Rocket reuse became a normal occurance, probably earlier than the majority of the industry anticipated. Their competitive pricing took the market by storm, changing the equation of sending anything to space. There are less new payloads to launch in 2019, because it takes much longer to contract and build a satellite than to send it to space, and the market hasn't yet adapted to this new mechanic.
Their need for manufacturing new boosters scaled down greatly because of reusability. You cannot reasign all engineers to other projects, some must go.
On top of that SpaceX is moving to new risky projects like the Starship, and they need to cut any fat that poses risk to their long term plans.
Lastly, as few pointed out, it's a great opportunity to get rid of underperforming employees and restructure the company.
The key I think is that the launch rate has increased, but the market has a years long delay due to build times. The result is that the existing supply of launchable satellites has been consumed, so fewer launches are available to pay the bills.
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've reached out to my former colleagues who left to join Space X)
What's odd is why SpaceX is cutting staff with the new development underway on the larger rockets and the satellite business. I'm curious about how they'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'll get more out of an already highly productive team. That'd be something to learn from.
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'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.
I just don't buy the Carbon Fiber vs Stainless construction. They aren't used for the same thing (low weight structural stiffness vs heat conduction, radiation & appearance).
From what I understand it was a water tank contactor that did the hopper in Boca Chica... and it will never face lanch/re-entry stresses. That won't replace anyone.
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's a lot of people.
What I hope is we'll see new startups form out of these folk. What I'd like to see is an ESOP/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.
Well, Space X costs less than half than a ULA launch. I suspect that ULA spends that additional money on large sub-contracts to Boeing and Lockheed for the Delta and Atlas vehicles. This makes me think that when we add up the employees on the subcontracts the space X staffing number will be much more impressive in it's leanness.
I hope they all join my company, we've got a lot of work they would find interesting. With the retirement rate increasing it's the time to change things for the better. I want their experience at Space X on how to do things faster and better. But perhaps that's wishful thinking...
> What's odd is why SpaceX is cutting staff with the new development underway on the larger rockets and the satellite business. I'm curious about how they're going to increase development while cutting staff.
The oddness diminishes when you look at their open jobs listing [1], as it looks that they have >300 open positions.
> What's odd is why SpaceX is cutting staff with the new development underway on the larger rockets and the satellite business.
You're missing that they finished up falcon heavy development last spring, falcon 9 block 5 a little later, and crew dragon is finishing up now. That's a lot of development manpower freed up. To much for starship probably, and I don't know if many of the launcher skills are applicable to satellites.
Well, naturally every company has talent drain. The rockstars will not work long in one company and jump from one gig to the next. But if you have bad luck and hired some slackers, which will happen with the tightest of hiring schemes, then they will certainly stick around.
Thus over time you still have to re-hire people you really need, but get a bigger and bigger amount of people who are just there for the social benefits.
So what can you do to achieve your ambitious goals? Reduce the workforce and try to find a cutting point where you get rid of mostly parasites while keeping your ambitious work bees around.
Usually at the same time of the cut, some of the work bees also get raises and promotions, because then there's some free budget. So if you are an ambitious work bee, then "cutting staff" is actually also good news.
Finding the right cutting point is really the important point and hardest part. For instance you don't want to lay off people who really are performers but for some reason or another (e.g. they just got a baby) they don't perform right now. So at least in the companies I could look inside until now the cutting point is usually well inside the slackers group, so that the people who would recover and then start performing again have a chance to continue.
In the end, even the most tyranical ass-hole leader wants to have as many people as possible work as hard as possible to achieve his goals for him, in exchange for an amount of money that in most cases is peanuts for him. And not all leaders are even tyranical ass-holes.
You left out the part where managers are held accountable for failing to help their staff be productive. It’s easy to rant about slackers but in my experience they’re rare (and 100% protected by management) compared to people who are given conflicting or bad incentives or – by far the most common – work which appears simple only from a distance (e.g. how enterprise software developers can take 3 months to add a button because that involves 600 edits on 20 servers and a labyrinthine test plan).
It's not unsual to layoff 10% of your workforce in hardware companies but it is unusual for a "growing" company. To put in perspective Pratt and Whitney laid off about 10-15% a couple years ago when they were in between the phasing out of the old engine and ramping up the new engine. Sometimes companies are unlucky because there is a drought where the demand for the new stuff is lower than the demand of old stuff but you have to phase it out to maintain product lifecycles for sustainable growth.
