Tesla reviews

3.5

58% would recommend to a friend

(11,927 total reviews)
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Elon Musk

59% approve of CEO

56% positive business outlook

Tesla has an employee rating of 3.5 out of 5 stars, based on 11,927 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Tesla employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Manufactura industry (3.5 stars).

Reviews by job title

12K reviews
3.0
Feb 13, 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great mission, important for the world. Lots of opportunity. You can come into the company and work on something awesome from day 1, if you're lucky. Bad people have a way of getting fired. Come to think of it, any time I realized someone wasn't carrying their weight, within 6 months they were gone. That's a good thing. Coworkers are by and large pretty awesome. They might not be the most gifted or talented in all cases, but this is a place where people's hard work pays off. You always need to work about 3 times harder than you thought to make that a reality though. It's full of driven people. There are cracks in the foundation at every level, but somehow we push forward, and some details are not that important. If you can ignore those things, or like other people ignoring some details in favor of the big picture, it's great.

Cons

The company and culture will suck you dry. Your soulless exoskeleton will have a tough time finding another job while being pummeled to death by relentless demands. It's not coming from just one person, as a matrix organization it's more like death by a thousand cuts. The longer you work there, the more people in far off departments will remember you, and line up at your desk/email you and copy bosses demanding urgent actions. As a global company, this is 24/7 and sometimes in a language you can't read. In the beginning it's fun and very interesting. A great challenge. But everyone has a limit, and you will get there eventually. In the early days everything is cool. You can start something new, build it up, make it awesome. Then support it forever, have more similar things dumped on you, and watch all the new flashy interns working on the cool stuff. Once you take something on, you can almost never escape it. If you get an intern, management expects you to give them the cool stuff and keep the garbage for yourself. It makes sense to continue the cycle of entrapment. Internal mobility is a joke, a way for management to pass off under-performing staff or people they don't get along with. If you do a good job, you are stuck, and your manager can stop you from moving anywhere else. You might need to quit and re-join to move within Tesla. So make sure you like the job if you accept it, forget getting your foot in the door and then shifting to something you like better.

1.0
Jul 19, 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

It can be fun to drive engineering prototypes.

Cons

Extremely high pressure environment, unrealistic deadlines and long hours (9-6:30 every weekday + an expectation to drive engineering cars on weekends and file bug reports) led to a complete burnout and mental breakdown for me. More than one engineer left my team every month on average.

1.0
May 4, 2015
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

1) Cool mission, cool product, great halo reputation: Seems like a great place to be! 2) Benefits: very competitive, sans 401k match. 3) Remains quite innovative, nimble, fast paced and open with communication. There’s a con to that too, considering the size of the organization, see below.

Cons

1) Compensation – not competitive in the Bay Area, tough to afford living there on Tesla salary. The once atmospheric rise of stock doesn’t cut it anymore to make up the difference. 2) Work/life balance. What balance? Time off on weekends or on vacations is a misnomer, requiring one to catch up while away so you aren’t hopelessly behind when you return. You may not hear management say, "You have to work on weekends/vacations" but only if you’re not listening. They create work-a-holics by tasking you 30 hrs over what you can physically accomplish every week. Manufacturing lines shooting out emails, calls, etc. at midnight, 1am, 2am, 3am is common and the production side expectation of covering all hours of line operation is absolutely ridiculous and responsibilities need to be delegated/divided. 3) Poor management. The issue is that a majority of people love Tesla because they think they’ll get to work on cool product & interesting technical problems - and these are the people that see little value in learning how to develop sustainable systems & emotional intelligence. People are promoted into management positions - not because they actually know how to lead/manage, but because they spoon feed high priority info upward, making their visibility they output of their work. So there are layers of non-value add individuals who are horrible managers and leaders. Yet, there is no system to actually do anything about that because "emotional intelligence" or "sustainable systems" are not taken seriously. 4) Schmucks, the fast paced environment in combination with the spoon feeding middle management results in a toxic atmosphere, or maybe people are getting burned out and it's wearing on their personality and patience. Many managers straight-up intimidate/scare their employees into compliance of doing exactly what they want them to at that exact time (extreme micromanagement), without even understanding the priorities that person has (resulting in no-win situations and poor performance overall). This intimidation is a blue collar management tactic that doesn’t work on highly trained, highly intelligent engineers. 5) It's a big company now and, inevitably, it has become slower moving and is now layered with process and bureaucracy. So many political battles, empire building, territory grabbing.

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