This article is really about the layoffs, rather than the removal of the job postings. Obviously that'd be the case: what else is there to talk about other than that there were some job postings, but they aren't there anymore?
It's become pretty common to use job postings as a diagnostic or predictive source. I remember when I first noticed an article inferring that such-and-such a company must be developing such-and-such a type of video game, because they were hiring for people with particular technical skills which implied a certain development path. I thought "oh, that's clever, I never would have thought to monitor job boards to learn about the future, but it makes sense". Now that practice of reporting on hiring is just de rigeur across coverage of many different industries, I think.
I wonder if there will be some kind of response from companies, to try to hide or obfuscate such information—which may sometimes amount to a trade secret, or sometimes (as in this Tesla case) just a present kernel for bad publicity to form around. Maybe leaving up positions with no intention of filling them, or posting fake positions to send confusing signals to people watching you? They probably already do this, come to think of it.
The end result would be increased annoyance and frustration for people applying to those jobs.
That behavior is so distasteful. Heard that story more than once and it sickens me to think how much impact a rescinded job offer could have on someone’s life. What if someone moved, quit a good job, etc all on a broken promise. Even better when the job market feels comparatively weak.
> ...it sickens me to think how much impact a rescinded job offer could have on someone’s life. What if someone moved, quit a good job, etc all on a broken promise.
Though this kind of behavior is common enough that I wonder if companies have found a way to weasel out of it, or they're just getting away with it due to ignorance or a reluctance to sue by those they have wronged.
> I wonder if there will be some kind of response from companies, to try to hide or obfuscate such information-
They already do this in the form of third party job postings which will describe the role/work but not name the company. There are tons of these all over linkedin.
companies in top or even middle tier don't do this. saying you work for a faang+ is an important part of compensation even if benefits and salary are the same (they aren't).
I literally just applied for a role at Callaway that did this - It is more common than you think. I've also seen it done for NBC Universal, Stubhub, and large satellite companies - just off the top of my head and own experience.
Job postings are also a great way to see what companies are focusing on right now, what their needs and priorities are. It’s useful from a sales intelligence and marketing point of view because you can tailor your messaging based on that
Not sure that's a major issue for current customers; I saw a guy careening through my office parking lot at road speed just yesterday. No hands on wheel, staring at his phone.
Create a site that people who applied to an employer can go to announce they have, and employees can look up the numbers themselves. It'll give employees a feel for application numbers, and those who are tasked with interviewing will have a feel for the actual rate of candidate generation.
Or, as a hiring manager, don't be a douche and be candid with your team.
I've just started using Otta for my search and they publish responsiveness scores. Not sure if it's by role or across the company. It's saved me from wasting time on companies with bad hiring practices (assuming scoring is accurate)
Many companies still have tons of job openings right after the day of their layoffs. You could argue they might be hiring different positions, but it's somewhat odd.
I think the Conventional PR Wisdom is that releasing a statement when you do things like this will be better than not doing it. So yes, most companies would make some sized press release and have a statement ready to go before doing something like this.
The new narrative is that Tesla is a 'Technology Company'. There is Tesla AI for example that is building Robots etc. Musk's competitor to OpenAI (x.AI ?) has raised $6 billion at a $18 billion valuation. Unclear if that is related to Tesla. I guess he decided that if AI is going to destroy humanity he might as well make some coin helping it happen.
New? They have been claiming this from day one when people called out the fact that they produce a fraction of what other car makers produce yet are valued x times over the others.
> There is Tesla AI for example that is building Robots etc. Musk's competitor to OpenAI (x.AI ?) has raised $6 billion at a $18 billion valuation.
This is just giving Musk more runway to make promises that Tesla will fail to deliver on. When the robot fails, he'll pivot to promising something different, and the cycle will repeat.
