Pros
Good benefits, work/life balance isn't great but not terrible, free snacks, some great coworkers
Cons
Where to begin... Worst of all is the connection the Buffalo office has with the San Mateo, CA office. I'm not sure what the vetting process is like for the leadership team in CA, but they seem to continuously hire people who are unqualified, unintelligent, unprofessional, extremely rude, and overwhelmingly narcissistic. The worst part about this job is having to communicate with these people. They are some of the most vile, hateful souls I've ever had the displeasure of working with. And the issues start at the top. There is rampant unprofessionalism, hostility and animosity present at every level of the autopilot department. Mentally and emotionally, this is a draining environment to be a part of. People are not treated like people and no thought is ever given to how anyone in the department SHOULD be treated. It's absolutely disgusting. Worst of all, this obvious unprofessionalism problem within the company trickles all the way down to the lowest employees, who then get blamed for the problems, rather than leadership ever taking a look at how they contribute to the problem. Seems to me that there is a maturity problem here, people, including the supervisors, act like they're in high school. It's a toxic environment. Attendance policy is absolutely ridiculous. No unpaid time off is ever to be given and PTO trickles in at a laughable pace. Management encourages using sick time for anything you want, and then holds it over your head when your time gets low. If you run out you basically get fired if you ever need any extra time off. The path for extraordinary employees to move up the ranks seems to have been designed by someone with no experience in how workplaces actually function. The process for earning a promotion is tantamount to a gameshow where making it to the end is basically dependent on your luck. You can give this company everything you have and then will promote someone else who does half the work, but just happened to get the right judges for their gameshow rounds. Too much bias among AP leadership, especially among those in California. Working here is a waste of time if you have any aspirations to move up, they will just promote someone who has worked here for a month and has done nothing to earn it. If Tesla cares at all about keeping good employees, they should be promoting much more based on merit. They say that somehow "isn't fair" while promoting people who have not put in the hours of extra effort, who do not give 100% every day, people who do not care about making Tesla a better company to work for. Calling this company a "start-up" at their current valuation by the stock market is an absolute joke, but they still function like one. Unfortunately for people like me who see greater opportunities for the company to evolve, we do not matter. There is no path to making things better. That is what it's like to work at Tesla.
