Tesla

The company absolutely loves to take risks, which is great if you're an engineer that is keen to really test and build your skills.

Tesla does greatly value strong technical talent. The best way to learn here is FAFO.

Tesla is a good place to work for a short period of time, but it depends on what you want/value. So, depending on your circumstances, Tesla will either be a great or a terrible place to work.

I'm not sure what to put for the "recommend to a friend" option below, but it really depends on the friend and what they want. I have referred old colleagues to Tesla in the past, so it's definitely an individual question.

There's basically no mentorship, so you have to learn most things on your own. Engineers are generally viewed as a commodity, and the culture is also becoming more zero-sum as time goes on. This means people at a Director level now either fire or give a minimum number of people a bad review for every performance review cycle. They want to fit everything to a bell curve. So far, it seems to dis-incentivize collaboration because we're now all competing with each other.

I know firing the bottom 5-10% every year looks good on paper, but it creates a toxic work culture, and Tesla already doesn't have a great reputation in this department. Some teams are much better than others, but obviously, this is one opinion, and I don't think any of this will change.