One more note here, Tesla has also announced they want to drop 10% of staff. Normally this sort of thing involves severance packages, notifying agencies about upcoming reductions, actually making decisions, etc.

One view here is that if Musk can convince 10% of their staff to quit with this announcement he'll save lots of money (by not paying severance packages and other stuff)!

He's got lots of money, you don't need to save it for him.

Paying severance to staff you decide you don't want is much cheaper overall than losing staff randomly, which will include your higher performers.

It's not a plausible explanation for Musk's actions. I would be inclined to take his word at face value, that he genuinely believes that remote work is less productive than face to face work at Tesla.

No matter what’s your opinion on Musk, he’s very erratic and makes lots of decision on the spot, without or against data. It brought him huge wins (turns out people want cool electric cars) and huge headaches (FSD, factory automation, Twitter acquisition).

His engineering teams often learn about projects from his tweets. I’m pretty sure so does HR.

Musk doesn't feel this is random. The remote employees that don't want to come into work in the office are by definition not the higher performers to him.

The reality though is whether or not you announce it in advance, once you start laying folks off you will start to lose high performers who have the ability to get a jew job.

Yeah, I think everyone is assuming that the email and layoffs are causally related. That doesn't seem plausible. If he really wanted to use the work-from-the-office mandate to raise attrition, he would do that months PRIOR to announcing layoffs - not at the same time.

I wouldn't be surprised if people who said they prefer not to come back to the office, will just be given the same severance package. OP should ask HR about it.

They probably are causally related, just not to each other.

High operating cost/productivity = layoffs + back to office.

It's usually not worth claiming it, but it seems like there is an argument for constructive dismissal here.

Why is it usually not worth claiming it? The payout is small if one succeeds in arguing it?

what would be the point?

Isn't constructive dismissal just a way to get unemployment, and you would get unemployment anyways with a layoff or involuntary termination?

That is the point: if an employee quits, they're not entitled to unemployment.

However, if they were "constructively dismissed" that is treated as a layoff/involuntary termination and the employee can get unemployment.

Note that the OP mentioned that their remote work agreement was voided. They weren't constructively dismissed, it sounds like they were actually terminated. (A company can't simply decide to unilaterally void part of an employment agreement without voiding the entire agreement. That's not how contracts work. )

My point is that I don't see how constructive dismissal would ever come up in this scenario.

Either they will either quit voluntarily (stupid) or they will be terminated.

They haven't been terminated because they are still working until August at least. It sounds like they were given until Friday to sign a revised employment contract without remote work or the company will take action.

Constructive dismissal usually comes up for hourly workers that stop being scheduled but aren't fired. For a salary employee it is usually cut and dry, either the employer is sending you a check or they aren't.

Not only has the employee been constructively terminated, but I would argue that they have been actually terminated if they were told that their remote work agreement was voided and they need to sign a new one.

It's not a 10% drop in staff. It's a 10% drop in salaried employees. So the numbers aren't as big as most are reporting.

That's true, though the original poster here is a salaried employee, so the pressure level is unchanged for them.

Don't know if it makes a difference but did they announce it? I thought it was a leaked e-mail to executives?

> He's got lots of money, you don't need to save it for him.

I want to nitpick you on this as I know you probably don't mean it but others might be confused by it. There is no way in which Elon Musk personally gets money from this. Elon doesn't have money other than the stock shares he sold. Most of his net value is still in the value of Tesla itself. His announcement of layoffs caused him to lose money.

Additionally if Tesla needed money, there would be no way to provide it as he doesn't have any money to provide it with.

In their employment capacity Elon Musk and other people who work for Tesla have an incredibly large budget. They can use that budget to downsize in a way that complies with the law.

I don't know what Tesla pay is like, but man, you really have to be guzzling the Kool-Aid to stay employed there. Crunching crazy hours, having some asshole guilt you for PTO, working for the world's unfunniest meme Lord, etc. Somehow, I have the feeling they're going to have no problem shedding 10% of their workforce this year...

