Tesla

Living in the Bay Area was fun.

Expectations were very low for software engineering interns.

It's truly impressive how well Tesla exploits the image of their CEO. I met so many smart people who could be making more money and working less hours, but who choose to be at Tesla because they truly believe they are saving the world with Tesla's mission.

I was utterly neglected by my team. I would spend most of the time at my internship trying to find my manager, who was never at his desk. I spent hours sending him pages worth of messages with no response. Whenever I finished a task, it would take an absurd amount of time before I was assigned a new one. I frequently brought up how unhappy I was about this, and the problem was never resolved.

The pay is pretty terrible. It's lower than any other Bay Area internship. They also don't have any of the exciting on-site benefits that Bay Area tech companies typically offer. I did not profit over the course of my internship. Between Bay Area housing and the overpriced lunches I'd buy at Tesla, I spent 100% of the money that I made. The housing stipend didn't even begin to cover the cost of housing.

The work environment was extremely toxic. Pretty much every full-timer on my team was consistently putting in 80+ hour weeks. They're on salary, so they weren't even collecting overtime. Everyone was constantly stressed out. It seems to be part of the culture to be always complaining and worried about job performance. For obvious reasons, the turnover rate was very high. Tesla loses software engineers to better tech companies daily.

I was underwhelmed by the quality of engineers on my team. I would have expected Tesla to only hire the best of the best engineers, but I encountered a lot of poorly written code and didn't think full-timers did a very impressive amount of work. Tesla might have the best electrical or mechanical engineers, but this is far from true for software engineers.