SpaceX Faces Another Former Employee Lawsuit
SpaceX Workers Launch 3rd Suit, Allege Racist Policies, Law 360
“Space Exploration Technologies Corp. employees on Monday launched a putative class action suit in California court accusing it of fostering a racist working environment in which certain workers were subjected to slurs and passed over for promotions, making this the third employee suit to befall the rocket manufacturer in less than a month.”
Marc’s note: I reached out to SpaceX for a comment on this new lawsuit. Here’s the response from John Taylor their Communications Director.
“SpaceX rejects these allegations and will vigorously defend itself in court. At SpaceX, we don’t care about your gender, race, ethnic background, sexual orientation, age or anything else of that nature–to succeed here, the only requirement is to work hard and produce outstanding results.
“Earlier this year SpaceX completed its annual review cycle and as a result of those reviews, approximately 4% of our workforce were let go. Given the ambitious goals of the company, the standards for work performance at SpaceX are very high. It is critical that all employees meet this standard.”
“SpaceX is committed not only to providing an awesome work environment where employees do exciting and meaningful work, but also to ensuring that everyone pulls their own weight and is held accountable for failing to do so. Unfortunately some people who succeed at other companies do not succeed here.
“Developing the technology to put human life on Mars requires the best efforts of a uniquely talented team. SpaceX continues to seek out the best and brightest individuals across all disciplines, with an expected net positive employee growth in 2014 of approximately 20 percent.”
Not a particularly unexpectable development given the hyper-litigious nature of Southern California. These kinds of nuisance suits tend to occur in clusters as they cost virtually nothing to initiate and, the U.S. having no “English Rule” where a loser pays the victor’s expenses, no real downside even if the suit is eventually turfed, as they nearly always are. I expect we’ll be hearing next about how SpaceX allegedly discriminates against gays and women and blonde Jewish Bolivians.
No doubt. It’s a cost of doing business in the US these days. I wonder how long it will be before SpaceX starts looking to relocate.
I suggest SpaceX relocate to somewhere other than lunatic California … possibly central Florida … where Canaveral is located. There is the University of Florida, which has an excellent engineering school, UCF, etc to draw from. And it’s certainly more attractive than Hawthorne or greater LA. Plus a MUCH MUCH better tax environment.
Come on Elon, yield to this simple logic!
UF is in Gainsville, UCF in Orlando. They are NOT the same.
I graduated from UF; I know. Just listed UCF as another source of engineering talent.
It’s funny… I live in California, and I’ve lived in FL, and I think of it as “lunatic Florida.”
I guess it’s a matter of perspective.
The problem with the “English Rule” is when you take on megacorps with million dollar lawyers, if you can’t survive the litigation process you get billed for everything. The problem with the “California Rule” is that you can sue using lawyers on contingency.
Both versions make life impossible.
If I have to choose between making life impossible for businesspeople or for opportunistic parasites and slackers I know exactly which choice I’d make.
SpaceX has entered the burnout cycle. Today’s outstanding employees will be next years substandard ones precisely because the entire business is built on an unsustainable process of burning people out and replacing them.
An interesting charge. How do you know that?
Take a look at http://www.glassdoor.com/Re…
Yes, certainly not direct proof (what company doesn’t have employees complain), but there’s certainly smoke there regarding overworking employees.
P. S. Obligatory comment since this relates to pointing out something not perfect at SpaceX: I want SpaceX to succeed, they’re good for the industry, Elon Musk is cool, ULA is everything evil, etc.
OMG AstrolnMI, I went to that site you had a link too, and the stories are identical to what I hear from the many SpaceX employees I know personally. These Space X groupies need to go there and read it for themselves, because every time I make a truthful comment about Spacex, I get hammered.
I’ve worked in this sort of environment before and it’s truly not for everyone. But I’d say that the first 10 to 15 years of my career was in that sort of environment (software company that still had a young average age for the workers). So, I expect that the comments on Green Door are accurate. With tools like this, anyone looking for a job at SpaceX should not be surprised to find that they expect long hours from their employees.
They’re not the only ones. The software industry is notorious for expecting long hours from its employees.
I too have echoed this sentiment for awhile now, the people I know who work at SpaceX routinely work 6 days and 60+ hours per week.
Many other space professionals I know would like to work for SpaceX but have already worked their lives away at their current jobs and have no intention of starting it all over again.
The space business is a bad business to employ tired, burned out people and flushing your workforce once a year is bad way of doing business.
I think 10hrs per day 6 days per week, constantly week in and week out is a little much to expect from anyone. But Musk is able to cash in on the enthusiasm of young folks who do not yet understand or value the life/work balance.
Or do not yet feel the need for work/life balance because they are young, single, childless, and passionate about the work.
parking lot full at 6am, parking lot full at 6pm, parking lot full on saturday and sunday;
former SpaceX employees quitting to go back to working for NASA subcontractors that require 44hr workweeks and the first 4hrs isn’t paid;
fridays at the local watering hole over beer with faces that have aged by twenty years in the last three;
They’ll have no trouble filling spots vacated by turnover no matter what the cause. SpaceX is an up and coming exciting place to work, so it will remain an aerospace company where people actually want to work.
But is that viable way to run a company for the long term? Maybe it’s because I’m ancient myself, but institutional knowledge isn’t something to dismiss. There are certain problems where I can assign a newcomer to a task and it’ll take him or her 10 hours or I can assign someone experienced with the company and it’ll take him or her 1. New blood is extremely important, but so is long term knowledge to not repeat mistakes. SpaceX, or any company, needs to be a place where people want to both work _and_ stay.
Yes, I think this is a viable way to run a company long term. Firing under-performers is a necessary part of maintaining a culture where hard work is rewarded. The only employees who would fear these sorts of reductions are the ones who don’t fit into that culture and should be looking for another job that has a better “work-life balance” (i.e. they don’t expect to have to regularly work more than 40 hours a week).
