The challenging work life balance makes this place a nightmare, especially for women with children. There was a certainly a pressure to be "on-call" at all hours of the day, especially in a remote environment. Most individuals had their personal phones converted to accept work emails so they could keep up after hours. The late-night emailing is cumbersome and burdensome for those with a family. Leaders often refer to the culture of Tesla as a meritocracy - which sounds like a good thing (the hardest working people get the biggest reward) however that culture comes with a double edged sword. This concept really only benefits people who are young and single and willing to work longer hours and constantly say yes. If you're a yes-man or an "idea-man" you will get promoted, even with no experience managing people. There is a huge amount of turnover in all departments. The turnover massively hurts team morale and work life balance suffers because of it. Typically if someone resigns, Tesla asks them to leave immediately without any reasonable time to help find a replacement, and a whole team takes over their work until they can hire someone. Since Tesla is frugal, they will often promote someone from a lower level and ask them to do both their current job and their bosses job, with not enough compensation and not enough training or experience to succeed. Hard-working and talented people managers have left this company in droves over the last few years because the pace is relentless, executive leadership will not take criticism or feedback and HR cannot solve problems fast enough.