It is normal to layoff about 5% per year, you trim the one in the 20 that is the weakest and it has positive, not negative effects. Going to 10% is a bit stretch, but still workable. In the last companies I worked, if up to 20% of the people left one day it would have an immediate positive impact on the performance, less complexity to deal with and more focus to work on real stuff.
5% is insane, I would never work for a company that regularly laid off that many people. Firing under performers is one thing, but to systematically clear house is toxic. How are you supposed to build a career if one of your coworkers/friends is canned every year, so everyone is wondering what year is theirs? So people overwork themselves to make sure it doesn't happen to them. You need to show your employees safety, so one bad project doesn't ruin their lives.
> if up to 20% of the people left one day it would have an immediate positive impact on the performance, less complexity to deal with and more focus to work on real stuff.
Maybe in a fairy tale. In the real world, the 20% that were laid off are unlikely to be the 20% that should have been laid off.
Probably would depend on who was in the 20% who left. Having the people in the management structure select the correct people to fire is probably not that common. Especially in big, old companies where management has evolved over a long time to select for people who don't get fired instead of people who work well together and do a good job.
To expand on this point, when you hear layoffs you probably immediately think about the engineers given the demographic of this site and how you wouldn't working for a company like this. However, layoffs have a tendency to hit sales and production harder than the technical team. Production and sales usually outnumber engineers to begin with and has a higher turnover rate due to the nature of the work.
10% is a big fraction. How often do large, stable companies execute a layoff like that? Sometimes layoffs can be not so bad, for example when that's the company's way of clearing off the managers' firing wishlist without incurring legal trouble. However at 10% of the workforce, this may be a change of direction away from R&D and towards sitting on the falcon 9 and launching to LEO.
Maybe, maybe not. Consider it in terms of your own workplace: if you worked on a team of 10, and one person got laid off, would that seem so huge? I think the question is whether this round of layoffs is in response to an acute cash flow issue or just part of long-term financial prudency. They fact that they waited until after Christmas and are providing 8 weeks of pay and benefits makes me hopeful that it's the latter.
Also, given that Falcon 9 is now essentially "done", I expect there probably is a fair bit of internal capacity that's accumulated during its development which can be cut. For example, SpaceX is famous for building a lot of components in house, but perhaps they'll move more to using subcontractors for Falcon 9 parts. That might free up money to spend on R&D. The challenge will be to become leaner and save money in the core launch business without compromising standards. It'll only take a couple of accidents to trash their reputation.
Waiting until after Christmas is indeed nice, but the 8 weeks is actually mandated by law.
California WARN act applies to any site that has at least 70 employees and lays of at least 50. When this is triggered, the employer needs to provide at least 60 days notice.
8 weeks of pay as severance is insultingly horrible, even for very junior employees. If a company hopes to grow and be taken seriously as a professional workplace, you have to do much, much better than 8 weeks pay & benefits for severance.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Always negotiate severance up front as part of any job offer, and consider 4-6 months as an absolute minimum for junior or mid-level employees, and at least 12 months of pay for senior employees. Simply turn down job offers when a company won’t offer this and take a longer time to find an offer at one of the (many) companies that will.
Most companies will negotiate severance with you but you have to ask and make it clear that in-writing severance details to serve as protection against unexpected unemployment from layoffs is a dealbreaker for you.
Most candidates won’t negotiate this, which is why most companies don’t have to offer it except to the few special case people that require it.
If we all, as candidates, unilaterally make it impossible to hire us without adequate severance, we’ll all be better off.. instead of just the minority of candidates who put forward the effort to negotiate it and aren’t afraid to turn down offers that don’t include defined severance agreements.
It is more like you work at a company with 10 people. One person is fired but that person happens to be hr. The remaining 9 somehow get payroll done but someone is always short.
> towards sitting on the falcon 9 and launching to LEO.
That would still leave them with many thousands of redundant employees. Falcon 9 is done and the production is dropping due to reusability. Recently, they had a 3rd re-flight of the same core, which, coupled with the slowdown of the global launch market, means that in the next years they will need to produce a third to a half of the number of cores they used in 2017. The same for Merlin engines.
They basically fulfilled their mission and drastically reduced the cost of getting into orbit - which for the space industry is dominated by labor costs. Without a greatly increased demand, they can't justify keeping those people around.
And they can't roll all the Falcon production workforce towards BFR, Raptor and Starlink since those are still strongly R&D dominated projects and the skill set is incompatible. At the same time, they have hundreds of engineering positions open for those projects.
