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Tesla is attempting to recruit me. Anyone have experience working for this company?
- Thread starter Crutonius
- Start date
MY1stEV
Member
bo3bdar
Member
At least here in Silicon Valley, Tesla is well known as a complete sweatshop. Too much to do, not enough people, by deliberate design. This is why their software is always half-baked. They don't care about their people and treat everyone as disposable cogs. (source: several people I know. You can look on glassdoor for some further info)
The Lorax
Member
Hard to know for sure. All of their engineers are under ten years old and don't speak any English.
I kind of figured that might be the case. Tesla is sort of a celebrity company. That draws a lot of attention. For workers this has the unfortunate side effect of creating a lot of competition for a job where the conditions are not quite what they should be.
bo3bdar
Member
They leverage that celebrity to draw in younger people who are willing to sacrifice all of their time for the 'mission.' More senior people can be interested in the mission too, but not at the expense of being expected to be working every waking hour. It's part of how they have a bias against experience. You see this is every day stuff where they make complete amateur software mistakes because they don't have any depth in their bench. Look at the AI day video as a perfect example of this- lots of young folks with enthusiasm, wasting time repeating work that has already been done by others because they don't know it exists. It's also why everything they do takes forever, because they have to always reinvent the wheel.
Please don't get me wrong, youth and enthusiasm have their place on a team, but you need to direct that energy with someone who knows what they are doing because of long experience. I'd love to work there and almost applied to fix their lame front end software, but me and no one in my circle of experienced engineers would ever sign up for this level of bad management. People at Tesla are judged by how many hours they spend at the office- the worst possible metric.
Funny- I worked at Apple during a period when they did in fact do that as well. Based on current conversations, I don't think Apple is this way any more.
It's possible that this is just the nature of invention versus production. During an invention cycle you can probably get away with enthusiasm and grit it out while you build something new. You'd still be better served and faster if you had some experienced members, but 1.0 products are almost always riddled with poor design decisions and mistakes. But then during a production/sales/profit cycle, where you need to make it 'real', you can't fake it anymore, you have to do the hard work and fix all the mistakes.
This is where Tesla is now, and flailing. This is why they have a quality problems that never quite get solved. It's why their UI is still a clunky stupid mess. It's why FSD is always 'coming soon.' It's why their customer service is widely panned.
Tesla is industry leading in only their drive train and battery. Still worth buying for that alone, and makes it a fun car. Everything else is second tier, and their software is embarrassing.
To let you know where I'm coming from- imagine the UI in the car where it was actually based on the driving experience, not someone sitting at a desk doing UI mockups. Like your arm moves in the air while driving and bouncing, and it's hard to hit tiny boxes. Maybe the font should not be grey on grey and small, so you can glance while driving instead of having to focus. Maybe common functions like wipers should be in a stable spot so you can build muscle memory to hit them without looking. Wouldn't it be nice to be able use that area for the useless car animations for something useful?
Imagine a UI where the goal is to hone it to perfection- not change it every year because it's Christmas and needs new icons and 'fresh'. This is my personal huge, huge disappointment with Tesla. I expected the software and UI to actually get better over time, not worse.
mtndrew1
Active Member
I know someone at SpaceX and they call it “SlaveX.”
I know it’s not the same company but I wouldn’t be surprised if Tesla is the same sort of environment.
I know it’s not the same company but I wouldn’t be surprised if Tesla is the same sort of environment.
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