Is it really hard to see why people would want to work there, morally? The goal of playing a part in sustainable/renewable energy is pretty noble.

That is such a freaking joke.

Personal automobiles are the worse possible thing for the environment. End cars. Let's get real public transit back. Hyperloop is a lie to kill existing public transit efforts. So many people have documented that so many things have issues. Yes electric cars are good, but not much better than Plugin Hybrids.

Entire countries have been developed around the car. It’s tone deaf to ignore that and think they’re going away anytime in the next half century, demanding public transportation replace them. Urban planning and refactoring takes significant time.

The US shrugs at such an idea and keeps buying 17 million cars a year. Even Norway buys cars (although most are electric cars now). When cars are sold, they should be EVs.

> End cars

I guess those of us that live in rural areas should just bike 100s of km everywhere then.

It's always amusing to see these hyperbolic, clearly unrealistic statements on here. I wonder what's going through the head of someone like you...

83% of Americans live in urban areas and 70% of annual vehicle miles are in urban areas. Rural communities are an edge case where cars would still make sense.

You might want to look up how the US Census Bureau defines urban. My 7,000 person town with orchards and farms is considered an urban area. This makes some sense as it's loosely part of a greater metropolitan area but it's not remotely an area that could be served to a significant degree by public transportation.

17% of Americans is not an "edge case" by any stretch of the imagination. That's 57 million people.

OK? You ignore the larger point by disagreeing with the terminology I chose. Reducing car usage in the US by 70% would be an absolutely massive win

And Musk sending employees back to the office is the opposite of reducing single occupancy vehicle use.

Not to mention the fact that a large part of those 83% would like to be able to occasionally travel outside the urban area.

There are also planes and trains, and, if you're travelling to a remote location without access to either of those, rental cars. But most people in an urban area are primarily travelling within that urban area.

>It's always amusing to see these hyperbolic, clearly unrealistic statements on here. I wonder what's going through the head of someone like you...

If the edge cases mostly only affected people you didn't like how much would you care about solving them.

Exactly.

Well said. It's equally hyperbolic and unrealistic to require poor people to buy and maintain an automobile, which is basically what has happened because our public transit sucks.

Hey, that's easier than razing and rebuilding US cities that were built under the assumption everyone has a car.

(Among other things, they have road topologies that make buses and bikes completely infeasible.)

> Among other things, they have road topologies that make buses and bikes completely infeasible

If the hilly San Francisco can have lots of bikes and buses (…and cable cars and street cars and light rail and commuter rail) then so can most cities.

Hills aren't the problem. Urban sprawl is, and so are irregular road grids with uniform density everywhere.

SF is compact, and has a few main drags where it makes sense to have trollies / bus lines. It also has a well-defined city center, so a hub and spoke transit system mostly works there.

In contrast, public transit doesn't even really make sense in South Bay. It was (mostly) laid out when public transit was common, but now there are multiple mini-downtown areas without train service, and many of the tracks have been ripped out.

I hardly see any bikes in downtown SF, I can't imagine anyone is riding them elsewhere.

You should see the rest of the country, there’s even fewer bikes in most places.

But downtown doesn’t need bikes. There’s amble public transit and everything is close by. Most people I know who bike use it for longer distances, eg the base of Bernal Heights to downtown via mission+market. Or going from Caltrain to sunset.

We already razed the cities once to build the roads.

If it's that easy to end personal automobiles and increase funding for public transit by 10000%, why don't you just wave your magic wand and do it?

Getting a job at Tesla to accelerate electrification of cars is a lot more within someone's personal control than somehow enacting the political will to change legislation and funding away from personal vehicles and towards public transit.

But I guess just making HN comments about it is a more feel-good easy solution.

Presumably because it's not possible to wave a magic wand and do it. I know I would if I could. It would be great to be wealthier as a country (US-centric here), have far fewer c02 emissions for mostly no good reason, have fewer people dead or harmed because of car accidents, and have healthier people because they get out move around more.

