Redwood Materials

You learn a lot and you have great autonomy, as long as you align with whatever constraints or dictations leadership presents, or your manager can adequately protect you.

They were able to bring in the best talent and incredible human beings that believe in the mission. For most it will be one of the most challenging times in their career and that will result in a huge toolbox and very expedited learnings. Great snacks, those pretzel hummus snacks are great.

Safety is often dismissed and pushed back on, and it's a fight to get them to listen and often puts a target on your back.

The Tesla way or people that worked at Tesla will win in most cases. And that's a problem, if it isn't evident, because discrete manufacturing is very different than the complexity that RW systems have that are closer to chemical processing.

They are appropriately attempting to take the secret sauce Elon-isms and they execute them in the wrong places, and with the wrong inputs and requirements. For instance, for one of the chemical processes, massive amounts of automation in the form of automatic valves and sensors were deleted in the vain of delete as much as possible and we can add things back in as necessary. Many items got added back in, but not enough. And every time there was an issue with a valve left open, a tank overfilling, there was blame to the technical teams for not being able to catch that and prevent it when leadership made that decision.

Owning the important things in house is a great strategy, but that doesn't mean you design and build a system that can be easily purchased off the shelf and then put the onus on controls team to mechanically protect the system through controls logic. Time waste, money waste. For younger and mid level engineers, there is a lack of mentorship and leadership acumen to make sure the right people are working in the right areas. For instance, if you have only 1 person in the company that is the hydraulic god, why would you not at least tell the engineer who is assigned the hydraulic project to utilize this subject matter expert who is on campus but happens to be assigned to another project.

There was always us and them mentality between infrastructure and design team, and that just goes back to leadership. Again, more money and time wasted for stupid stuff.

Many of the leaders have not been properly trained to be leaders and thus struggle to hold their people accountable and give meaningful feedback. This is a disservice to the engineers.

Favoritism and being a yes person are real here and cause highly qualified high performers from getting promoted.

Women might need to switch departments a few times to find a boss that isn't intimidated by them so they can have an enriching career and not always be in fear of losing their job.

Unless RW has figured out how to have their cake and eat it too, like build fast, and cheap and right, they're going to continue to burn money, lose incredible engineers and make it harder than it needs to be.

The mission is incredible and RW has accomplished amazing things, albeit the hardware in most cases. Own what's important in house and where it unlocks the ability to meet deadline or budget targets, hold the right people accountable, listen to the people you hire that have actual industry experience, and provide mentorship to the armies of engineers that are being hired.