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Comment by scarab92 | Hacker News Reader

Paying severance to staff you decide you don't want is much cheaper overall than losing staff randomly, which will include your higher performers.

It's not a plausible explanation for Musk's actions. I would be inclined to take his word at face value, that he genuinely believes that remote work is less productive than face to face work at Tesla.

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No matter what’s your opinion on Musk, he’s very erratic and makes lots of decision on the spot, without or against data. It brought him huge wins (turns out people want cool electric cars) and huge headaches (FSD, factory automation, Twitter acquisition).

His engineering teams often learn about projects from his tweets. I’m pretty sure so does HR.

Musk doesn't feel this is random. The remote employees that don't want to come into work in the office are by definition not the higher performers to him.

The reality though is whether or not you announce it in advance, once you start laying folks off you will start to lose high performers who have the ability to get a jew job.

Yeah, I think everyone is assuming that the email and layoffs are causally related. That doesn't seem plausible. If he really wanted to use the work-from-the-office mandate to raise attrition, he would do that months PRIOR to announcing layoffs - not at the same time.

I wouldn't be surprised if people who said they prefer not to come back to the office, will just be given the same severance package. OP should ask HR about it.

They probably are causally related, just not to each other.

High operating cost/productivity = layoffs + back to office.

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