Lucid Motors

Free snacks and drinks, custodial staff does dishes for everyone, pretty office park, very diverse staff.

Company culture:

There seems to be a strong cultural pressure against collaboration and focusing on the bigger picture. The team is primarily focused on completing Jira tickets under tight time constraints, which often leads to quick fixes and hacks rather than addressing the root causes of issues. Bringing up discussion on prevention and best practices is met with "that's a good idea and we may consider it in the future, but right now we need to close out these current tickets."

Role expectations:

I was anticipating that my experience would be leveraged for high-impact work. However, it appears that the team brought me on board with the expectation that I would primarily be fighting small fires and closing out the backlog of tickets, presumably just with higher throughput.

Limited involvement:

I'm not consistently invited to meetings where system-level discussions and decision-making take place. I often have to proactively ask to be involved when I overhear relevant conversations in the background, and even then it doesn't always lead to being involved.

Lack of collaboration:

When someone discovers a bug, they create a ticket and assign it to another team or individual without further collaboration or follow-up (since they have so many tickets of their own to work on). In other places I've worked, they called that "throwing problems over the wall."

Poor information management:

While relevant information is supposed to be captured in the Confluence wiki, it is often spread out, duplicated, and outdated. This makes it challenging to find reliable information, and often requires detective work to see if anyone has knowledge about the topic or if the problem is still relevant. Often, the only people who knew about a particular niche no longer work at Lucid.

Ditch whatever Jira/Agile thing you have going on. Actively involve new hires in discussions and meetings. Make meetings more about problem solving and not just lengthy status reports moving Jira tickets around. Encourage collaboration across the company. Address the "not invented here" syndrome of the products. Help people understand the "why" of what they are doing instead of just the "what".