DUBLIN – While some investors have fallen out of love with Tesla in the last eighteen months, the company is still a magnet for young talent. Tesla reports that it has more job applicants than it can handle as young engineers and programmers line up to work at the innovative automaker. This is a fairly important advantage for Tesla. In the US, the job market is extremely tight and competition for workers – especially ones with technical and scientific skills – is intense. For Tesla, having its pick of the litter when it comes to engineers is a real boon. However, as this article points out, many find that when they land their dream Tesla job, they have bitten off more than they can chew. Many employees report working long hours and struggling to hit hard-to-reach targets. – Felicity Duncan
Tesla Is the Hot Spot for Young Job Seekers
By Kelsey Gee and Tim Higgins
(The Wall Street Journal) Landon Kupfer thought he’d grabbed a piece of the Silicon Valley dream when Tesla Inc.hired him about a year ago to work on quality issues at the company’s Fremont, Calif., factory.
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The perks included driving Tesla cars and impressing friends and strangers curious about work at one of the tech industry’s hottest brands. “Getting a job there was pretty exciting,” said the 23-year-old San Jose native, who had experience fixing cars and installing windows but thought a job at the tech giant was beyond his reach.
His excitement was soon met with the complexities of mass-production during a remarkable period in Tesla’s history, as it ramped up production of its electric car for the mainstream, the Model 3 sedan. Mr. Kupfer’s team stretched to reach tougher manufacturing targets each week. “We’d get one goal to work toward, we’d hit that goal, then, Boom!—it didn’t even matter—let’s go to the next thing,” said Mr. Kupfer, who left the Bay Area after a few months to relocate to Texas, where he said the cost of living is better.
For many young engineers and other job seekers eager to advance environmentally-friendly vehicles and create something new, landing a job at the Palo Alto auto maker can be a hard-to-pass-up career break.
After they arrive, many say they learn it also means long hours and a frenzied pace. For some, it can soon lead to exhaustion or the temptation to accept offers from tech firms eager to hire talent with Tesla experience.
On Handshake, a student career-services app, Tesla is one of the most popular of the 275,000-plus employers using the platform to promote job openings. An analysis of Handshake’s nine million student and alumni users showed Tesla received more job and internship applications than any other company on the app in the 2016-2017 academic year. This past school year, it was narrowly beat by JPMorgan Chase & Co.
Overall, Tesla collected nearly a half-million applications last year, about double the volume in 2016, according to a company spokeswoman.
It isn’t clear whether Tesla’s production struggles this year with the new Model 3 or Chief Executive Elon Musk’s legal tussles with security regulators have affected young job seekers’ interest in Tesla. Comparable Handshake data for the current academic year isn’t available, though Tesla says it has received more applications to date this year than in all of 2017.
“Our interest from candidates continues to grow year over year,” Cindy Nicola, vice president of global recruiting at Tesla, said in a statement.
Tesla’s stated mission of accelerating the world’s transition to sustainable energy appeals to many of its 45,000 workers, some of whom are willing to work 100-hour weeks and eschew the common perks of tech companies, such as free food. Instead, some employees say, they run on adrenaline, stock options and a shared passion with the company’s leader to change the world.
Kiran Karunakaran says he was making $80,000 a year at a Philadelphia electronics company when Tesla offered him $95,000 and stock options to become an engineer in 2015. Though Apple made him a $115,000 offer around the same time, he says, the 29-year-old Mr. Karunakaran took the Tesla job. He said the decision was a no-brainer.
Other Tesla employees said they have turned down offers from companies such as Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo and Uber Technologies Inc. that were 20% to 50% above their Tesla salaries.
“What really attracts young people to Tesla is instant gratification,” Mr. Karunakaran said. “You see these incredible things you’ve worked on come to fruition, on the road, in months,” he said. Mr. Karunakaran left Tesla in May after three years—one year shy of the full vesting of his stock options—to follow his wife to Seattle for her job.
Tesla draws from a pool of schools noted for churning out mechanical engineers and technicians, not just from the Ivy League circles usually frequented by recruiters of top consulting, tech and finance companies. At Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Boston this past September, two Tesla employees delivered their pitch at an invitation-only session where more than 60 students peppered them with questions about Tesla car assembly, and engineering issues it might have faced during production delays this year.
“The were jumping out of their skin excited to be there,” said Dave Ortendahl, the school career center’s director of corporate relations.
Anusha Atluri, a second-year M.B.A. student at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business, spent the summer as an intern on Tesla’s Model 3 assembly line in Fremont. Partway through the summer, Ms. Atluri spotted a way to tweak a step in the manufacturing line that she thought might speed up production. She put together a PowerPoint presentation for the rest of the team and, encouraged by the response, she suggested following up the next week with management to discuss implementing the change.
“They were like, why not just try it tomorrow?” she said. The process changed the next day, and within a week the line was running more efficiently, she said.
When Tesla announced in June it would cut 9% of its workforce, not including factory workers, for cost savings, Twitter was full of messages from some people who had been let go, praising Mr. Musk for their experience.
“I don’t regret giving all I had and in a way bidding adieu is my last contribution. I’ll be cheering Tesla on knowing I did my part,” one sales manager who lost his job wrote on Twitter in reply to Mr. Musk.
Some others, meanwhile, have tired of the workload or the corporate drama, and walked away from Tesla for jobs at Waymo, Lyft or Amazon.com . More than 50 high-ranking Tesla executives have left since the Model 3 unveiling in spring 2016, including the chief financial officer and heads of sales, human resources and public relations. Mr. Musk says turnover is normal; outside observers have questioned whether his micromanaging approach has harmed morale.
One engineering manager described leaving Tesla from exhaustion after having a baby, only to decide about a year into a new job at a large tech company that it wasn’t a good fit. The manager jumped at the chance to return to Tesla with a new take on balancing work and personal life.
It isn’t just about working less, this person said. “Everybody should have more work than they can possibly finish at all times,” the person said. “It forces the person to draw the line on when they give up—when they say, I’m done for the day. At Tesla you have to achieve some kind of comfort knowing you didn’t do it all.”
Write to Kelsey Gee at [email protected] and Tim Higgins at [email protected]
