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Awesome people. Management is bad with realistic expectations

Senior Mechanical Design Engineer
Former Employee
Worked at Tesla for 4 years
November 1, 2015
Palo Alto, California
4.0
RecommendsNeutral Outlook
Pros

Fast-paced. Super smart engineers to work with. Great for mid-career and entry-level engineers to gain good experience really fast in both R&D and production engineering. Growing company with plenty of opportunity to see different groups. They make real hardware; not a lot of places are that devoted to making real hardware and putting it out on the streets. The product performance is out of this world. Amazing cars to work on with generally great people. Getting in back in 2011 led to very good compensation with stock options.

Cons

Incredibly tight project timelines that were often unrealistic.

Burn-out rate was high.

Get the sense that upper management didn't care about employees, just wanted as much work out of them as possible.

Middle managers have huge responsibilities, as given incredible stretch goals, skeleton crews, and minimal resources.

When results fell short, Elon and JB would fire people without just cause.

Many director/VP levels were fired or quit over drama and unfair treatment.

Design engineers expected to support designs in production that they know don't have the proper development or validation.

Product never mature enough to launch.

Lots of design churn and timeline slip due to Elon futzing with the look/aesthetics of styling, which in turn caused product delays and reliability issues after multiple re-designs ate up the time that was allotted for testing and refinement for durability/reliability of the car.

Advice to Management

Respect the proper timelines for validation and refinement to make a good, reliable product. Tesla and its products already have cache, but that image/reputation will be tarnished if stupid, styling-driven changes force re-designs that reduce hardware capability and durability. And people will not wait around forever for a continually delayed product, no matter how cool the doors or door handles are.

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