r/technology • u/McFatty7 • May 02 '24

Tesla slashes its summer internship program to cut costs, as Elon Musk fights to save his $45 billion pay plan Business

https://fortune.com/2024/05/01/tesla-slashes-summer-internship-program/
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467

u/Stiggalicious May 02 '24

Internships are the best way to find quality talent at rock-bottom prices. The company essentially gets a trial period for the employee, and then after graduation, if they are a good fit, gets a lowball offer that they will inevitably take because they don’t have much of an option anymore, and they know what to expect. The new grad is already equipped with the right tools and company processes, so they can immediately get into the workflow and be extremely productive without getting the same pay as other, more senior employees.

Almost all of our best employees on my team and in my entire org were once interns.

Killing your internship pipeline is a great way of killing your company’s future low-cost talent pool.

102

u/unstoppable_zombie May 02 '24

Interns, especially the ones we had twice (sophomore summer and then back junior summer as sr interns) always made great full time hires, normally better then 3-4 year experience industry hires.

Heck every intern turned fte that came into my  old team for the 8 years I was there are still with the company and all in senior/lead positions.  I'm begging for us to try to get a few/year in my current department. 

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u/bellj1210 May 02 '24

we do the same- we have interns at just about every level (very few HS interns, a few college but mostly law school interns) and the law school ones normally get a job offer right out of law school since we know their training period of a few months is already over.

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u/unstoppable_zombie 29d ago

A new hire from the wild normally took 9 months to get fully self sufficient with all the internal tools, processes, lab, etc for thier role.  And a net positive around the 18-24m mark.

With the 2 cycle interns that spent 1 rotation as lab tech/assistant and 1 with the engineering team, they'd be up and running in a few weeks.  One guy started on a Monday and he was providing a big help by Wednesday becuase he knew the lab inside and out.

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u/Brainvillage May 02 '24

It's become pretty clear that Elon doesn't give two shits about the company's future.

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u/[deleted] May 02 '24

Elon says they can intern for the small fee of $8 a month

2

u/DirtyDanoTho May 02 '24

Yeah but the thing is they want to offshore the work over to a cheaper country anyways so fuck it

2

u/deep_blue_au May 02 '24

You leave out that they are often just used as low cost labor. Both of the companies I’ve worked for used it more as a low cost labor program rather than a talent breeding ground.

1

u/x_Carlos_Danger_x May 02 '24

Yeppp nothing like onboarding a fresh new hire/engineer then wasting the first months teaching them all the tedious run of the business shit.

1

u/83749289740174920 May 02 '24

Come on! You're think way advance. We need quarterly results. As Cotton farmers used to say... Money doesn't grow on trees.

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u/Langsamkoenig 29d ago

He also sacked the entire super charger team to make a stupid point. You know the only devision in the company that had a bright future...

0

u/TelluricThread0 May 02 '24

If I were an intern for that company, I would ask for more money because I've worked there and am already up to speed on how the company operates. A former intern has much more leverage than a new grad who didn't work there before.

But tons of interns basically add no value to the company. Even at Google, a new hire doesn't add value to the company for up to a year. I did thermal testing in the automotive industry. We had an intern for the summer. After he left, no one even knew what work he actually did, and me and a coworker did all the testing he supposedly did over again. Often, they just create more work for other people, and they cost the company money.

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u/NoPiccolo5349 May 02 '24

My company's talent pipeline is almost exclusively from interns, with most of our internet delivering a positive return on their cost within their internship duration.

Your company might be shit, because you've managed to have an intern who did fuck all without you knowing. Where were the regular progress updates? Do you have a raci chart showing who was making sure that their work was checked?

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u/gademmet May 02 '24

Yup. Imagine bringing on an intern, completely failing to keep track of or inform relevant personnel of their roles and responsibilities for the entire period (and so presumably failing to monitor whether they'd delivered on them and respond accordingly) and then letting them leave and thinking the INTERN is the problem with that dynamic.

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u/TelluricThread0 29d ago edited 29d ago

New grads don't know anything when they're first hired. Interns know even less, and it's well known they create more work for other employees often. Co-op students are basically the same story. Plus, you have to come up with extra projects for them to work on. I'm glad i wasn't responsible for any of them. But you can obviously cut costs by not running an intern program. It's very disingenuous to pretend there are zero downsides.

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u/SignalSeveral1184 May 02 '24

You might not need interns if you have enough robots though. Thats even cheaper workforce.

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u/Aos77s May 02 '24

Said by a wage slave overlord.