<story><title>Tesla to Cut 10% of Jobs</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/03/feeling-super-bad-about-economy-musk-wants-to-cut-10percent-of-tesla-jobs.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mjr00</author><text>Not defending Tesla or Musk specifically here, but this happens all the time. Until you&amp;#x27;re ready to announce to internal staff (and publicly, if you&amp;#x27;re large enough) that you&amp;#x27;re in a hiring freeze and&amp;#x2F;or doing layoffs, you need to keep up appearances that things are operating normally, even if that means keeping up the recruiting pipeline for positions that you have no intention of hiring.&lt;p&gt;The absolute worst thing you can do is go into a &amp;quot;soft freeze&amp;quot; mode where new hires slowly stop getting approved, backfills aren&amp;#x27;t happening, middle management gets told that hiring will be revisited next quarter, etc. Non-management employees &lt;i&gt;will&lt;/i&gt; notice this and you&amp;#x27;ll start getting rumors circulating and people leaving.</text></item><item><author>cmrdporcupine</author><text>Uh,ok...&lt;p&gt;Two days ago the &amp;quot;Who is hiring&amp;quot; thread here had something like 20+ software engineering positions for Tesla.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=31585021&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=31585021&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;More erratic decision making from Mr Musk. Like, I dunno, the time he told Twitter he was taking Tesla private while tripping on LSD. He needs to step aside from Tesla at this point.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>krisoft</author><text>&amp;gt; you need to keep up appearances that things are operating normally, even if that means keeping up the recruiting pipeline for positions that you have no intention of hiring&lt;p&gt;This reminds me what I once read about the challenges of zookeeping big cats. They tend to appear very often perfectly healthy until one day they just die. And when you do an autopsy on them you realise that they were sick since weeks or even month, but it often does not “show” in a way you would expect.&lt;p&gt;The speculation is that since they are not incentivised evolutionary to show that they are hurt. In the wild they are often solitary creatures so no one would or could help them, on the other hand if they appear hurt that would invite other predators to challenge them. Sounds like the incentive structure is very similar for companies.</text></comment>
<story><title>Tesla to Cut 10% of Jobs</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/03/feeling-super-bad-about-economy-musk-wants-to-cut-10percent-of-tesla-jobs.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mjr00</author><text>Not defending Tesla or Musk specifically here, but this happens all the time. Until you&amp;#x27;re ready to announce to internal staff (and publicly, if you&amp;#x27;re large enough) that you&amp;#x27;re in a hiring freeze and&amp;#x2F;or doing layoffs, you need to keep up appearances that things are operating normally, even if that means keeping up the recruiting pipeline for positions that you have no intention of hiring.&lt;p&gt;The absolute worst thing you can do is go into a &amp;quot;soft freeze&amp;quot; mode where new hires slowly stop getting approved, backfills aren&amp;#x27;t happening, middle management gets told that hiring will be revisited next quarter, etc. Non-management employees &lt;i&gt;will&lt;/i&gt; notice this and you&amp;#x27;ll start getting rumors circulating and people leaving.</text></item><item><author>cmrdporcupine</author><text>Uh,ok...&lt;p&gt;Two days ago the &amp;quot;Who is hiring&amp;quot; thread here had something like 20+ software engineering positions for Tesla.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=31585021&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=31585021&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;More erratic decision making from Mr Musk. Like, I dunno, the time he told Twitter he was taking Tesla private while tripping on LSD. He needs to step aside from Tesla at this point.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thrwyoilarticle</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve experienced similar at a large tech employer. During a brief, now-forgotten market downturn, we froze hiring but kept open all of our position advertisements, in order to keep the pipeline &amp;#x27;warm&amp;#x27;.&lt;p&gt;I thought it was short-sighted. There were a small number of qualified people for the positions and we constantly complained that it was hard to find them. If one of those qualified candidates applies to a position and gets ghosted, they may never apply again, either because they lose their confidence or out of spite.</text></comment>