“Tesla Is Reportedly Revoking Internship Offers to College Students Weeks Before Their Start Dates: ‘I Spent Thousands On Housing’”
Remember, this isn’t just an intern thing. It’s going to impact anyone hired to work for a team or department that no longer exists.
Getting an internship at a notable company is hard to do, and getting dropped at the last minute is fucking terrible, and can delay you entrance into the workforce. Which already takes way too fucking long and puts recent grads in even more debt.
That said, this article is also leaving out the other employees that suffered the same fate. I’ve known people who have left homes and pulled their kids out of school, all for a job that vanished when they arrived.
There should be penalties for leading on an employee that uproots their life to go work for a job that doesn’t materialize.
It was a tough sacrifice, but the really important thing going forward is making sure Elon gets his 56 billion dollar bonus reinstated that was so cruelly taken away.
I admit I own a Tesla. Given all the recent erratic behavior:
- Not only will I not recommend Teslas to anybody who might ask about it, I will warn them to look at company & CEO behavior over the years, and actively discourage others from buying one.
- When the time comes, I will not be replacing my current car with another Tesla. I will still likely go with an EV, but by then there should be significantly more good (better) options available.
About the only way I’ll change either of these will be for Elon to step down and completely remove himself from any control over Tesla. But I don’t see that happening and I certainly won’t be holding my breath.
I at least don’t blame you. They used to be the best EVs that you could get. May I ask what model year and how you like it as a car, independent of Musk’s PR shenanigans?
‘21 Model Y long range. Overall it drives well, and the supercharger network is really nice. We took it on a trip up & down a good portion of the east coast last year and never had any issues charging it. We have a couple 30 lb dogs that love going for rides, so things like dog mode are really nice as well.
Things I really do not like:
- The reliance on cameras for all sorts of features like auto high beams and auto wipers on top of traffic aware cruise control (aka autopilot) (and full self driving, if you have it). I regularly have the wipers go off on clear, sunny days. The auto high beams are so unreliable I don’t use them, and that means no autopilot at night. I have no faith in even trying out FSD because of how glitchy everything else is.
- The minimal use of physical controls. I have to take my eyes off the road just to switch wiper speed/mode.
- Software updates have, more than once, changed my settings for things like autopilot without warning, and I’ve only discovered it when driving and turning autopilot on.
- The maps have lots of routing issues. It shows roads in my neighborhood that don’t yet exist (new development under construction), regularly routes me wrong ways (there’s a left turn near my home that it thinks it can’t take so it tries to route me two sides if a triangle as a result), and on our road trip we found a stretch of highway that it thought it couldn’t drive on and kept trying to route us along side streets. And there’s no way I know to report these issues so they can be fixed. Apps like Waze make that trivial.
Pretty much all of these are reasons why I refuse to even try FSD and discourage others from using it. About the only way I’ll give it another chance is if a truly independent third party tests it and says all these issues have been resolved.
Software updates have, more than once, changed my settings for things like autopilot without warning, and I’ve only discovered it when driving and turning autopilot on.
I feel like this point can’t be overstated enough. When I need to go somewhere, I shouldn’t need to reorient myself because the car receives software updates all the time. A device that’s constantly changing is inherently unreliable, even if technically it’s improving over time.
I regularly have the wipers go off on clear, sunny days.
To be fair; similar things happen with those on non-Teslas aswell. If it was possible I would disable the automatic wipers on my vehicle entirely and make them work manually like on older vehicles. I vastly prefer that system. I’m only for automatic wipers when they can with a 100% accuracy predict what I want them to do. Now they either wipe when they shouldn’t or don’t when they should.
Teslas were the “best”, as in the only option for what they did. They were never the “best”, as in better than existing products for what they did.
Being first to market for such a long time was an incredible feat and it speaks volumes that their position isn’t much, much stronger at the end of it.
I agree w/ the “best” argument but I don’t agree with the “first to market” argument… There were a notable amount of electric cars in the UK before Tesla became a thing. Perhaps things in .de are different…
I did notice in Berlin just a few weeks ago that you guys don’t really seem to be pushing for clean air zones in major cities unlike a lot of the UK which given your progressive population came as a surprise to me.
Same here. For me, not only has the CEO been erratic as all heck, the tech has stalled out and I don’t see any improvements and the other car manufacturers are quickly catching up and in some cases surpassed Tesla.
It’s really sad to see the company fall so badly, so quickly but that’s what you get when you let a completely unhinged person be in charge without checks. Still nice to see his money at least kick start the EV industry to where it is today, good and bad.
Tangentially related, but I remember being in college when Tesla was like starting to take off. Like the Model S had just come out. I went to one of the Tesla internship presentations on campus and listened to some of the people who had the internship the previous year and they talked about how they were pulling like, 60+ hour weeks and that they had like, a shuttle that ran all throughout the night to take them from the workplace to the housing. Some talked about going back home at like 3AM, and then showing up for work again at 8AM. It really sounded kind of like it would be a very stressful experience and I didn’t even want to apply after listening to it. I guess they were paid well, but
Sounds like things have only gotten way more chaotic since then
In the USA interns work for free? In my country interns work for free. (They’re not supposed to actually work, but learn how work is done in that company)
During my free internship I was placed in the summer in a warehouse moving boxes without AC. The next day I called the teacher and said that I’m sick and unfortunately I couldn’t get to do the slave anymore
A preference cascade by consumers leading to a death spiral.
Watch for tesla to spin off the vehicle business soon and refocus on batteries / energy going forward.
Well Musk does have said before that Tesla is a technology company first and a car manufacturer second. It may very well be that they move out of making cars at some point and instead focus on licensing the software, especially FSD to other manufacturers.
That’s because he wants Tech style valuation for their stock (i.e. Price/Earnings ratios around 80) rather than automaker valuations (were P/Es are more like 4 or 5).
Gotta justify the 56 billion!
Still now, after massive price falls,Tesla stock is worth more than all other US automakers combined even though they sell way less cars because investors still treat it as some kind of growth tech startup that’s going to the moon rather than a stale maker of cars.
(Also last I checked their FSD has already been surpassed by Mercedes’ … a stale maker of cars)
“We’ll be the Apple of EVs/boring holes/solar tiles/alternative underground transport systems/rocketry” has always been a core element of Musk scams.
Also last I checked their FSD has already been surpassed by Mercedes’
This isn’t a fair assesment in my opinion. While Mercedes does offer level 3 self driving unlike the level 2 on Teslas it’s still extremely limited system. It only works on certain hand-picked highways between LA, SF and LV and even then it requires specific weather and traffic conditions to be met untill it let’s you enable it and even then you need to be able to take over when needed just like on Teslas. FSD on the other hand works on all roads in the US including unmapped ones and parking lots and now especially after the V12 update it has gotten pretty damn good at it. The leap it has done in just a few months has been quite dramatic. I highly recommend checking some tests/reviews on YouTube if you’re not up to date with it and this is something that interests you. It’s still by no means foolproof but I’m definitely starting to get the feeling that we’re not far off from it legitimately being significantly better than a human driver.