The 3 months severance is the same as what was offered for (most) employees affected by the Twitter layoffs last week. I believe NY requires 3 months and CA 2 months for WARN.
I say most employees because there was an article asserting that India employees only got 2 months even though Musk said everyone got 3.
Expecting or requiring? If I’m a project manager and I do all my work for the week in 15 hours, can my employer require me to sit in my office for 25 more hours just to stare at my wall and still call me exempt?
In the unlikely event, sure. There’s not really a lot of ways to make those types of folks non-exempt, save by cutting their pay. And that would mainly affect overtime pay, which wouldn’t be an issue in this case, anyway.
Yup, and probably why he put 3 months in the email. That said, some employees have it in their employment agreements they get more than that in a layoff, and that’s also caused some headaches.
Sure, he may be legally clear, but it’s not for certain and not really so cut and dried unless the precise terms are laid out and how these may vary from state to state or for individual employees.
Also, one of those things that can be a headache is it seems like Musk is conflating severance with the payments required via WARN. So, let’s say you have an agreement for 1 week’s severance for every year you worked. If enough people are laid off without sufficient notice, you would still be owed that severance on top of the 3 months Musk is attempting to use to satisfy the requirements of the WARN Act.
Again, there’s a reason why big corporations have a Compliance department (though Twitter’s is pretty much gone now) and a Legal department (again, most of these are gone, too). Even when you think are you legally in the clear, it’s best to have the professionals make sure you are.
To expand on that last point, WARN payments are basically an attempt to pay the penalty for noncompliance in advance. They aren’t in lieu of severance.
So, if for example 1000 employees are laid off and just given 3 months severance, Twitter would still be on the hook for the WARN penalty separately after 60 (or 90) days.
But what this looks like is Musk thinks the WARN penalty can be used in lieu of severance, which is totally not the case for a mass layoff. He would need all the relevant employees to sign agreements to accept that severance on their way out the door in exchange for waiving their rights under WARN. That happened to me once. I ended up with about 11 months severance and signed an agreement to waive such rights. And got a new job within a couple days (though took a month off anyway).
If he just fires them, tosses them a check, and there are enough of them, he’s potentially on the hook for a lot more money after the 60 (or 90 or whatever) days.
Yes, it’s not actually 3 months of severance. They stay on as full-fledged employees for the WARN period. During this time they are not expected (or allowed) to work, but they get benefits. After the WARN period, they are terminated. If their state’s WARN period is less than 3 months, they get the difference as severance.
From my experience this is a standard way to handle the WARN act. The two or three month notice is given to employees, but they are not expected to work during that time. In many ways it seems like they are getting the entire period as severance, but they are not really.
Exempt, professional employees are not supposed to be clock-punchers. You aren’t paid hourly, you are paid for getting a job done. It is extremely common to make professional people work long hours. Whether it’s smart or not is another questoon.
A professional engineer can find herself getting a 3 AM call saying a critical server is down, and on short notice fly across the country and spend a week working on it and doing little else other than sleeping. There is no extra pay for this - it’s part of being a professional. Of course, a well managed company will see that bonuses are paid to people who do this stuff, but it’s not mandatory.
In software, ‘death marches’ are common towards the end of a release. In the case of overdue projects, the ‘death march’ can last weeks or months, with workers actually sleeping at the facility to minimize time not working on problems. Google advertises that they have sleeping rooms for employees who are exhausted.
That said, you can’t maintain the frenetic activity as a regular thing. People burn out, the work gets sloppy, bugs creep into software, etc.
The problem with a lot of entrepreneurs is that many of them are absolute workaholics, and so they tend to demand the same from the people around them. If Elon Musk the billionaire can put in 16 hours on the shop floor, so can his employees. Or so the thinking goes. Mere normal work ethics start to look like laziness when you’re a work-crazed dynamo who never stops.
One last thing: Elon Musk may be doing this as a filter. He may have no intention of working people as hard as he says, but he wants to retain the people who are willing to do it, and dump the ‘work to rule’ types. This offer may be an attempt to sniff out the ones unwilling to commit to the company. That may or may not backfire on him, if that’s what he is doing.
This applies to Google, Occulus, Facebook, Valve, etc but not to microsoft. Microsofties do get some perks like an allowance that can be used for a gym membership, but none of what you listed is standard at Microsoft.
The Commons was pretty posh back when I was in the trenches there a number of years back, but yeah, still not quite like the Palo Alto and Mountain View clients I used to go visit.
Elon Musk spends a good bit of time on twitter. Personally, I don’t know where he finds the time, being such a hardcore worker and all, but he’s going to miss it when he finally manages to kill it.
