong. It's likely that I'm not considering people walked in without any PEP or any notice and were let go even according to another poster on HN.

I suppose "dead weight" can be redeemable, however I would say that if you are "dead weight" you probably have the wrong job, and are very likely better off finding something different.

As we get older, that's less and less of an option, and often we have to put up with a job rather than enjoy a job.

So if dead weight often is attributable to wrong job (rather than utter incompetence) isn't job redistribution.assignment a more or less manageable issue when you have 33 thousand emps?