Does working at Tesla suck as badly as I hear?
I have long heard Tesla is a meat grinder for engineers and Musk has been known to say things like “you need to rest? You can rest when we go out of business!” Today I got an earful from a former QA who told how on the floor hourly rates are something like a lame $19/hr, how they are up to 220 vehicles a shift and injuries are going up, and how they seem to find reasons to fire for cause a bit before people’s 4 year RSUs vest.
A colleague of mine when I used to work at Tesla showed his work after 3-5 months of effort, and everyone on the team thought he is doing great work on that project. Elon’s response:”This is a f*cking abortion.”
Ok. So was it an abortion?
Yes, unless you enjoy working 80+ hours
Really depends on the team.
Don't pretend to be Amazon!
Meh. I love it here. Been here since a few years. Most of the weeks i am working less than 60hrs which is normal
What is Tesla comp relative to other companies (assumings you are swe)
Tesla will def low ball initial offer but as long as you have other offers they can get competitive but generally no sign on has been my experience.
> how they seem to find reasons to fire for cause a bit before people’s 4 year RSUs vest. Wait, that makes no sense. You have a one year cliff and then you vest quarterly: the 4th year vesting is not special in any way!
I am just going based on what I heard, and granted I heard from someone who no longer works there! Sample size of one and likely biased to boot
It’s definitely the toughest place to work having hired and worked with people from all the normal companies on here and asked them. It’s not the hours in most cases, it’s more the pace and intensity is relentless. The pay is also at the mid to lower end BUT the pay off is being part of one of hopefully the most important companies that help to change the world. We have the normal super smart people etc but to enjoy and succeed here you need to want to deal with craziness and go all in. If you don’t want to do that then you will most probably not enjoy it.
I have been at Tesla for years and do not find it hard at all. 50 hour weeks is what I wanted and that is what I mostly get, pay is good if you are good or have other offers. Intensity of work is high but the people you are working with are all motivated and hence it is fun.
They’ve sure hired a lot of garbage people from Cisco and Ericsson. Let me just observe that they’ve done quite a lot of hiring out of the ass-end of Cisco and not the competent bits. Given who I know works there, I don’t think I’d be willing to ridge in a car based on their coding track record. They’d do stuff like return pointers to stack vars etc.
Absolutely true.