I'd also suggest examining your perspective. Highways and roads are also public transit. It's a non-sequitur to suggest that highways aren't public transit yet something like bikes or bike lanes are.

Unfortunately we've been convinced by big government that we need highways, highway builders, giant departments of transportation, car insurance, tires, gasoline and gas stations, the actual cars themselves, oil changes, AAA, and all of these other industries at the scale that we have them now. It's just a giant jobs program.

If we built medium-density, mixed use neighborhoods you wouldn't need a gasoline or electric car to walk a few blocks to a local grocery store. It's manufactured spending. That's why there are so many advertisements and BIG GOVERNMENT programs.

If we cared about being efficient or cost-effective we'd just build things differently. But we don't care about that. While electric cars are "better" for c02 emissions than gasoline powered cars (and more fun to drive IMO), it's like doubling down on a solution for a problem that we can just not have by not driving so much and having cars.

It's really frustrating when I read comments where people act incredulous at the idea of not spending billions and billions of dollars every year on cars and associated government programs when you could just walk down the street instead. Can you still have a car to drive to the countryside? Yea definitely. Do we literally need to design society around a gigantic SUV so you can drive to Costco and pretend you are saving money buying in bulk? No.

This is satire, right?

> Let's get real public transit back

You forgot the tiny detail that public transit sucks bad in most countries (and you won't fix it with government and unions) and it won't get you where you need to go unless you live in the very center of a city.

Cars aren't going anywhere. This is simply delusional. Cars existed long before there were any subsidies in the form of government road development. They're not going away even if you take any kind of funding away for car infrastructure and build lots of other infrastructure.

I suggest exploring outside cities and widening your horizons. You apparently don't know much about the world.

Also even if implemented, hyperloop isn't for transport inside cities. It's for intermediate distances that are only a little too short to travel by plane with but too far for rapid travel on train/car. Elon was never interested in implementing hyperloop anyway. So this is a red herring.

Cars gained popularity in America with the rise of road systems that allowed for suburban life.

Car companies has a huge history of damaging public transit infrastructure goals in cities to further their cars. In LA car companies literally bought rail car lines and turned them into buses.

Hyper loop is absolutely an interest of Elon but yes it is a red herring. He’s doing it to distract from other goals so more people want teslas. Eg the Las Vegas tunnels that use teslas instead of train cars.

https://inhabitat.com/what-happened-to-los-angeles-streetcar...

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/elon-musk-s-boring-c...

> Hyper loop is absolutely an interest of Elon but yes it is a red herring. He’s doing it to distract from other goals so more people want teslas. Eg the Las Vegas tunnels that use teslas instead of train cars.

I said he had no interest in implementing it, not that it wasn't an interest. He doesn't have the time and the level of interest in his other tasks is much higher.

In theory, public transit seems like it would have less impact on the environment, but in practice (in the US at least), public transit has all-in unsubsidized cost (and therefore environmental impact) per passenger mile often greater than private cars.

If cost is equal to environmental impact, are you arguing that Tesla helps the environment?

$60k+ luxury cars with $12k DLCs aren’t going to change the world. Tesla morphed long time ago from sustainable energy transformation to car manufacturer/AI hype company. Even Musk says their future is in AI/Teslabot/whatever he comes up with next.

It appears that the cost of Tesla's cheapest car is trending down. The original roadster was 100k in 2008. The cheapest model 3 is currently just under 50K [1].

[1] https://www.tesla.com/model3/design

Without Tesla we would have not much better than a Nissan Leaf or a Renault Zoe.

They contributed it it, and likely sped it up, sure. But government regulations were/are much bigger driver of it.

If you're going to take credit from Tesla here on this front and give it to the government, then it's only fair to also mention that government regulations were/are a big driver of fossil fuel subsidies and c02 emissions which is creating a problem.

Personally I don't find this to be super constructive. It's similar in some ways to taking credit away from the founder of a company and saying that a VC firm was a much bigger driver of the company's success.

I agree but in Norway, most of the government incentives for electric cars were in place 10 to 20 years before the car manufacturers started to sell good electric cars.