This is quite different than seemingly arbitrary “across the board reductions” that many companies saw during the great recession. Those sorts of reductions are demoralizing for the employees who remain because the message is that upper management values profits over their employees.
Agree on firing underperformers and maintaining a culture of hard work. I don’t agree good, smart employees should fear reductions because they want to have a life.
My concern is it takes hundreds of people to build, test, and operate a spacecraft and there are a finite number of good people to fill those roles. I think you are overestimating the pool of people that are willing to do this over time once the shines wears off. Although, maybe I am underestimating it. We’ll know over time, I guess.
How “replaceable” a person is enters into this equation as well. I’ve seen my share of “indispensable” employees over my career and many of them do have a better “work life balance”. The company knows what they’re worth and they don’t want to lose them. These guys also get paid more, because they earned it.
You know the type. The person who is the technical lead for a team of about 100+ engineers or programmers isn’t going to be let go just because he’s “only” putting in a 45 hour work week when most everyone else is putting in more than that.
No – it’s really not viable for the long term. With the sort of turnover that it will engender, SpaceX will have a continuous brain drain in expertise, to the point where the new blood will be constantly having to come up the extremely steep learning curve and hopefully not have to relearn the mistakes of the previous herd. Progress will become incremental to asymptotic.
Your reply has nothing to do with the point that AstroInMi raised. I would be curious to see what your response to his actual question is.
“But is that viable way to run a company for the long term?”
The history of labor is that this IS a viable way to run a company especially one that requires familiarity with new technology and new methods. Who wants an “old (45yr old) video game programmer? Given the dirth of employment opportunities for people coming out of college, this model works great. Read Steve Jobs book. He did the same thing in essence.
I wonder about that. The other side of the coin: the more experienced guy will be much more efficient, will go down fewer blind alleys, and in short will get a given volume of work completed in much less time.
Personally I handle projects now that, while I would have disagreed at the time, a much younger self would have not seen all of the consequences. And I imagine it’s the same for the engineers who populate this site.
There are plenty of studies showing that working more than X hours per day is counter-productive, where X= 8 or 10.
The ‘hire young’ predilection is nothing more than preference for people who are like you.
I think SpaceX works as a Silicon Valley start-up. It is a team of very driven, very focused, very committed people. They have put life/work balance on the back burner for the interim as they go to Mars. A certain percentage of workers don’t buy into the plan or decide to get off the train. I suspect that SpaceX will have little trouble replacing those people. I don’t think I could work there, but many have the drive to do it.
Startup’s whether in silicon valley or elsewhere always put in 60 odd hours a week. SpaceX though is no longer a startup though. Having said that the mentality of a startup still persists which might be a good thing. Also note, entrepreneurs, self-employed and small business owners regularly put in 60 hours including myself and Keith. There are people who just want to be an employee and work their 40 hours and that’s it. Also note, all SpaceX employees are shareholders. They have a stake in the future of the company. Every company has people who don’t workout or can’t cut it. The employees in these lawsuits will have their day in court, perhaps, if it goes that far, but otherwise SpaceX will keep moving forward. I know several people who work there and none have complained about being overworked or mistreated.
I agree about small businesses, but SpaceX is not a small business. Nor is any company that needs to build something as complex as a spacecraft or rocket. Certainly in the space business there are going to be times where long hours are required, but it can’t be day-in and day-out to be viable long term. Tired and strung out employees also make mistakes regardless of how good they are.
Well Marc, you asked for my story how I know what goes on at SpaceX. I replied to a post earlier today and you rejected it. Why ?, Was it too anti SpaceX ?
There was one post either today to yesterday which was rejected. While both sides of a position are encouraged we do draw a line and when a comment goes too far, it is rejected.
I’ll sound like an old man, but regarding Mars, I want to get humans there, too, but experiencing being a human on Earth isn’t such a bad thing, either. I don’t want the folks that get us to Mars to miss out on that.
As pleasant as it may be to have a 9-5 and a fulfilling family life, great achievements by large groups of people in human history have frequently come at the cost of extreme sacrifice.
Great accomplishments rarely come from small efforts.
Excellent perspective.
It’s fun to participate in creating something larger than yourself. German engineers did it at the start of WWII, we did it during the first DotCom bubble, and SpaceX employees are doing it now. But burning out while doing it isn’t fun. Sustainable change is what moves us all forward.
Apollo wasn’t sustainable, and so we’ve had decades of recovery time from that insane push.
Didn’t traditional aerospace companies go through this during 1960s? I heard back then companies will hire 30,000 people but they will also fire 30,000 people. Lot of fast paced projects driven by Vietnam war and Apollo program. But maybe many were simply laid off before getting burned out.
Yes, I think what you hit on is actually a better model to compare Apollo than comparing SpaceX to Apple (sort of subtweeting [subcommenting?] objose above).
I’m also kind of torn, too. At least from what I read, there overwork was non-stop then, as well. But whether that could have been maintained into the 70s was trumped by people losing interest in Apollo like you say.
I don’t know. Maybe I should just be happy that there are people that will push that envelope while I work on my less ambitious space projects. I think the manager in me is leaking out in wanting them not to overwork. 🙂
Yeah, and they still do. No bucks, no buck Rogers. SpaceX despite the sentiment is not immune to this. Never saw what the second lawsuit was about so here it is: Sued over pay and working conditions. Not sure if the cash-flow problem is a speculation or a fact but I would bet the latter.
http://www.parabolicarc.com…
This is the flip side of “diversity” – getting sued because people didn’t like the choices you made.
To me, ‘new’ space looks a lot like ‘old’ space. Just younger and with a few more women..