Tesla has been lying about being a "tech" company to justify its obscene stock price for a decade. "Look we write software so it's okay that we are priced more than the entire rest of the industry combined"
Especially, when the CEO's very confrontational public opinions has soured potential customer from wanting to be seen driving a Tesla. There is a political divide for those interested in green energy and those who are not. It has become a tribalist identity issue in US politics. Liberals are generally those buying EVs, while conservatives are more inclined to buy IC vehicles. It is a dumb issue to be politically divided on, but here we are. When Elon says things liberals don't like, liberals do not want to associate with him or Tesla.
If Tesla's plan is to sell more EVs, they should find a new CEO.
The model Y was the best selling car in the world in 2023. I don't think most of the potential customers know or care about the chief executive of tesla any more than they care about the chief executive of Mercedes.
"Liberals are generally those buying EVs, while conservatives are more inclined to buy IC vehicles"
I don't think the divide is all that significant. There may be a slightly bigger percentage buying for a perceive environmental reason, but Teslas are mainly purchased by the rich, politics be damned.
Income doesn't matter if your brand is seen as tarnished by a group of people. Many wealthy liberals may have hang ups about the Tesla/Elon association.
Some comments here impute some deceit, or alternatively, transparency in this. While there are ethical issues in rescinding internship offers, the ethics overall is not what speaks to me in this action.
What I see is another one or two more bad quarters foreseen by Tesla senior management. It takes time to get a supply of resumes. It takes time to hire. They even need to hire a new head of HR. Evidently there will be no hiring any time soon.
You can blame inflation for part of that. The value of a dollar is near nothing compared to even 5 years ago. And of course you need a higher salary when everyone charges you more just for being in the US. See YouTube premium pricing around the globe as an easy example.
The US economy pumps assets and dumps exports, yes. However, weakening the dollar would dump assets and pump exports. That's the opposite of what the US has been up to for the last 50 years and it's the opposite of what the US is up to today. Your understanding of macroeconomics needs work.
Hint: if your analysis does not involve US counterparties, it can only ever be correct by accident.
At the very last, it's devalued by more than half, and this is a national trend in the housing market alone. You can also observe this in dining out (either sit down or fast food), groceries, tools, etc. And yes, a pre-2021 dollar losing half of its worth in less than a couple of years is "near nothing". That means the dollar is a terrible store of value, and an entire net value stored in dollars would disappear inside half a lifetime, if not faster if Congress does another mass printing/borrowing of money.
As an anecdote example:
* Pre-2021, my house was 160k, with about 10% down, resulting in P&I of about $750.
* Post-2021 (and no significant change since, the same house can probably sell for near $320 (& definitely $290 at the low end). To buy this, you'll need twice the down payment, and even with 10% down, your P&I is now nearly $2000 (due to the higher interest rates and huge principal).
A dollar in 2018 is worth 2.67x more than a dollar today. It's pretty apparent in equities, but also in commodities, and there's no going back to pre-2021 monetary values. "Inflation" may or may not have slowed down, but a lot of people are now stuck until deflation actually occurs or significant salary growth occurs.
How so? As you acknowledged, number go up internally doesn't mean number doesn't go down relative to other currency, leaving relative expensiveness the same.
yen an pound are at historic lows vs dollar.
Dollar vs euro is at historic average.
Let me guess, you'an Austrian/freshwater econ fan. Know theres a problem and what it is before you see the patient.
America is too expensive. The entire economy has been shifting away from creating new useful things and towards what I think of as extraction. A couple examples:
- Car companies paywalling hardware and software features while selling data (including GPS location, speed, etc.) to data brokers.
- Netflix raising subscription fees in spite of the fact that they've cancelled so many original shows and lost so much of their leased catalog.
- Grocery stores and fast food restaurants firing cashiers and replacing them with unreliable self-checkout kiosks (pushing the work off onto the customer while continuing to charge them just as much, if not more).
- Wendy's adding "surge pricing" and replacing drive-through workers with an AI that's barely 80% accurate. (So they'll charge you more just because and still fuck up your order.)
There are other examples, these are just the ones that are fresh in my mind right now.
