Tesla

Cool technology, cool CEO. Other engineers are sharp and very nice/great to work with. Prestigious. All the walking around the big plant keeps you in shape.

Management, management, management. Normally, when you say someone is crazy, it’s a figure of speech. But many of us think that my boss is clinically mentally ill, and his boss isn’t much better (at least neurotic).

And there was another manager who was just evil, his face always like a stone, attacking/destroying people right and left (usually new employees who didn’t know enough yet to defend themselves).

Pay is the lowest in the valley. I hadn’t been paid this little since the late 90s.

The company has the highest turnover rate of any company I’ve ever seen. It’s hard to find people who have been there more than a year or so. You can never decompress/relax/reenergize because your boss will be e-mailing you evenings and weekends, expecting an immediate response. You always have to be "on."

Tesla had to commandeer part of the cafeteria full-time to hold the continuing string of interviews needed to counter the stream of people leaving. With all their job listings, I’d always thought they must be expanding like crazy, but it’s actually just to compensate for the turnover.

Tesla’s business model appears to be this:

• Continue building the mystique of the Tesla/Elon Musk name as a lure.
• Hire people only from out of state (I almost never came across anyone who was from California) who are not aware of how expensive the Bay Area is or how low their new higher salary is relative to the cost of living.
• Once they’re here, work them huge hours because you have them in the “golden handcuffs” of having to pay back their relocation costs if they leave within two years.
• After two years, you have to replace them, but you got two years of 60-hour weeks from a top person at a low price.

Noted short seller Jim Chanos is shorting Tesla, saying that the exodus of executives strongly correlates with companies that are heading for a crash. I know firsthand that they spend massively on projects in their factory that make no economic sense, justifying it by saying, “This will look so cool on the tour route!” Shades of the dot-com bubble, circa 1999…

Retake Engineering Economics 101.

Also, allow your people some work/life balance so that you can retain people for more than a year and not have to spend all your time interviewing and training replacements.