Hard to justify developing totally new types of cars for a country with just 5 million people living it.

True. Many countries had incentives before the industry reacted to the Tesla model s.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_incentives_for_pl...

There's no evidence of that. I could just as easily make the claim that without Tesla we'd have had those cars sooner.

Solar, Powerwall, Megapack, Autobidder?

All of them are either shrinking/stagnant or VC level pitches.

Based on? From their quarterly reports, they seem to be headed in the opposite direction (up).

Tesla’s solar is down almost 4x compared to high of Solarcity.

Tesla is a noble bet that the performance/price curve of batteries is relatively predictable. Notice how lots of companies are able to make big expensive batteries?

People have worked for worse companies who's stock hasn't done nearly as well. See Facebook.

Rofl in terms of workplace Facebook has been the best by far for myself. Given the most trust and responsibility, everyone I met was helpful, honest, and blunt. People came from wildly different backgrounds.

Anytime I had a question about a random area I’d get to meet the lead engineer for 30 minutes to an hour and they give an in-depth breakdown of how their tech work. I was always encouraged to help others and it reflected well in performance review.

When I had my interview with Tesla, the engineer sounded incredibly burnt out and was honest about how horrible it was.

The Kool-aid is powerful; I don't blame you and the pay is probably great. It makes it all that much easier to ignore the external harm Facebook causes. I'm not playing moral judge; just that someone can list a bunch of reasons why it's awesome to work for Tesla and mention none of the downsides.

Except at the end of the day facebook is morally bankrupt and you supported that by working for them. At least Tesla's mission is noble and is having a positive effect on human civilization and the planet.

Facebook may be evil, but I've never heard anything but good things about the work culture

bUt ThE mIsSiOn BrO

(Make Elon/Bezos/Zuc/etc Richer)

This is very excellent "non-advice". OP would do well to take it. Document everything, keep hard copies, and don't quit.

-- edit --

Your employers EAP program should typically offer free legal consultations with a lawyer they recommend. EAP calls are typically keep private from your employer.

EAP Legal programs almost always have specific clauses preventing their use against the employer. Get your own lawyer. A prepaid legal plan can be a cost-effective way to start this.

I would not use an EAP program for an employment dispute. While it is supposed to be confidential there have been cases of confidential information getting back to the employer. Considering we're talking about Tesla and Elon Musk I think the last thing in the world I would want to do would be to go up against them with a lawyer that was paid and recommended by Tesla.

Oh sure, you'll likely lose the case - but you're going to give Elon Musk and Tesla a black eye in the process. It's a PR nightmare Tesla would be wise to avoid, but Elon Musk is capricious so who knows?

This is the money advice. I had an issue vaguely like this with an employer. The advice I received was, don’t tell them you have a lawyer unless the lawyer says to, don’t quit or let them make decisions for you, and if you are unsure draw things out.

While doing these things you should probably find a lawyer to help you out.

“One thing I don't think you should do is quit.”

Second. Under most circumstances, if you quit a job, you are not entitled to state Unemployment Insurance.

Not sure if this is what you’re referring to as ‘severance’ (what I usually think of as granted by the largesse of the employer).

Also start interviewing elsewhere. Life is too short to work at a place like that with your talents. There’s many other companies that would happily put your skills to use under better working conditions.

Agreed, don't quit.

It sounds like you have an actual employment agreement saying your position is remote. If that's the case, and your agreement has suddenly been "voided", then technically you were just laid off, and Tesla owes you severance (if that was part of your agreement).

The point of Elon Musk demanding that everyone work from the office is to try to make it the employee's decision to leave the company, rather than the company laying them off. Because if the employee leaves, the employee is not entitled to unemployment (or severance, if that is part of their employment agreement).

However, terminations by the employer are covered by state and federal labor laws, and generally Tesla would owe unemployment for all terminated employees, and severance if that is part of their employment agreement. (And mass terminations such as this one are additionally governed by the WARN Act.)

I wish I would have read this advice years ago...