FTA:
Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth.[1] Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society. They result in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality,[2][3] risk of growing political bribery, and potential national decline.
Successful capture of regulatory agencies (if any) to gain a coercive monopoly can result in advantages for rent-seekers in a market while imposing disadvantages on their uncorrupt competitors. This is one of many possible forms of rent-seeking behavior.
> [Elon Musk] also said he would ask any executive who retained more than three workers who “don’t obviously pass the excellent, necessary and trustworthy test” to resign.
Is this "excellent, necessary and trustworthy test" referring to some specific criteria at Tesla or is it judged at an executives discretion?
Nah, low debt, lots of cash equivalents on hand, utility scale storage business is a rocket ship. They’re doing bad enough the board should fire Musk, but not bad enough the org will die.
Tesla should survive for many reasons (product need, ~120k global workers), but needs an adult in charge. No one is irreplaceable, even Musk. Preserve the enterprise, its value, and the jobs.
They've done the classic thing of saving pennies now and spending dollars later though. Laying off the Supercharger team is a particularly baffling mistake: Superchargers are the selling point for getting a Tesla as opposed to some other BEV, and especially now that they've opened up the network to other companies. In some areas Tesla owners are already complaining that they can't get a charger because of the non-Tesla vehicles occupying them. That need not necessarily have been a mistake if they went pedal-to-the-floor on building out the network further, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen. It's a bad error that's going to bite them hard, soon.
If this were any other company, HN would instantly and unanimously recognize that this is as the classic MBA/PE blunder of cutting costs but and gutting any chance at future success; the only reason people aren't recognize it as such is because of lingering goodwill towards Elon.
Agree, the minute I start sensing issues with the Supercharger Network's reliability, I'm out. It's the sole reason I bought a Tesla over any other electric car, and was about to save every other electric car that adopted NACS.
With the NACS roll out though its clear the SuperCharger network can no longer be thought of as a Tesla only thing though, and something would probably have had to change regardless. Tesla obviously aren't going to be interested in running the service on behalf of the entire car industry - the profits are meagre and its ultimately just a utility like a gas pump. I think this is an inevitable consequence of progress; Tesla had to build the SuperCharger network back in early 2010s - today it can direct the rest of the industry to continue the task.
My guess is we shall shortly see establishment of a new body to manage, pay and extend the SuperCharger network, but as a neutral body acting on behalf of all car makers. Similarly, its no longer just Tesla who have a monopoly on SuperCharger sites - other companies can now build NACS fast chargers such as Electrify America etc:
Will this be as good as the original network's reliable hardware? Probably not in some places! But just as we don't expect Ford to own every single gas pump, every NACS site being owned and operated by Tesla was probably a non-starter too, especially now its going to be virtually universal across the US EV landscape.
Then why fire 20% to 40% (as some rumors are pointing out today) of your staff? Why get rid of the supercharger team? Why get rid of the new vehicles team?
If they really were "low debt" and "lots of cash" on hand kind of company, then there's no reason for huge cuts.
Tesla lost $2.5 Billion in cash flow in Q1 2024, likely due to increasing inventory (aka: they can't sell their cars fast enough despite all the price cuts).
The knee-jerk reaction to just start laying off huge swaths of the company to compensate is... understandable. Clearly a dumb move but understandable. I think you're underselling the clear problems of Tesla the company that go far above and beyond Elon Musk.
Was firing the whole Supercharging team the right move? Probably not. In fact, I'm certain that this move will only make fewer people buy Tesla, now that the charging situation is complete chaos. But given the numbers, Tesla doesn't have many quarters of runway left (even with Tesla's $26 Billion in cash and short-term investments, there's over $15 Billion in various liabilities. So Tesla only has ~4 more quarters at this cash-burn rate before it runs out of cash).
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Tesla sales in China, Germany, and USA are all down for April 2024 as well. Meaning there's even larger inventory glut and even more cash-flow losses.