I would have put them on other Musk projects to keep them from going to the competition. SpaceX doesn't have a monopoly on low cost launch. The next place to figure out how to 3d print a tungsten titanium copper nickel chromium iron one piece rocket nozzle will also have that advantage.
Depends on management style. Stack ranking companies, which used to include MS and GE) would fire 10% (theoretically the bottom 10%) every year. It's no longer fashionable, but there are probably some that still do this more or less.
Musk does seem to believe in occasionally "trimming the fat" when the numbers get tight. SpaceX did this exact thing in 2014, and Tesla has done it recently (and is now back over the headcount post-layoffs).
It's a big fraction but it's not necessarily unheard of. For example Autodesk laid off about 13% of its workforce at the end of 2017. Additionally, in California you've got to give plenty of advance notice and as a result the state tracks mass layoffs[1].
Maybe reusability is already having the desired effects? When a reusable launch is cheaper than using an expendable rocket, a big chunk of the savings must be labor (the raw materials are cheap) SpaceX, I think, is doing unusually deep manufacturing (vs contracting out, where most of the the hit of reduced labor demand would happen at component suppliers), so the reduction is at their own workforce if the increased efficiency is not fully compensated by increased demand.
In my experience, the larger the company the less painful it is to fire 10%.
In large engineering organisations, laying off 10% makes no difference at all on anything apart from the ego of managers whose teams shrink.
On the topic, wasn't Jack Welsh/GE that popularised the idea of firing the bottom 10% every single year? Not saying that this is necessarily a good idea but that shows the amount of slack in large organisations.
If you ask the PR department or look at the "About Us" section of any company, you'll find some fantastical story how they're improving humanity by earning millions doing whatever they do too.
The one time I lived through a 10% reduction, the results were not catastrophic, but still pretty bad. Morale took a huge hit. What's worse, is that it spooks everyone. Resumes get updated, networks get activated, and you find a lot of people leaving after the layoff for new jobs.
This isn't the first time SpaceX has done a 10% layoff round [1]. It seems like they do this at key inflection points where they're relatively sure they can make the next tech leap, and need to retool their workforce.
Not sure if this is still the case but didn't SpaceX make a point to stick to trade secrets instead of patents[1] for fear of Chinese rocket agencies copying them anyways?
If they lay off 10% of their workforce, how do they ensure that their trade secrets are kept safe? Lay off only low-risk employees? NDAs? It was my understanding that the degree to which those can be enforced in California is limited.
NDAs are used to protect both confidential information and trade secrets but trade secrets are treated differently from confidential information by the courts.
In typical NDA you specify a defined period of time to avoid the risk of a court declaring that an NDA is too restrictive. This should not apply to trade secret.
Trade secret lasts indefinitely even after NDA time period expires if all other conditions for trade secret are met.
There are some cases where NDA expiring invalidates trade secret but it's mostly due to specific circumstances or badly formed NDA. You should inform the employees when they are dealing with a trade secret and use all means to keep them secret.
My gut says this is an aggressive Muskian decimation.
1) Maybe brought on themselves: 'hey, design/build the thing, then fire those who designed it' type thing, which definitely happens. It happens to companies in a crunch, or those who just put the outcome ahead of everything else.
2) A decimation: let's use this as an opportunity to drop anyone we feel is not cutting it - and teams that we created/hired we realize we don't want/need.
3) General organizational shakeup.
4) A true and real opex cutback ahead of anticipated future needs.
The thing is - outside of human terms - it's a big cut but it might be highly rational.
'Pruning' I think is a essential aspect of any healthy organization, forcing entities to rethink, to shake them out of their settled positions, getting rid of organizational cruft.
Of course, there are humans behind every decision which makes it quite fundamentally something else.
But if you could imagine they were 'robots', as if to remove any issues of compassion and concern for externalized outcomes, and this were simply a simple dispassionate re-org ... then you can see where the economics might be pointing.
We also don't know the terms of the layoff: maybe some of them are voluntary. Maybe the payouts are huge. Sometimes these things work out well for a lot of those involved, obviously it doesn't for others.
Edit to add: I understand you were using this as a thought experiment. Sorry for knee-jerking.
If you're employing people to do something robots can't, you need to understand that the way to treat them is also different. This goes double if your mission is to improve the world instead of outright capitalism.
