Tesla

1. Cool mission, cool product, great halo reputation: Seems like a great place to be!

2. Benefits: Very competitive, sans 401k match.

3. Remains quite innovative, nimble, fast-paced, and open with communication. There’s a con to that, too, considering the size of the organization (see below).

1. Compensation – not competitive in the Bay Area; it's tough to afford living there on a Tesla salary. The once atmospheric rise of stock doesn’t cut it anymore to make up the difference.

2. Work/life balance. What balance? Time off on weekends or on vacations is a misnomer, requiring one to catch up while away so you aren’t hopelessly behind when you return. You may not hear management say, "You have to work on weekends/vacations," but only if you’re not listening. They create workaholics by tasking you 30 hours over what you can physically accomplish every week. Manufacturing lines shooting out emails, calls, etc., at midnight, 1 am, 2 am, 3 am is common, and the production side expectation of covering all hours of line operation is absolutely ridiculous. Responsibilities need to be delegated/divided.

3. Poor management. The issue is that a majority of people love Tesla because they think they’ll get to work on cool products & interesting technical problems – and these are the people that see little value in learning how to develop sustainable systems & emotional intelligence. People are promoted into management positions, not because they actually know how to lead/manage, but because they spoon-feed high-priority information upward, making their visibility output of their work. So there are layers of non-value-add individuals who are horrible managers and leaders. Yet, there is no system to actually do anything about that because "emotional intelligence" or "sustainable systems" are not taken seriously.

4. Schmucks. The fast-paced environment, in combination with the spoon-feeding middle management, results in a toxic atmosphere, or maybe people are getting burned out, and it's wearing on their personality and patience. Many managers straight-up intimidate/scare their employees into compliance of doing exactly what they want them to at that exact time (extreme micromanagement), without even understanding the priorities that person has (resulting in no-win situations and poor performance overall). This intimidation is a blue-collar management tactic that doesn’t work on highly trained, highly intelligent engineers.

5. It's a big company now and, inevitably, it has become slower moving and is now layered with process and bureaucracy. So many political battles, empire building, and territory grabbing.

1. Embrace emotional intelligence and a sustainable work environment.

Getting a great engineer (from other areas/disciplines) to cover busy work in production, knowing they’ll get sick of wasting their time on logistics and tired of constant reactive firefighting, is not only unsustainable, it is unethical.

You need great managers and leaders in order to build the right system(s) and become a great success.

Throwing more bodies at a system that isn’t set up for success is the wrong way to succeed on many levels and will result in inefficiencies, not competitive advantages.

1. Do something about that work-life balance.

Leadership’s answer to solving reactive problems can’t be to also add in the proactive work; there isn’t enough time in one person’s day to cover both when firefighting is happening most of the time.

Consider re-evaluating how work is done. What processes are in place that are inefficient and ineffective and need to be updated or removed?

1. A flat organization can’t be maintained efficiently when roles and priorities are so loosely defined and everyone is included in everything.

Learn to trust your lead people, and make that trust proliferate downward/sideways, etc.

Let people specialize and not have to cover every issue that comes up, and you’ll gain efficiencies & experts.