Supercharging is already fired. There's no way that team can likely ever be recovered, and the goodwill between Supercharger and all of their installers has been destroyed. (Its risky for a company to invest $10,000+ per supercharger on their property, only for them to be Ghosted on an Elon whim). That's permanent damage to the brand, I don't think anyone would want to build superchargers after hearing the horror stories of these ghosted businesses.
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Remember: bankruptcy is a cash-flow issue. Not a profitability issue. If you run out of cash, that's it. You can't pay suppliers and thus they'll force you into bankruptcy (eventually).
One law we should pass is forbidding C-suites from holding more than one full-time job, unless said job is at some non-profit or just sitting (or chairing) a board.
It really seems like as soon as interest rates rose all of a sudden every "Super CEO"'s business portfolio was in troubled waters.
Do we need a specific law for this? If it's bad for the companies involved, shouldn't that be something their board take care of? If the directors are failing in their supervisory duty, isn't that something a shareholder lawsuit can address?
Where's your evidence that the market has been even attempting to solve the problem of people (such as Musk) holding multiple C-suite positions simultaneously? I've seen no such evidence. If anything it seems to be supporting it, given that Tesla shareholders seem primed to vote on giving Musk 50 billion USD.
You're the one who claimed the market will solve this problem, the onus is on you to provide evidence for your position. Additionally there are plenty of cases out there of objectively terrible CEOs (Elizabeth Holmes comes to mind) that don't get booted out - it usually takes regulators or even the justice department to deal with it in those cases. Which is exactly what's being proposed.
Well, it seems like if I was bullish on tesla and believed their growth story I’d be extremely interested in making sure that elon gets what he wants, because it seems he is basically threatening to gut parts of the company if he doesn’t. Cannot imagine how this is legal or tolerable, but lots of stuff he does I think this is the case and nothing seems to really matter and number go up.
So when Tesla sold cars in China, then Beijing prevented Tesla from getting the proceeds of those sales out of the country, Tesla said, "oh, well," and kept selling cars in China; is that your speculation on what happened?
So, he's managed to encourage and support the coal-rolling Right-wing, and alienate the Green-friendly Left, while demanding a $50 billion payout, from his electric car company, that has lied about FSD since, what, 2013?
Now, fire whole teams, cease all hiring, and ... profit?
You think he's a fool, but remember that extra space in the cybertruck battery pack? That's where the CyberCoal™ add-on pack will go, which will allow customers to expel huge clouds of choking black smoke at the push of a button. Electric performance, gasoline pollution. It'll be the best of both worlds!
I think they are just struggling. Go drive by a tesla dealership. The lots are full. Remember, corporations have real time data on performance. What we see in public disclosures can be over 3 months old by the time it's officially reported.
Do they have actual dealerships? My understanding is that they only really have showrooms or service centers, and the lots that they have are just fulfillment centers, not a traditional car lot where you can buy from inventory.
I don't think those are typical inventory. The Cybertrucks are on backorder, yet the huge Tesla lot I drive by daily (in Northwest Houston) has many on the lot.
I think he's trying to match tech companies' signals to investors (layoffs, AI investment) but he did them in the wrong order and the timing for this is having the opposite effect it did for meta et al in terms of PR
there's probably also real, good, cost savings going on from it which should help but isn't geting the news bump he wants
It's become pretty common to use job postings as a diagnostic or predictive source. I remember when I first noticed an article inferring that such-and-such a company must be developing such-and-such a type of video game, because they were hiring for people with particular technical skills which implied a certain development path. I thought "oh, that's clever, I never would have thought to monitor job boards to learn about the future, but it makes sense". Now that practice of reporting on hiring is just de rigeur across coverage of many different industries, I think.
I wonder if there will be some kind of response from companies, to try to hide or obfuscate such information—which may sometimes amount to a trade secret, or sometimes (as in this Tesla case) just a present kernel for bad publicity to form around. Maybe leaving up positions with no intention of filling them, or posting fake positions to send confusing signals to people watching you? They probably already do this, come to think of it.
The end result would be increased annoyance and frustration for people applying to those jobs.