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
4.0
Nov 1, 2015
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Fast paced. Super smart engineers to work with. Great for mid career and entry level engineers to get good experience really fast in both R&D and production engineering. Growing company with plenty of opportunity to see different groups. They make real hardware...not a lot of places are that devoted to making real hardware and putting it out on the streets. The product performance is out of this world. Amazing cars to work on with generally great people. Getting in back in 2011 led to very good compensation with stock options.

Cons

Incredibly tight project timelines that were often un-realistic. Burn-out rate was high. Get the sense that upper management didn't care about employees, just wanted as much work out of them as possible. Middle managers have huge responsibilities, as given incredible stretch goals, skeleton crews, and minimal resources. When results fell short, Elon and JB would fire people without just cause. Many director/VP levels were fired/quit over drama and unfair treatment. Design engineers expected to support designs in production that they know don't have the proper development or validation. Product never mature enough to launch. Lots of design churn and timeline slip due to Elon futzing with the look/aesthetics of styling, which in turn caused product delays and reliability issues after multiple re-designs ate up the time that was alloted for testing and refinement for durability/reliability of the car.

1.0
Sep 13, 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

If you like un-necessary meetings.................. Join it. If you don't want to work..................................Join it If you are fresher/ intern.................................. Join it If you want to work only for pay the bills......... Join it If you like bila-bila bila-bila (management)..... Join it If you want to get Apple i-5.............................. Join it If you want your H1B visa..............................Join it (Later on they apply green card also) If you want to proud of this company............. Join it (At least friends/ family/relative will respect you... Lol) During my work, I always felt that I am on shopping with my girlfriend. if you can act like a good boy friend..... Join it

Cons

If you respect your intelligence... Don't join it. No contribution in 401K plan (1:0) No yearly increment (Not even $100 yearly) Very expensive city (Rent min $1950 for 1 BHK apt) More than 90% people are not technical but with good management quality.

1.0
Nov 27, 2016

Heading for a fall

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Cool technology, cool CEO; other engineers are sharp and very nice/great to work with. Prestigious. All the walking around the big plant keeps you in shape.

Cons

Management, management, management. Normally when you say someone is crazy, it’s a figure of speech, but many of us think that my boss is clinically mentally ill, and his boss isn’t much better (at least neurotic). And there was another manager who was just evil, face always like a stone, attacking/destroying people right and left (usually new employees who didn’t know enough yet to defend themselves). Pay is the lowest in the valley—I hadn’t been paid this little since the late 90s. The company has the highest turnover rate of any company I’ve ever seen—it’s hard to find people who have been there more than a year or so. You can never decompress/relax/reenergize because your boss will be e-mailing you evenings and weekends, expecting an immediate response--you always have to be "on." Tesla had to commandeer part of the cafeteria full-time to hold the continuing string of interviews needed to counter the stream of people leaving. With all their job listings I’d always thought they must be expanding like crazy, but it’s actually just to compensate for the turnover. Tesla’s business model appears to be this: 1. Continue building the mystique of the Tesla/Elon Musk name as a lure. 2. Hire people only from out of state (I almost never came across anyone who was from California) who are not aware of how expensive the bay area is or how low their new higher salary is relative to the cost of living. 3. Once they’re here, work them huge hours because you have them in the “golden handcuffs” of having to pay back their relocation costs if they leave within two years. 4. After two years, you have to replace them, but you got two years of 60-hour weeks from a top person at a low price. Noted short seller Jim Chanos is shorting Tesla, saying that the exodus of executives strongly correlates with companies that are heading for a crash. I know firsthand that they spend massively on projects in their factory that make no economic sense, justifying it by saying “this will look so cool on the tour route!” Shades of the dot-com bubble, circa 1999…

Viewing 13 - 15 of 11,927 Reviews

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