June 28, 2022
Tesla lays off nearly 200 Autopilot workers, shutters San Mateo office
Tesla has gutted the data annotation team working on Autopilot, laying off nearly 200 employees and shutting down the San Mateo, California office where they worked.
The layoffs, first reported by Bloomberg, have been confirmed by sources who talked to TechCrunch on condition of anonymity.
The cuts come amid a broader reduction of jobs at Tesla.
However, these layoffs targeted personnel once deemed critical to the company’s Autopilot advanced driver assistance system and more notably efforts by CEO Elon Musk to further develop automated driving functions through the $12,000 optional FSD system.
Until today, Tesla had hundreds of data annotation employees working on the Autopilot team in San Mateo and Buffalo, New York.
The San Mateo office had a headcount of 276, and after laying off 195 staffers from all ranks — supervisors, labelers and data analysts — the team is left with 81 workers, who sources say will be relocated to another office.
The source noted layoffs of this team were rumored to be on the table for months, and that the work would be offloaded to Buffalo.
Based on data from Glassdoor, jobs like data annotation specialists or data analysts at Tesla pay less in Buffalo than in San Mateo.
It’s unclear if Tesla is shifting workers to the New York office to reduce costs or as a strategy to become eligible for New York State’s many job incentives, like the New York Youth Jobs program tax credit or the credit for employment of persons with disabilities.
That said, it likely won’t be a 1:1 replacement in Buffalo, where sources say Tesla will probably just inundate the existing team, “as is the Tesla way.
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