Zipline

-The drone is cool. -Many colleagues are nice.

“Unlimited PTO” is a branding gimmick. In practice, it is tightly limited. The Head of Hardware Engineering sent a company-wide email to officially limit the so-called “unlimited PTO” to 3–4 weeks. Many colleagues wanted to take more than 20 days PTO, but their manager won't approve it. And it's very unfair that some manager obviously took more than 5 weeks PTO but didn't put it on the system. -Management consistently pressures employees to work through Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s to hit arbitrary company goals. -Some engineers pitch designs they believe are “innovative,” only for those designs to be completely infeasible for mass production. -There is a culture of manufactured heroics.

Some engineers ignore supplier management entirely, miss deadlines, then burn excessive money on quick-turn parts to “save” the schedule. Management celebrates this behavior. Firefighters get rewarded; fire prevention does not exist. Employees who managed everything well and not drama are never credited. -Leadership positions appear to be influenced by personal relationships rather than merit, even in cases of sustained poor performance. -Performance reviews happen every six months using a 1–5 scale where a 3 supposedly means “consistently meeting high expectations. This system is meaningless and demoralizing by design. -An employee was terminated because he needed time to support his ill wife.

This company demonstrates a complete lack of ethics and humanity. -A senior TPM collected a high salary for years while contributing nothing beyond asking for status updates and forwarding them upward. -The office environment is physically depressing, with poor lighting that makes it feel like working in permanent darkness—both literally and mentally. -Many managers were hired from Tesla but lack even basic people-management skills. Financially set and complacent, they show no interest in self-improvement. -At least one manager has been effectively sidelined while his team continuously loses members, yet he remains employed purely because he manages upward well.

-Fix management before blaming individual contributors. -Layoffs should start with unqualified managers who contribute nothing, not with the people actually doing the work. -Stop promoting friends into senior leadership. Nepotism is actively damaging the company.