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Comment by lyime | Hacker News Reader

I had a friend who had a brief stint at Tesla, now she is in grad school.

She used to tell me stories of how she was constantly asked to work on different teams, doing totally unrelated tasks. She started as a project coordinator but one day she was asked to make sales calls. She also worked on delivering cars as well as give tours to the Tesla factory.

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Sounds like the chaos of a startup. It's why some people choose to work at GM. It's also why GM floundered - I can't imagine them having any flexibility in work rules.

I hope they pull it off - I will buy one of their mainstream cars.

Tesla is a 12 year old company that has burned hundreds of millions of dollars and shipped tens of thousands of cars. How is it remotely a startup? If you can't get staffing and other admin stuff right at age 12, then that says a lot about how poor management is. If you have engineers making sales calls or giving tours, then you're paying engineering salaries for non-engineering work.

That actually does sound like fun, for the right kind of person.

Fun, perhaps. I am not sure about the value of such a 'diverse' stint from the perspective of one's career progress/development. Promotions often require sustained excellence, which may be hard to achieve if you are starting off in different roles every now and then. Jumping jobs often requires external visibility, which would also be stunted if you are constantly changing roles.

From the article, it sounds like ENGINEERS were asked to call potential customers to close deals.

When your bottom line is in trouble, everyone works in sales.

Sounds like it could have been intentional - I see people in the banking industry constantly jumping jobs across all products and different sectors of the bank in order to gain experience and understanding of the company from all sorts of angles.

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