Presumably, one doesn’t want to prune a spaceflight organization quite as aggressively if it jeopardizes mission safety...
Could also be that they consider themselves “done” with major design phases of the heavy, while the people mover stuff is too far away to engage mid level designers with effectively?
hey, design/build the thing, then fire those who designed it' type thing, which definitely happens
That’s OK if you hire contractors and pay them premium contractors rates. It’s sleazy and underhanded to make people believe that job security is part of the “package” then bait-and-switch.
For comparison, DoD is reducing its medical workforce for 13%, 17,000 jobs. Makes total sense to me. I only work 12 hours a day, 6-7 days a week, so really, less than half-time.
Readit News
Rocket reuse became a normal occurance, probably earlier than the majority of the industry anticipated. Their competitive pricing took the market by storm, changing the equation of sending anything to space. There are less new payloads to launch in 2019, because it takes much longer to contract and build a satellite than to send it to space, and the market hasn't yet adapted to this new mechanic.
Their need for manufacturing new boosters scaled down greatly because of reusability. You cannot reasign all engineers to other projects, some must go.
On top of that SpaceX is moving to new risky projects like the Starship, and they need to cut any fat that poses risk to their long term plans.
Lastly, as few pointed out, it's a great opportunity to get rid of underperforming employees and restructure the company.
These layoffs are a direct result of SpaceX's recent failures to raise money.
Positions are made redundant, not people. Individual performance is irrelevant, if not the company needs to be taken to the cleaners at a tribunal.
What's odd is why SpaceX is cutting staff with the new development underway on the larger rockets and the satellite business. I'm curious about how they'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'll get more out of an already highly productive team. That'd be something to learn from.
From what I understand it was a water tank contactor that did the hopper in Boca Chica... and it will never face lanch/re-entry stresses. That won't replace anyone.
What I hope is we'll see new startups form out of these folk. What I'd like to see is an ESOP/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.
I hope they all join my company, we've got a lot of work they would find interesting. With the retirement rate increasing it's the time to change things for the better. I want their experience at Space X on how to do things faster and better. But perhaps that's wishful thinking...
The oddness diminishes when you look at their open jobs listing [1], as it looks that they have >300 open positions.
[1] https://www.spacex.com/careers/list
Deleted Comment
Good on ya.
You're missing that they finished up falcon heavy development last spring, falcon 9 block 5 a little later, and crew dragon is finishing up now. That's a lot of development manpower freed up. To much for starship probably, and I don't know if many of the launcher skills are applicable to satellites.
Thus over time you still have to re-hire people you really need, but get a bigger and bigger amount of people who are just there for the social benefits.
So what can you do to achieve your ambitious goals? Reduce the workforce and try to find a cutting point where you get rid of mostly parasites while keeping your ambitious work bees around.
Usually at the same time of the cut, some of the work bees also get raises and promotions, because then there's some free budget. So if you are an ambitious work bee, then "cutting staff" is actually also good news.
Finding the right cutting point is really the important point and hardest part. For instance you don't want to lay off people who really are performers but for some reason or another (e.g. they just got a baby) they don't perform right now. So at least in the companies I could look inside until now the cutting point is usually well inside the slackers group, so that the people who would recover and then start performing again have a chance to continue.
In the end, even the most tyranical ass-hole leader wants to have as many people as possible work as hard as possible to achieve his goals for him, in exchange for an amount of money that in most cases is peanuts for him. And not all leaders are even tyranical ass-holes.
Maybe in a fairy tale. In the real world, the 20% that were laid off are unlikely to be the 20% that should have been laid off.
Also, given that Falcon 9 is now essentially "done", I expect there probably is a fair bit of internal capacity that's accumulated during its development which can be cut. For example, SpaceX is famous for building a lot of components in house, but perhaps they'll move more to using subcontractors for Falcon 9 parts. That might free up money to spend on R&D. The challenge will be to become leaner and save money in the core launch business without compromising standards. It'll only take a couple of accidents to trash their reputation.
California WARN act applies to any site that has at least 70 employees and lays of at least 50. When this is triggered, the employer needs to provide at least 60 days notice.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Always negotiate severance up front as part of any job offer, and consider 4-6 months as an absolute minimum for junior or mid-level employees, and at least 12 months of pay for senior employees. Simply turn down job offers when a company won’t offer this and take a longer time to find an offer at one of the (many) companies that will.
