I recently interviewed for Tesla's module department. Module engineering is essentially the gear between engineering and manufacturing. They're the heavy lifters. They're the front line grunts. They're the ones accountable for everything - LVM to HVM feasibility, process development, metrology, selection of suppliers, qualifying the manufacturing cell, process control and sustaining(operations, efficiency, continuous improvement, training etc.) and troubleshooting lines down situations.<p>The interviewer was very polite and told me this is probably the most demanding job at Tesla, especially at this time of the company's state when they're ramping up the production lines for Model 3.<p>I was intrigued and went to second round interview, and it eventually led to an offer. That is where things got interesting. Tesla needs to invest heavily in their Module engineers. The pay package was extremely disappointing and I am not willing to let go of the golden years of my life (late 20's) for this kind of a job unless it is heavily incentivized. I've had similar demanding job offers from oil companies, but at least they offset with a very compelling pay package (15% Alaska bonus, 4 weeks off, presumably amazing yearly bonus).
Tl;dr I hope they upgraded the the DB backing their battery manufacturing process.<p>I had a buddy who worked at Tesla. The first step of the battery manufacture process involves a robot taking a little cell out of the box, discharging it, charging it back up and testing to see if it shows the right voltage. Super easy quality control test. But all that needs to be written to a database. The database was hosted on a vm using a shared raid array of spinning disks. Their battery manufacturer process was literally gated by a slow ass disk drive. My buddy pointed this out. Asked that they just throw an SSD in there (we’re working on it). Followed up, asked if he could just do it himself (no). Followed up a third time asking for the authority to fix the problem (no). Finally quit in disgust because they refused to solve a simple problem so how are they going to solve hard ones?
> It's looking more and more like the official reason for the layoffs - "…As with any company, especially one of over 33,000 employees, performance reviews also occasionally result in employee departures" - doesn't hold water.<p>Why not? If you can't find 2% dead wood at your company you're miraculously good at hiring or are not looking very hard. Stack ranking companies tend to use 5-10% as the bottom tier subject to "yank".<p>I'm not saying it is just performance reviews, because I have no more idea than whomever wrote the article what's really going on inside Tesla, but the idea that it couldn't make sense for a big employer like that to do a small round of firings doesn't hold water.
So layoffs in Fremont and Roseville are somehow causing Tesla employees at the Gigafactory to become less experienced?<p><a href="https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/10/13/4819750/" rel="nofollow">https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/10/13/4819750/</a><p>Yeah... OK.
Url changed from <a href="http://media.thinknum.com/articles/teslas-production-plagued-by-inexperienced-workers-after-they-laid-off-700/" rel="nofollow">http://media.thinknum.com/articles/teslas-production-plagued...</a>, which quotes heavily from this yet links not to it.
recent reddit post where an owner was on his second attempt to take delivery of a III <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/7t0uul/inspect_for_major_panel_gapalignment_defects_at/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/7t0uul/inspect...</a><p>the annoying part was the take it or leave it that they felt they received, apparently the first car was worse
The author argues that they are not careful enough and not taking their time to fully inspect the battery packs, while saying that they should stop taking their time and ramp up the production already! Appears to me that she would blame Tesla either way.
Elon Musk is spread out way too thin. He should never have bought SolarCity, and he needs to relinquish SpaceX entirely. He needs to be laser-focused on getting the Model3 out of the door because his whole company depends on it.<p>I think people are sensing a hell of a lot of weakness, and if Tesla starts running out of money, he could literally find himself and the company bankrupt, especially if banks stop lending money because it looks like a bad credit risk.<p>This feels like the type of company that could crumble down to single digits in stock value because of some catastrophic set of financial issues.