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Comment by PeterBannon | Hacker News Reader

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PeterBannon

The same thing happened to me in late 2018.

I was hired to write a compiler for deep learning (training) on Tesla's in-house hardware, under Peter Bannon.

I resigned from the job I had at the time, and Tesla backed out of the contract shortly before my start date.

Tesla is ruthless.

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Isn't this promissory estoppel? Like they promised that you would start at a certain date, causing you to quit your current job. Then they withdrew the promise, causing you to be unemployed.

At the time I was not in a position to legally challenge Tesla. I realized I had been dealing with a bad company and took work elsewhere. But I will never forget what Tesla did to me.

If you have no actual preliminary evidence that Tesla did this you probably wouldn't have a case - getting to deposition (and thus getting access to emails for evidence) requires claims to have some basis and rescinding a job offer can be explained by many other things easily. (I am not your lawyer, of course)

A clever tatic to remove key employees from competitors.

Right. You can promise whatever exhorbitant amount of money, perks and projects that dont exist . One day before the start date you just rescind the fictional offer.

This is so unethical there should be a 1 or 2 month "deposit" for these cases haha

North Texas is littered with "contract to hire" "opportunities". BNSF burned me on a year long contract, after which they were supposed to hire me. I was fresh out of the military and stupid, so I did it. I asked two months prior all the way to the last week if they were going to hire me, at which point they told me that my contracting company had renewed my contract.

Since then, companies would call about contract to hire and I'd tell them, "Sure, I'll take the position but they have to be willing to fund a bond worth $10,000 (10% of expected salary) that is immediately transferred to me if the contract is renewed or ends without a hire."

I take a risk when I go a year without insurance, they're going to pay for that. Not one of these companies ever accepted. On a more rich note, there's no such thing as contract to hire - they have zero obligation and you retain all the risk. It's junk and marketing by malicious people.

It seems reasonable to me that this would work just like a house offer: if the offer is accepted, it should be the basis of a contract where the new hire pays if he/she backs out, and the company lays you off with severance if they back out.

Or you could just ask them to put the offer in writing before changing jobs. In which case, you have a proper cause for a lawsuit much better than trying for implied contract.

> I was hired to write a compiler for deep learning (training) on Tesla's in-house hardware, under Pete Bannon.

You were hired to report to Pete Bannon? So, that is some other person? And your (user+)name is also Peter Bannon?

This is my throwaway Hacker News account named after the relevant director at Tesla:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/peterbannon

I'm sorry you found this so confusing.

It's not just confusing but unethical. The confusion serves to put words in another person's mouth. It is a kind of impersonation. Please retire this account.

Well, as I said, it's a throwaway account, i.e., created for a single comment tree.

I won't be using it again (because it's a throwaway account) but not because I want to protect Peter Bannon.

Also, I disagree that it's unethical. Obviously you can't infer who's talking simply from the name of a Hacker News account. For example, if my account name was ElonMusk123, it would be naive to assume I was Elon Musk.

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