In terms of raw salary and stock, compensation is fairly competitive, but benefits are terrible as far as tech goes. 2 weeks vacation, well below average health, dental, and vision, no flexible time, no match on your 401(k), limited holidays, no transportation assistance, unpaid maternity leave only, etc. SolarCity claims they want to be more of a tech company, but have maybe 40% of the benefits you get at a tech company. Although they do have free snacks and soda (unfortunately very few, if any, healthy options).
You will work all the time. If you're very, very lucky you may sleep or eat sometimes.
That's closer to the truth than most will believe. You will be asked to work every evening, weekend, and night. When I left, I knew a guy that had worked the past 12 weekends straight. If you don't do this you will be threatened with being fired. As in, your manager will literally approach you and say if you don't work 70-80 hours per week, you will likely be fired (as my manager did to me). And this comes down all the way from the top. There is no work-life balance here. There's just work.
If you attempt to improve the companies processes, your manager will tell you "I want you to feel empowered to make changes around here", but they won't actually empower you. So you keep suggesting things to improve productivity, but no one will ever really listen. But they will keep asking you to be more productive by giving the company all of your time. They'll claim there's "too much to do" to focus any efforts on improving processes. That's the very same sentiment that kills companies. No one cares because they're too busy checking the stock price and cashing out. I caught Pete Rive - the CTO - checking the price in a meeting once instead of paying attention. "What a classy leader", I thought.
Competence doesn't matter here. The average quality of software engineers is on the level of high school students. They refuse to learn new ways of getting things done, and don't believe in best practices. Many, in fact, are vehemently against best practices. Again, the "no time" argument comes up a lot. The sentiment that kills companies. No one is ever fired for being incompetent. If they were, every engineering manager up to and including Pete Rive would no longer be at the company, as well as 90% of the staff that's been there for more than a year. They don't care how efficient you are as long as you're working a lot of hours. My manager watched a person spend 50 hours over the course of 3 days on a task and give up, gave the task to me which I completed in an hour, and didn't bat an eye. There's no place else I can think of where that would be remotely acceptable.
I quit before my first stock vest because SolarCity is too invasive into your personal life and too toxic a place to work to be worth it. It's a shame too, because clean energy may fail for the ridiculous reason that the people tackling the problem are incompetent. Hopefully other clean energy companies are not like SolarCity.
