<story><title>SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce</title><url>https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-spacex-layoffs-20190111-story.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>roedog</author><text>The SoCal aerospace job market is hot right now.  The driver is multiple large program starts at multiple contractors who are competing for people. This should make it possible for everyone to land on their feet.  (I&amp;#x27;ve reached out to my former colleagues who left to join Space X)&lt;p&gt;What&amp;#x27;s odd is why SpaceX is cutting staff with the new development underway on the larger rockets and the satellite business. I&amp;#x27;m curious about how they&amp;#x27;re going to increase development while cutting staff.  The big aero firms have room for improvement on productivity.  But SpaceX has been lean from the start. I wonder how they&amp;#x27;ll get more  out of an already highly productive team. That&amp;#x27;d be something to learn from.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>HeadsUpHigh</author><text>SpaceX switched from carbon fiber construction for their next rocket to stainless steel. My guess is at least a big part of this workforce reduction relates to people involved in cf which are no longer needed.  Additionally they had a lot of people working on crew dragon which as it now nears it&amp;#x27;s launch might not be needed any more( e.g. pica heatshield, electronics, software developers etc). Same goes for the now mature f9( block 5 was supposed to be the last iteration but there might have been some small improvements. Furthermore with the speed up on the Starship timeline the potential need for an elongated 2nd stage is reduced). So it makes sense for these divisions to move people to the new projects and at least some of them end up getting fired, either due to expertise or performance or whatever.</text></comment>
<story><title>SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce</title><url>https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-spacex-layoffs-20190111-story.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>roedog</author><text>The SoCal aerospace job market is hot right now.  The driver is multiple large program starts at multiple contractors who are competing for people. This should make it possible for everyone to land on their feet.  (I&amp;#x27;ve reached out to my former colleagues who left to join Space X)&lt;p&gt;What&amp;#x27;s odd is why SpaceX is cutting staff with the new development underway on the larger rockets and the satellite business. I&amp;#x27;m curious about how they&amp;#x27;re going to increase development while cutting staff.  The big aero firms have room for improvement on productivity.  But SpaceX has been lean from the start. I wonder how they&amp;#x27;ll get more  out of an already highly productive team. That&amp;#x27;d be something to learn from.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Robotbeat</author><text>SpaceX has like 7000 employees, about twice as many as ULA (their domestic competitor). There are reasons why (Dragon, BFR, Starlink, in-house engines, higher flightrate, more in-house everything), but that&amp;#x27;s a lot of people.&lt;p&gt;What I hope is we&amp;#x27;ll see new startups form out of these folk. What I&amp;#x27;d like to see is an ESOP&amp;#x2F;co-op newspace company bent on similar goals. A lot of these employees have vested stock (or likely will vest soon) that might help capitalize such an effort.</text></comment>