Recently, I was approached by a LinkedIn recruiter for a position at Tesla. The entire experience was extremely disappointing, and I feel compelled to expose this company.
I applied for a frontend position, and the first round involved a take-home challenge where I had to implement a page to display a gallery of images from the machine learning dataset they provided. However, the link they emailed me for the challenge didn’t work despite numerous attempts. After a long back-and-forth, I finally got a working link. I completed the challenge quickly and sent it back to them. They immediately responded, moving me forward to a phone interview. Their quick reply surprised me because the code repository I sent required setting up and installing npm, indicating they likely didn’t even open my code. It’s really unfair that they didn’t bother to look at the five hours of effort I put into the challenge.
During the interview, I asked HR if the interview would focus on frontend topics, to which they affirmed. However, the interview included a backend system design question about designing a Tetris game and defining classes and functions. I was taken aback, wondering where the frontend questions were. Designing a Tetris game is not a frontend system design; it’s more related to backend data modeling. What’s even more frustrating is that other companies usually discuss the take-home challenge during the onsite interview, but Tesla’s onsite had no connection to the take-home challenge and was unrelated to frontend work.
After the interview, I was very displeased with the entire experience, so I didn’t bother checking the interview results. I decided that even if I were invited for an onsite interview, I wouldn’t continue with the process. Surprisingly, they took a whole week to send me a rejection email early last Saturday. The whole process lacked professionalism, respect, and consistency from HR. The fact that the recruiter and HR were responding to emails late at night, even at 11 PM, speaks volumes about the poor work-life balance at their company.
This post reflects my personal experience and serves as a heads-up for those preparing to interview at Tesla.