Most companies will negotiate severance with you but you have to ask and make it clear that in-writing severance details to serve as protection against unexpected unemployment from layoffs is a dealbreaker for you.
Most candidates won’t negotiate this, which is why most companies don’t have to offer it except to the few special case people that require it.
If we all, as candidates, unilaterally make it impossible to hire us without adequate severance, we’ll all be better off.. instead of just the minority of candidates who put forward the effort to negotiate it and aren’t afraid to turn down offers that don’t include defined severance agreements.
That would still leave them with many thousands of redundant employees. Falcon 9 is done and the production is dropping due to reusability. Recently, they had a 3rd re-flight of the same core, which, coupled with the slowdown of the global launch market, means that in the next years they will need to produce a third to a half of the number of cores they used in 2017. The same for Merlin engines.
They basically fulfilled their mission and drastically reduced the cost of getting into orbit - which for the space industry is dominated by labor costs. Without a greatly increased demand, they can't justify keeping those people around.
And they can't roll all the Falcon production workforce towards BFR, Raptor and Starlink since those are still strongly R&D dominated projects and the skill set is incompatible. At the same time, they have hundreds of engineering positions open for those projects.
I would have put them on other Musk projects to keep them from going to the competition. SpaceX doesn't have a monopoly on low cost launch. The next place to figure out how to 3d print a tungsten titanium copper nickel chromium iron one piece rocket nozzle will also have that advantage.
Musk does seem to believe in occasionally "trimming the fat" when the numbers get tight. SpaceX did this exact thing in 2014, and Tesla has done it recently (and is now back over the headcount post-layoffs).
1: https://www.edd.ca.gov/jobs_and_training/Layoff_Services_WAR...
In large engineering organisations, laying off 10% makes no difference at all on anything apart from the ego of managers whose teams shrink.
On the topic, wasn't Jack Welsh/GE that popularised the idea of firing the bottom 10% every single year? Not saying that this is necessarily a good idea but that shows the amount of slack in large organisations.
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
[1] https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=35254.0
If they lay off 10% of their workforce, how do they ensure that their trade secrets are kept safe? Lay off only low-risk employees? NDAs? It was my understanding that the degree to which those can be enforced in California is limited.
[1] https://www.nasdaq.com/article/is-elon-musks-spacex-protecte...
California limits non-compete agreements and anti-moonlighting clauses however, as far as I know, does not limit NDAs.
In typical NDA you specify a defined period of time to avoid the risk of a court declaring that an NDA is too restrictive. This should not apply to trade secret. Trade secret lasts indefinitely even after NDA time period expires if all other conditions for trade secret are met.
There are some cases where NDA expiring invalidates trade secret but it's mostly due to specific circumstances or badly formed NDA. You should inform the employees when they are dealing with a trade secret and use all means to keep them secret.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
1) Maybe brought on themselves: 'hey, design/build the thing, then fire those who designed it' type thing, which definitely happens. It happens to companies in a crunch, or those who just put the outcome ahead of everything else.
2) A decimation: let's use this as an opportunity to drop anyone we feel is not cutting it - and teams that we created/hired we realize we don't want/need.
3) General organizational shakeup.
4) A true and real opex cutback ahead of anticipated future needs.
The thing is - outside of human terms - it's a big cut but it might be highly rational.
'Pruning' I think is a essential aspect of any healthy organization, forcing entities to rethink, to shake them out of their settled positions, getting rid of organizational cruft.
Of course, there are humans behind every decision which makes it quite fundamentally something else.
But if you could imagine they were 'robots', as if to remove any issues of compassion and concern for externalized outcomes, and this were simply a simple dispassionate re-org ... then you can see where the economics might be pointing.
We also don't know the terms of the layoff: maybe some of them are voluntary. Maybe the payouts are huge. Sometimes these things work out well for a lot of those involved, obviously it doesn't for others.
No. Don't.
Edit to add: I understand you were using this as a thought experiment. Sorry for knee-jerking.
If you're employing people to do something robots can't, you need to understand that the way to treat them is also different. This goes double if your mission is to improve the world instead of outright capitalism.
And if you're employing people to do what robots can do, you can treat them as robots?
Could also be that they consider themselves “done” with major design phases of the heavy, while the people mover stuff is too far away to engage mid level designers with effectively?
That’s OK if you hire contractors and pay them premium contractors rates. It’s sleazy and underhanded to make people believe that job security is part of the “package” then bait-and-switch.
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2019/01/10/more-17000-un...