Hiring at Tesla
Tesla is on a massive hiring spree, adding over 6900 jobs to its career page this week.
Most of the new positions appear to be Engineering, Information Technology, Vehicle Service and Manufacturing - but overall this surge represents an almost 50% hiring increase since June. This compares closely to the 7200 hiring peak back in May, just before the freeze, so it looks like Tesla’s trying to make up for some lost time.
Some of you might remember that back in June, CEO Elon Musk asked his executives to pause hiring and cut staff by about 10% as he predicted the economy was about to take a downturn. He wasn’t wrong about that, but it hasn’t been too long since June, so what happened?
Likely this is due at least in part to the passing of the Inflation Reduction Act in the US. Tesla has been doing a good amount of shuffling with staff, equipment and planning since the law passed - getting ready to take advantage of the Green Energy industry funding this law will provide.
And that means more hiring, apparently - which has to sting for the folks that got laid off in June. But most of those layoffs ended up being from salaried positions - something that Elon viewed as more of an efficiency issue. And hourly hiring continued in many of Tesla's facilities.
More importantly, the new positions are clearly meant to support Tesla's expected growth. Musk announced earlier this year that Tesla was going to make a significant effort to improve its service in order to get wait times down. They'd need more hires for that.
Tesla's energy systems have been booming this year, too, with new facilities opening up across the US and in Australia. Production will soon be starting on the Cybertruck and the Tesla Semi. GigaShanghai keeps breaking production records like they're made of glass. Tesla's really ramping up in almost every area of their company.
So of course they're going to be hiring. When the hiring freeze went into effect, Elon predicted that Tesla's head count would be higher a year later - Nobody should be too upset by seeing this start to happen earlier.