Tesla Software Developer reviews

3.9

68% would recommend to a friend

(332 total reviews)
avatar

Elon Musk

80% approve of CEO

52% positive business outlook

Software Developer employees have rated Tesla with 3.9 out of 5 stars, based on 332 company reviews on Glassdoor. This indicates that most Software Developer professionals have a good working experience there. Tesla is rated in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) by Software Developer professionals compared to other employers within the Produktion industry (3.5 stars).

Reviews by job title

332 reviews
3.0
Feb 13, 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great mission, important for the world. Lots of opportunity. You can come into the company and work on something awesome from day 1, if you're lucky. Bad people have a way of getting fired. Come to think of it, any time I realized someone wasn't carrying their weight, within 6 months they were gone. That's a good thing. Coworkers are by and large pretty awesome. They might not be the most gifted or talented in all cases, but this is a place where people's hard work pays off. You always need to work about 3 times harder than you thought to make that a reality though. It's full of driven people. There are cracks in the foundation at every level, but somehow we push forward, and some details are not that important. If you can ignore those things, or like other people ignoring some details in favor of the big picture, it's great.

Cons

The company and culture will suck you dry. Your soulless exoskeleton will have a tough time finding another job while being pummeled to death by relentless demands. It's not coming from just one person, as a matrix organization it's more like death by a thousand cuts. The longer you work there, the more people in far off departments will remember you, and line up at your desk/email you and copy bosses demanding urgent actions. As a global company, this is 24/7 and sometimes in a language you can't read. In the beginning it's fun and very interesting. A great challenge. But everyone has a limit, and you will get there eventually. In the early days everything is cool. You can start something new, build it up, make it awesome. Then support it forever, have more similar things dumped on you, and watch all the new flashy interns working on the cool stuff. Once you take something on, you can almost never escape it. If you get an intern, management expects you to give them the cool stuff and keep the garbage for yourself. It makes sense to continue the cycle of entrapment. Internal mobility is a joke, a way for management to pass off under-performing staff or people they don't get along with. If you do a good job, you are stuck, and your manager can stop you from moving anywhere else. You might need to quit and re-join to move within Tesla. So make sure you like the job if you accept it, forget getting your foot in the door and then shifting to something you like better.

2.0
Apr 9, 2017
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Tesla attracted some really great individual contributors to build Model S. They get five stars for building a stellar product, and +1 more for opportunity to innovate in the automotive space. (Yes, I know that's 6 but they lose 4 for crappy management). The biggest plus for Tesla is that the CEO is willing to make mistakes and take risks. Tesla is also willing to incorporate relatively new technologies into their products. It is a company challenging the automotive industry to "do better" by setting a high bar for quality and features. This is worth involving yourself in, IMHO. So there are some excellent opportunities there.

Cons

The company's management and HR policies are awful (-4 stars for this). They sometimes promote managers from within, but engineers frequently have exceedingly poor people skills, at least they did at Tesla. To make matters worse, the HR policy uses "stack ranking" and each group is forced to pick one individual as "worst". These people, no matter how skilled, are culled once or twice a year. So if you are great at what you do, working with 4 other great people, one of you is going to get let go, doesn't matter if all are great. This is incredibly stupid! It creates an atmosphere of suspicion and non-cooperation, and psychological fear. Very bad. The work place itself is low rent: IKEA tables and chairs. Big, open, very noisy space; poorly lit and visually distracting with people walking between long aisles of "desks". It is furnished like a start up, but is a multi-billion dollar publicly traded company. Its bad enough that they tended to avoid showing the work area to potential hires. Tesla is a great place to "come from", but not a great place to be.

1.0
Jul 19, 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

It can be fun to drive engineering prototypes.

Cons

Extremely high pressure environment, unrealistic deadlines and long hours (9-6:30 every weekday + an expectation to drive engineering cars on weekends and file bug reports) led to a complete burnout and mental breakdown for me. More than one engineer left my team every month on average.

Viewing 328 - 330 of 332 Reviews

Glassdoor has 15,629 Tesla reviews submitted anonymously by Tesla employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Tesla is right for you.