Pros: Tough work-life balance, long hours, great pay.

Cons: Long hours, on-call time

Pros: Tesla attracted some really great individual contributors to build Model S. They get five stars for building a stellar product, and +1 more for the opportunity to innovate in the automotive space. (Yes, I know that's six, but they lose four for crappy management). The biggest plus for Tesla is that the CEO is willing to make mistakes and take risks. Tesla is also willing to incorporate relatively new technologies into their products. It is a company challenging the automotive industry to "do better" by setting a high bar for quality and features. This is worth involving yourself in, IMHO. So there are some excellent opportunities there.

Cons: The company's management and HR policies are awful (-4 stars for this). They sometimes promote managers from within, but engineers frequently have exceedingly poor people skills, at least they did at Tesla. To make matters worse, the HR policy uses "stack ranking," and each group is forced to pick one individual as "worst." These people, no matter how skilled, are culled once or twice a year. So if you are great at what you do, working with four other great people, one of you is going to get let go, doesn't matter if all are great. This is incredibly stupid! It creates an atmosphere of suspicion and non-cooperation, and psychological fear. Very bad. The workplace itself is low rent: IKEA tables and chairs. A big, open, very noisy space; poorly lit and visually distracting with people walking between long aisles of "desks." It is furnished like a startup, but is a multi-billion dollar publicly traded company. It's bad enough that they tended to avoid showing the work area to potential hires. Tesla is a great place to "come from," but not a great place to be.

Pros: As a software engineer at Tesla, you're constantly pushing code. If you're looking for bureaucracy (and I highly doubt that you are as an SE), then Tesla isn't the place for you. If, on the other hand, you enjoy working fast and getting stuff done, then you'll definitely love it here.

Cons: The company benefits aren't that great, especially in comparison to other tech companies in the Bay Area.