Blog Tesla’s Director of Battery Engineering Leaves for Startup

Tesla’s director of battery engineering, Jon Wagner has left the company, according to his LinkedIn profile. The move comes at a time Tesla is struggling with battery production issues that are slowing Model 3 production.

This is the second battery expert that has left the company this year. Longtime battery technology director Kurt Kelty left the effort in August.

Wagner has been with Tesla since 2013, working on battery projects for both cars and the company’s Powerwall system. According to Wagner’s LinkedIn page, he is launching a battery and powertrain startup in California. Reuters first reported his departure from Tesla.

Tesla’s production target for the Model 3 was pushed back last week by three months. The company blamed the bottleneck on an issue with the battery module assembly line at its Nevada Gigafactory.

 

[ILLCOMM]

In before everyone goes insane.

1) We don't know, and will never know whether this was regretted or un-regretted attrition.
2a) If regretted, Tesla lost a valuable employee and is potentially worse off.
2b) If un-regretted, Tesla is a better company and is definitely better off.

Having worked and led large teams in a high-tech, insane growth company I can confidently say the following: regretted employee turnover is nearly impossible to avoid, especially as systems grow complex and day to day responsibilities start to include less innovation and more devops/maintenance/production issues. It's all fun and games until you have millions of users on various versions complaining, set against insane timelines and pressure! High performing resources are constantly recruited by competitors and startups who all pitch much greener grass (whether it is really is greener is another question) and when any part of a job gets laborious that background noise is harder to ignore. For this reason, any good org will have a plan in place to backfill talent; there should be very few key, unreplaceable people at any organization, though it is likely that there will be some.

So, I'd encourage folks not to read too deeply into this. There are just too many unknowns. But, I know they will. Sigh.

 

[plumazul]

So, Tesla doesn't have non-compete agreements?

 

[Electroman]

It appears that Tesla seems to be an incubating university for many types of innovation - Autonomous driving, AI, Machine learning, Battery technology and possibly high speed alien dreadnought manufacturing. Smart folks get recruited, learn and then spread their wings elsewhere.

 

[speedy]

So, Tesla doesn't have non-compete agreements?

If I'm not mistaken, California does not allow restrictive non-compete agreements . Many years ago, I was in a company that was acquired by a California company, and they actually sent us a document releasing us from our non-competes...

 

[plumazul]

It appears that Tesla seems to be an incubating university for many types of innovation - Autonomous driving, AI, Machine learning, Battery technology and possibly high speed alien dreadnought manufacturing. Smart folks get recruited, learn and then spread their wings elsewhere.

The Xerox of today? Oh wait, that didn't work out so well (for Xerox).