Perpetual goals ramping, burn out is inevitable
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.