Tesla

Tesla has a fun, challenging, and fast-paced environment. I've found everyone I've interacted with to be competent and respectful. Teams are highly collaborative. My immediate manager is very reasonable and communicates expectations well. The technology itself is inspiring; EVs are the future of transportation.

Free cereal and coffee.

Tesla has been experiencing a lot of growing pains with trying to accomplish too much, too fast.

Poor processes and infrastructure result in wasted time and quality control issues at pretty much every area of the company, whether software, manufacturing, or customer service.

It's a large company, so roles are somewhat fairly narrowly defined. I learned a lot in the first six months, but then found myself wishing I could branch out more after a year. It's not easy to move around between engineering teams/roles.

Compensation can be poor (particularly for new hires with limited experience or straight from school). More senior roles within engineering do appear to be better-compensated, at least.

Infrastructure is poor for certain aspects of development and validation. Without dedicated teams for maintaining test infrastructure for individual firmware teams, things have fallen apart over the years and are not scalable/sustainable.

Elon's combative Twitter rants hurt the image of the company, push away potential employees, and embarrass the company as a whole. Tone it down.

Overly aggressive (if not downright disingenuous) timelines are never met and make the company look like it's perpetually behind schedule, even though the pace of progress has actually been reasonable. Be more realistic.

Ensure that teams have the time and resources necessary to maintain infrastructure so that they can remain efficient as scope increases in scale with new vehicles and variations. This particularly applies to firmware validation, which I fear is a ticking time bomb.