Tesla to lay off 2,688 workers in Austin, more than 3,000 in California

Tesla Inc. will be laying off 2,688 employees at its Gigafactory in Austin, Texas, and more than 3,000 in the San Francisco Bay Area and elsewhere in California, the EV maker said in official notices.

At the Austin Gigafactory, the layoffs equal to about 12% of staff at the facility and will start June 14, according to to a worker adjustment and retraining notification, or WARN notice, which companies are required to file with a state labor department to give workers 60 days’ notice before layoffs.

WARN notices in California call for more than 2,500 layoffs in the Bay Area, mostly at the Tesla factory in Fremont and former headquarters in Palo Alto, and a few hundred more in Burbank, southern California, and the Central Valley's Lanthrop, where Tesla makes energy-storage products. The layoffs in California are starting on June 14, Tesla told the state.

The company already announced it would lay off 285 workers at two plants in Buffalo, N.Y., equal to 14% of that workforce, starting July 15.

Tesla recently announced large-scale job cuts equal to more than 10% of its global workforce as it struggles to boost profit and pave a path to future growth.

Ex-Googlers Hiring Engineers at TellApart

Burlingame, Calif.-based startup TellApart will hire up to 20 employees in the next year after raising $13 million in new financing.

Founded in 2009 by two ex-Googlers, the company helps online retailers target visitors to their sites who haven't purchased anything, but who might be persuaded to with the right advertising.

Of the planned 20 hires, about a third will be technologists, said Mark Ayzenshtat, co-founder and chief technology officer. Because TellApart's success relies on its ability to predict who will actually make a purchase, the company will be hiring people with expertise in operational machine learning. The company crunches a lot of data, so engineers with distributed systems and Hadoop experience are also in demand.

The company is also hiring business development and sales and marketing employees to help it acquire new clients.

Because of the company's Google roots, it hires engineers who are autonomous, take ownership of projects, and can succeed with little coaching or guidance, Ayzenshtat said.

TellApart offers competitive cash compensation and generous equity rewards, Ayzenshtat said.

Unlike the Google interview process that Ayzenshtat himself endured, TellApart doesn't ask abstract brainteasers to test engineering candidates' mettle. Instead, it asks questions meant to see how easily intimidated and adaptable candidates are.

For instance, an interviewer might ask how one would go about building Google's search engine. The best candidates will take a crack at it, Ayzenshtat said. Sub-par candidates will betray their lack of imagination by noting that they don't have experience in search. That's a warning sign, Ayzenshtat said, because startup engineers will have to tackle a lot of problems they're not experienced in.

"People know what they're good at and they expect to be asked about that, but if you throw so meting at them from left field, they often are put off," he said.

Candidates who make it through the interview process, though, can expect some nifty perks. Ayzenshtat and co-founder Josh McFarland -- who worked on Google's AdWords together -- took the entire 21-person company on a vacation to Hawaii after they met their quarterly goals last year.