Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmoy | Hacker News Reader

30% cut for VP+, 20% for director, 10% others

At least it's progressive?

Seems kind of questionable to lead the headline with 30% cut for employee pay when it's a 30% cut for the top level executives.

Total BS headline. It seems like they did they best they could.

How would you rewrite it? At some companies, "VP" isn't that senior of a position, and there are hundreds of them.

100s of vps usually means dozens of presidents. Probably 100s of directors and 100s x 2 managers.

There's very few industries where that's true, and it certainly isn't at Tesla.

I counted 20 VPs at Tesla[1] before getting lazy and giving up. There are lots in their sales and local manufacturing groups. There may be 50 or more.

Either way, you still didn't propose a better headline. Is it possible there isn't a significantly better way to condense the info into a headline?

1. https://www.google.com/search?q=tesla+vice+president+site%3A...

Same headline, replace "as much as 30%" with "10% or more"

It's more accurate, but less click baity. But of course that's why they chose it, so here we are.

* > Employees who haven’t been assigned to critical tasks and who can’t work from home will be furloughed without pay, though they will keep health-care benefits.*

Sounds like a 100% cut for most folks, less whatever inadequacy our unemployment insurance system pays out.

Does unemployment insurance even pay out if you've been furloughed without pay, but still technically have a job?

In the US generally speaking yes.

Yes, it can sometimes even pay out if you are furloughed with pay.

It now pays up to $1050 per week up to 26 weeks, plus the stimulus check of up to $1200. I wouldn't call that inadequate, especially considering that you don't have to work or even look for work.

For low paid workers, the federal unemployment stimulus can actually make their unemployment checks larger than their normal take home pay.

Only on HN is $54k/year considered "low paid".

The US median income is $31k. $1050/week is an enormous pay raise for well over half of the working population.

Those are two separate paragraphs. Low paid workers don't get $1050 per week, it scales based on income. But the minimum is $600.

Title selection has never been a super honest deal. It's meant to get you to read the article, nothing more. In the US at least it's a well-oiled machine from the late 1800s. I guess other countries have probably been doing it longer?

Years ago during the dotcom burst the executives where I worked took a paycut along with everyone else.

We later found out that the paycut for executives was repaid later via other pay and benefits "because they had a contract"... but obviously not for everyone else.

It was common in a lot of companies to cut (or defer) executive salaries but grant them additional stock options or warrants.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com