Non paywall link: https://archive.is/f28Lv
One of Tesla’s strengths was being attractive as an employer and having a choice of top talent. Who’s going to want to work for them now?
Is it? I’ve only read awful things about Tesla’s workplace culture. They’ve been sued for discrimination and sexual harassment like dozens of times (and they weren’t like micro-aggressions; more like open racism and Elon pulling his dick out) They routinely have (or at least had) a higher workplace injury rate than other car companies. (They said they got that down to the industry average but some investigative journalists reported they were just not reporting many injuries.)
I mean, maybe it’s a good place to be a software developer or something — that’s what I do and I wouldn’t work for “ketamine and fascism” era Elon for love or money but to each their own. But presumably most of their employees are on the factory floor and I’d much, much rather work at a UAW plant than a Tesla one. At least you have a union rep you can go to about safety/HR issues.
Stories of Tesla being a shitty place to work have been common for a while now. But originally Elon Musk sold it as being part of a project to change the world. He also made it prestigious (or tried to) claiming only the best could work at Tesla.
Elon Musk always made it sound like Tesla was an ideologically very sought after work place on all levels. Also as in being on the winning team.How effective all that bullshit really was IDK, but it sounded real in the beginning. I doubt many believe the bullshit today.
While there is arguably a larger pool of people who you can reach by not having open racism and the CEO whipping his dick out (and mysteriously not slamming it into his Tesla door, even if it is a masterful gambit) you can still get a lot of white men of privilege who are smart and hardworking who don’t nominally worry about being on the receiving end of most of the harassment so it’s OK as long as they end up part of the winning team because they’ll get mega stock bucks at the end. And this does extend to the factory floor, at least people’s impressions while joining the factory floor. They wouldn’t be an engineer but they’ll be a supervisor or something?
It’s kinda un-earned? Like, there’s stories that people tell each other of questionable veracity? Some set of startups in the days of yore gave their cleaning staff or whatnot options so I think it’s become part of the cultural mythos now even if the reality is that the cleaning staff these days is contractors who are mistreated so even if it did actually happen then, it won’t happen now.
And, dono, once you’ve solved the hard problems early on, there’s less of that drive to do the truly novel things and so you get more of the people who want to be part of a company that’s going to the top and wouldn’t mind if they could coast and/or fail upwards along the way.
The problem is that employers tend to presume that they can continue to abuse people going forwards into the future because they’ve gotten away with it so far. Until they do things like yank offers from new college grads or laying off too many of the professional staff, at which point you’ve shattered the illusion.
tl;dr: Elon sowing: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!!
Elon reaping: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.
I have to wonder just how many people are left who are willing to deliberately sign up to work for Tesla at this point anyway. I certainly wouldn’t.
Why did you add Elon Musk to the headline? I think we all know who runs Tesla, is it really necessary to mention him every time?
The inclusion of ‘Elon Musk’s’ in the headline was not done manually; it was automatically generated when the post was created. I have not edited the generated headline. You can verify this by attempting to create a post with the same link.
That is very strange, I wonder why Fortune feels the need to add that text. Why doesn’t the ‘embed title’ (or whatever it’s called) match the article title?
Probably SEO reasons to help it pop up if you search his name there by driving more traffic to their site
“Anastasia Nyrkovskaya’s Fortune Media Group quietly adds SEO terms to news headlines.”
He’s at the heart of the company’s problems. It’s good for the public to associate his name with failure, given the false image he’s created for himself.
Quietly?