Reclassifying you would probably be more trouble than it’s worth, since a competent boss would find more for you to do, or you’ll wind up with an unsatisfactory review.
The trick is to make the 15 hours look like 40.
Throw in perfectionism (another common entrepreneurial trait) and they demand more from those around them than they put in. It’s easier to say “not good enough - make it better” than it is to actually make it better.
This part I don’t quite get… commit to what?
Commit to the guy who spent 6 months trying to get out of buying the company, who just fired half your coworkers, and who will pocket 100% of any value generated by your long hours of high intensity work? Sign me up!
I have a close friend who built his business from a garage-operation with his wife to 300 employees and tens of millions in revenue. In the early days, as he hired people, they were all part of the core business and had equity, and they all worked like machines. I noticed over time he was constantly complaining that his new hires (after her was hiring “regular” workers) didn’t have the drive and passion for the business he did. He just couldn’t understand why a wage-worker wouldn’t treat the job like he did.
Any time I tried to explain it to him he’d end up back on “don’t they take satisfaction from making the company successful?” He just didn’t get it.
I worked at a place like that. A former colleague started a place and owned 90% of the equity when it sold for $35 million to a public company. I started working there a year or so after the sale. He made the same complaint to me and pointed out that I and the other new engineers had stock options. I countered that if the stock tripled(spoiler: this conversation happened in early 2001 so the opposite happened) we would get like $50k.
I have a friend who recently retired from Apple. They had crazy secrecy rules, like he went to Germany for work and wasn’t allowed to tell me what city he flew to. Or where his regular office was, for that matter. He didn’t get fancy perks. But they paid him twice what his prior employer had paid him, and were solvent, unlike his prior employer that often wobbled on the edge of bankruptcy. He seemed happy enough with the deal he got from Apple.
He also worked pretty normal hours, and could take normal vacations.
Any employer is within their rights to say “click this button by 5PM tomorrow or you’re fired.” Not really disputable or controversial.
The meaning of that button is what’s complicated. What if I click “Yes I will be a hardcore worker” and decide that means 41 hours instead of 40 hours? The company didn’t define “hardcore worker”.
If they explicitly said “your working agreement is now 20 hours extra without overtime,” that would never stand up in court. Yes, you can push exempt employees quite a bit when there are exceptional circumstances or projects, but that’s not supposed to be a routine expectation. If you look at their actual working agreement, there’s usually some statutory limit of (for example) 50 hours that they’re theoretically not supposed to exceed on a regular basis.
Back when I was a sysadmin, my work from week to week varied wildly, like from 30 hours to 70 hours. But when they required me to be on-call/on-duty for specific times outside the statutory workday, they had to pay by the hour because it was planned, explicitly defined, and outside the work agreement.
You can’t just fire half your workforce and mandate the remainers work double to make up for it. Musk was just hoping he could make that implied threat and the remaining employees would be too meek to challenge it. I have no proof, but I bet a bunch of the remainers are H1-B visa-holders who are at his mercy if they don’t want to get deported, and probably some folks looking at an options vesting cliff in the near term. Those folks probably have little appetite to fight for justice in this case, and Musk is willing to exploit that.
Musk might have a leg to stand on if this were some unusual crunch project. But it’s clear he’s cutting people loose to make others take an effective paycut. Not only that but he himself has stated on the record that he won’t be CEO for long term, he’s not committing to this. So it would be hard for him to argue in court that this is anything but a transparent attempt to double productivity.
Tell me about it - theory may be “you get paid for getting the work done” but for the vast majority of salary workers in the US, it’s “If your work takes more than 40 hours a week, then you have to work more than 40 hours. If your work takes less than 40 hours, you have to be working (at least at work) at least 40 hours a week.” And, even worse, some companies specifically design the jobs/personnel structure so the bulk of workers are working more than a 40 hour week because, hey, they don’t have to pay them extra, so wring as much work out of them as possible.
I carried a beeper early in my career. Operations would call if the daily run aborted. I might be in operations from 10:45 till past midnight.
It was agreed people on call that worked at night could come in at 9:30 instead of 8am.
It wasn’t full compensation. Some nights I might put in 3 hours and others 1 hour. It averaged out over a long period.
Call eventually caused me to take a tech support position outside Computing Services. I was ready for 8 to 5 hours. I was never unwilling to work late to finish a project.
Musk expects long hours all the time. I would never accept that.
My gf is salaried (and has an ownership stake in the company). Although she’s been working from home since the beginning of the pandemic, yesterday she went in to the office. She worked 9am-7pm, came home and had dinner with me, then went into her home office and worked 10pm-1am.
Then again, last week she spent a day visiting the outlet shops in Grove City while “on the clock”.