I applied to many position online, but did not get any call back. I decided to ask a friend for the email of a HR person, and emailed her asking if they had a position available.
To my great surprise, I got an answer from a manager a few weeks later asking me to come for an interview.
Great! but the interview was less than 24 hours later and he asked me to prepare a 30 minutes presentation on a topic related to the position I was applying for and study for a 30 minutes written-exam on thermodynamics and fluid mechanics... well, I would love to work at Tesla so I started and managed to be prepared on time.
Interview went pretty well, people (2 engineers and the team manager) were friendly.
- I presented for 30 minutes, answered many questions (got one a bit off).
- I interviewed with the team for 20 minutes (I was asking all the questions... maybe this was a bad move)
- I took the test, very back-of-the-envelope calculations... overall easier than I thought it would be, even if I got stuck an one that was involving a psychrometric diagram (not familiar with those at the time), and had trouble giving a typical drag coefficient for a car (Cd ~ .3 to .5) to complete an rough estimate. Correction was made with the manager, so I got a chance to explain my thoughts on a couple questions.
Cool bonus: waiting for the interview, the manager showed me a bunch of cars parts they were working on, pretty sweet!
The post interview part was the only bad point for Tesla: I waited 7 weeks (I had to ask them 3 times for an update) before they finally told me they picked someone else. Apparently I was second choice to a more experienced candidate.
