Nikola Reviews

During the turnover of multiple CEOs many people within the company promoted themselves to leadership positions that have no idea how to properly engineer a vehicle or lead successful teams. As a result, the company has an overwhelming number of employees in upper management. 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. Most of these employees come from other companies with little to no upper management experience and prefer to live in ignorance when problems arise within vehicle development and point fingers to other teams. This has led to a company run by hundreds of engineers with inflated titles who are rewarded by being smooth talkers and not developing vehicles. The end result is a poorly engineered product that is dangerous, hard to manufacture, not profitable and unreliable. The company recently enacted an unannounced and immediate mass layoff which has increased the demand of everyone's work and unmotivated all employees. Many of the laid off employees were ones that did actual work and much knowledge on how to continue to manufacture vehicles was lost. This new set of challenges has led to a financially unstable work environment. As a result nearly all my peers left or are looking to exit and stopped collaborating. I urge anyone considering to join Nikola to consider any other company.

Where to start ? Whole bunch of side projects which are a drain on resources - thankfully this is being curtailed now. Global engineering head and most technical directors quite simply don’t have what it takes (experience or leadership or team work or track record or engineering skill) to lead a company like this to success. Certain large teams have very little to do (partners doing everything) but still keep hiring and they don’t restrict it or set goals that need to be met. Very little goals are set at the team level and reviewed by management to measure if they are performing at an adequate level. The CEO has no clue how teams are being run or what the outcomes are, this is a small company so sit down with teams once a quarter to get a pulse. It’s not rocket science. There are only a few engineers really good at what they do, most of them are quite average which is not enough at a startup. The amount of politics and toxic work culture and insidious behaviors are mind boggling. Either the management is completely unaware (unlikely) or are just not bold enough to act. If you are a really good engineer, do yourself a favor and don’t join Nikola. It’s extremely poorly run and lots of inflated titles for people who are not good enough which will really demotivate you. Find other companies that cultivate a good culture and one that rewards the right mindset and skills because this one does not.