Tesla

Great mission, important for the world. Lots of opportunity.

You can come into the company and work on something awesome from day 1, if you're lucky.

Bad people have a way of getting fired.

Come to think of it, any time I realized someone wasn't carrying their weight, within 6 months they were gone. That's a good thing.

Coworkers are by and large pretty awesome. They might not be the most gifted or talented in all cases, but this is a place where people's hard work pays off. You always need to work about 3 times harder than you thought to make that a reality though.

It's full of driven people.

There are cracks in the foundation at every level, but somehow we push forward, and some details are not that important. If you can ignore those things, or like other people ignoring some details in favor of the big picture, it's great.

The company and culture will suck you dry. Your soulless exoskeleton will have a tough time finding another job, pummeled to death by relentless demands.

It's not coming from just one person. As a matrix organization, it's more like death by a thousand cuts. The longer you work there, the more people in far-off departments will remember you and line up at your desk or email you, copying bosses and demanding urgent actions.

As a global company, this is 24/7 and sometimes in a language you can't read. In the beginning, it's fun and very interesting, a great challenge. But everyone has a limit, and you will get there eventually.

In the early days, everything is cool. You can start something new, build it up, make it awesome, then support it forever. More similar things get dumped on you, and you watch all the new, flashy interns working on the cool stuff.

Once you take something on, you can almost never escape it. If you get an intern, management expects you to give them the cool stuff and keep the garbage for yourself. It makes sense to continue the cycle of entrapment.

Internal mobility is a joke, a way for management to pass off under-performing staff or people they don't get along with. If you do a good job, you are stuck, and your manager can stop you from moving anywhere else.

You might need to quit and rejoin to move within Tesla. So make sure you like the job if you accept it. Forget getting your foot in the door and then shifting to something you like better.

Stop understaffing everything. Add a bit more management to triage work better and not overload your senior staff until the point they leave. Give your staff some options once in a while to take on a new project and unload themselves of some things that have become a bit old. A fresh take can be a good thing that comes out of handing off a project. It can be neat for a new hire to take on something important, so spread that around. It probably makes sense at this stage to start thinking more than six months ahead. Try to keep some of your engineers in a long-term career path so they can imagine working their whole careers at Tesla. The company will keep doing awesome things. Elon will get personal credit for all of it, but having some joy of contributing to something that is new and awesome every few years would be beneficial.