Can't see the company success against it's AV rivals - Anonymous employee Motional Employee Review

2.0
Mar 19, 2022
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Good 401K benefits. I was lucky to have a good manager.

Cons

Senior leadership and up is a chaos. CTO Laura Major doesn't have any technical expertise on mass production AV development and have very little experience leading up a hundreds people R&D team. The only thing she can do is keep hiring new VPs and oust veterans. Oh, sorry, she's good at writing books. Her kids education book "What to expect when you're expecting robots" might be interesting to you. Team leaders busy filling holes for OKRs in order for the senior leadership to report good things to Hyundai. Nothing is done to achieve the long term plan while created so much short term holes for the team to patch. Toady people most of the time got promoted while honest people got neglected. If anything might cause Hyundai unhappy, people were forced to work overtime on short term solution to cover things up or just simply not to talk about it until leadership find a good excuse. The company's core value of "Win together, Take ownership, Safety As Our Bedrock" is a joke. The engineering team doesn't have any centripetal force to win together. With safety engineering team being reorged a million times after Motional's short 2-year-life, it reflects senior leadership's blindness, no clue on safety. I feel very bad for safety engineering. It's impossible to define safety cases without even having a good enough technology to run on the road. Not even from previous generations of platform. Overall it's a place I would recommend good engineers to stay away from and suggest existing employees to seek better opportunities if the company's technical progress stay halted as the past 2 years.

Explore other reviews about Motional

5.0
May 25, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

State of the art technology

Cons

Changes in leadership and org structure

4.0
Jul 4, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Excellent place to learn and grow a career. In software, especially cloud and data products, very kind and collaborative culture of people who work hard to learn and grow. Very good benefits package. Lots of room to have autonomy and to be a builder and a maintainer. Leadership team requires that promotion cases demonstrate real business impact, which makes it a good environment to learn how to be impactful.

Cons

Significant portion of company located in Singapore can be awkward for a few select roles. The company is past the funnest startup phases and needs to be aligned with frugal, fiscally conservative safety-first culture of South Korean Hyundai (parent company). Equity package looks inflated on paper by about 3-4x (the stock options are little more than a tax complication). Lots of red tape. Company moves slow. Cross-functional nature of domain-scoped teams requires program management and a bit of bureaucracy to get many things done. Leadership leverages the glass ceiling effect very effectively, which can have the unfortunate effect of orienting engineers to business problems instead of engineering.

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