Tesla reviews

- Scrum-ish Iterative Waterfall development process with various one size-fits-all processes. Forget about 1970s Toyota lean values (not practices), you will build software like you're in an assembly line of one of Henry Ford factories with time bosses and masters around you ready to take credit. - Middle managers tell you how to engineer software. - Rigid chain of command. - Middle management seem to be fighting tooth and nail for their personal survival with various power moves and establishing a loyalty based hierarchy. - Management is never wrong, you are. - Trust and respect is earned by doing exactly how and what the middle micro-management wants you do to as fast as humanly possible. You will likely be elevated to a valuable resource category and promoted if trusted. But you will always be a body. - Placating middle management is tantamount for career success pass Staff-level engineer, exceptions rarely happen. - The company attracts colleagues that actively politically compete against you on the same team. - Showing off your engineering skills tends to be perceived as a threat. - Lasagna code project structure and very low quality codebase. - Teams are reshuffled and reorganized constantly every year or two, almost no choice to work with people you want to work with long term. Teams are not self organized. - Shut up or get fired.

There were huge disappointments from broken promises of career growth and general lack of organization the permeated the sales department. Remember, Tesla is a young and innovative company but that also means it has many frustrating growth pains. For example: Managers that are unqualified and generally immature, but they've been around the company for a few years so they act like Tesla Gods. This made getting time off difficult, because the inexperienced sales managers looked at it as a lack of work ethic that would damage sales instead of a normal human need. Their immaturity also showed when they are confronted with new sales ideas. These were met with suspicion or general disinterest as if they already knew everything possible about automotive sales, a task the organization is absurdly new to. There was also a lack of organized career paths to move up interdepartmentally or change departments from, for example, sales to engineering or marketing. There were promises of growth first from the recruiters and later the sales managers, but to no avail. Managers moved around so much that the benchmark to gain promotion moved just as frequently, so you're left tossing in the waves. Tesla is amazingly forward thinking on automotive and sustainable technology but, in the walls of the sales department, it already felt stale, confusing, too lethargic towards new ideas and too rigid for new talent to grow.