More evidence of the Elon curse erasing his fiefdom.
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Jordan turned up at work on Sunday morning expecting a normal shift as a Tesla test driver.
But instead at the office they were told they couldn’t drive — their job was to train the electric carmaker’s self-driving software by riding along with it as it navigated real city streets — and asked to wait around on standby until the issue was resolved. "Don’t worry about it," a manager told them.
So Jordan waited for eight hours, and only learned on Monday morning that they were among the estimated 14,000 Tesla employees who were laid off across the world this weekend.
"It felt kind of s****y," Jordan told The Independent. "They could have sent me home. They could have given me the heads up." (The Independent agreed to refer to Jordan by a pseudonym to protect them from potential retaliation.)
Several newly-unemployed workers told The Independent the layoffs seemed to strike chaotically, without rhyme or reason. Some who’d been reprimanded repeatedly stayed on, while others with clean records were ejected. Some were laid off from already overworked teams, others saw the writing on the wall when their daily tasks dropped off as sales did.
This week’s layoffs appeared to be the largest in Tesla’s recent history, targeting 10 per cent of its roughly 140,000 employees, ranging from salesfolk in China through factory workers in Texas to engineers in California.
Simultaneously, Tesla lost two prominent executives: Drew Baglino, a long-serving lieutenant to chief executive Elon Musk who had been with the company for 18 years, and Rohan Patel, a former climate adviser to Barack Obama who led Tesla’s dealings with governments and regulators.
‘I think they were expecting to sell more cars’
Those laid-off struggled to figure out why they’d be selected over other employees.
"I’m used to a culling of familiar faces with ‘performance reviews,’ but I was in good standing," a laid-off customer care worker in the US told The Independent.
"I don’t know why we were the 10 per cent. Is it because I had a conversation with HR last month about a social concern?” the anonymous worker asked. “Someone heard a rumour that it had to do with desk tidiness, which seems ridiculous. But I’m left grasping at straws."
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/axed-tesla-staffers-chaos-lead-223045476.html
