Pros
You just have to show up to work, agree with the CEO and CMO's vision and collect a paycheck, its that simple. If you get in the right department and become a high level employee, you dont even have to show up to work! its awesome! The culture and mission of the company attracts some very, very talented employees that are placed into regular positions. The work life balance is great except during tradeshow and investor summit time. You have unlimited vacation so whats not to dislike except for the massive layoffs that happen every five years or so?!
Cons
Everything started to go bad around November of 2013, when our CEO pushed Local Motors from being a “crowd sourced” company to a “co-creation” platform. a year earlier we lost our awesome co-founder/ head of sales and later our head of marketing, soon after we lost all of our "top tier" talent and stopped major production of the Rally Fighter. The company stopped listening to the public and began to listen to a chosen set of a select few people who know nothing about how to make, design, manufacture and sell vehicles. We opened a new factory in a bad location, our CEO absorbed an outside marketing agency (and CMO) that led a “fake it till you make it” strategy and we stopped building real-world products in order to ride of the tech bubble with the hype of 3D printed vehicles, something we knew nothing about. Post 2014, the company started to get set up for one specific purpose, to WOW investors; from the people/equipment they hire to partners they choose to work with. The company is a startup financial machine; they constantly claim that they are a start-up in order to attract more interest from investors. Every couple of years they re-brand the entire company and change internal strategy based on what the top buzzword of the tech industry search engine is for that particular era. A constant re-branding needs a large marketing department, so this company has a big one and it is run by a very unique CMO (who is very effective at the "fake it" thing). I wont get into the details as the other reviews showcase the CMO and marketing department well. The engineering department is the second most important department as it is responsible for the prototype vehicles. With the way the company is structured, engineering is bypassed and the CEO/CMO gets to publish what is happening in product development, this is a problem. Other figureheads and departments publish information relating to vehicles weight, performance, range, level of autonomy right out of thin air and push this out to the real world. This can be very frustrating when you are an engineer and have to try and meet already published, what looks to be factual, information. There is complicated by the additional problem in that engineers do not have access to the budget or set parameters necessary to accomplish the simplest of tasks (like a widely used CAD program and a standardized sheet format). As an engineer you get to be an overqualified mechanic that gets to assemble prototype vehicles in a short period of time; its fun work but not proper. Local Motors rides off the coattails of other companies and there is little, if any groundbreaking research and development relating to the technology/autonomous/additive manufacturing sector being done in house. In summary, you get to make vehicles that appear to function properly, heavy emphasis on the "appear" part. As an assembler, fabricator or technician your job is to support engineering when the time arises to make another buzzword prototype vehicle. This can mean very long hours, time away from family and trips on the road and working for high level superiors that are taking advantage of, and not fostering your talents and unique skills that would otherwise be in continual development. Lastly, the company has a overwhelming number of employees in upper management. An overwhelming majority of employees in the company has the title "Director, VP, product/project manager" or something similar. Most of these employees come from other companies with little to no senior level experience (including the CEO, CMO, and COO). This company loves to throw job titles around whenever an employee is ready to leave as a bargaining chip, they are not earned over years of time like in other companies. As a result, almost all employees in upper management lack talent, are selfish, overpaid and also quite narcissistic.