Seems like a great place to work until the Kool Aid wears off.
Pros
You will meet some people here that are genuinely good individuals and ultimately want what is best for everyone. Generally pretty flexible work schedule. Decent introduction into the solar field. Helping people that genuinely seem to benefit from going solar can be very rewarding. Unfortunately, the bad experiences seem to outweigh the positive experiences with many customers now.
Cons
First and foremost, regardless of whatever fancy names or terms they may decide to list their jobs under (e.g. Field Energy Specialist), this is nothing more than a sales position under the surface. The opportunities to advance anywhere else beyond a sales position are very few and far between at this point. The company is constantly changing, so if you are looking for a fairly predictable job that you can make a long-term career out of I would strongly advise that you look elsewhere. The term "solar coaster" is often used by both coworkers and managers alike. While it may depend on the market, most states with the exception of California, are extremely volatile. For this reason, the company constantly seems to be at odds with state utility companies and entangled in various lawsuits and mudslinging campaigns. A lot of this is not necessarily fair to blame on SolarCity, however, the management does not tend to do a good job communicating why the company is dealing with certain situations. The leadership needs to be much more proactive and cooperative instead of trying to play the victim card and act like things are simply out of their control. The overall culture has changed significantly from when I first started just a few months ago. Managers seem to come and go every couple of months and the company now pushes for quantity over quality when it comes to generating potential customer leads. Regardless of how hard one may work, you are only as good as the number of opportunities that you generate any given month. If you are stuck in a Home Depot or god forbid, a Best Buy that tends to have lower traffic, you are left to fight an even steeper uphill battle. Management continues to ask more and more out of you while giving you less tools to do the job or achieve the numbers that they are asking for. If you are a top producer, then expect management to continue to ride you as long and hard as they can until you are completely tapped out. Alternatively, if you tend to be on the lower end of generating opps each month, management will threaten you with the dreaded Performance Review Plan (PIP) in an attempt to either motivate you to do better or ultimately get you to quit. They have a skewed store assignment structure. The best performers will generally be placed in the top producing stores in the region thus allowing them to maintain their positions as top producers every month. While those that may have had a bad month are banished to stores with slower traffic or those with less interest from customers and are ultimately left to try to scratch and claw their way to meet their company required quota every month. Did you have a great month? Great, your reward is that you get to keep your job and do it all over again the next month. Needless to say, the job can get VERY monotonous and downright frustrating at times. A lot of the directions that the company is headed may be a direct result of the company feeling increasing pressure to start showing a profit for the shareholders. Unfortunately, a lot of the poor decisions that are being made at the upper levels of corporate leadership ultimately roll downhill and in turn affect the people that are on the front lines and make the least money the hardest. SolarCity is by no means a bad company. In fact, their mission is indeed very noble and I still strongly feel that is the right thing to do. However, some of the recent decisions that have been made by the companies leadership make it much harder to believe that you are doing the right thing each and every day. A typical day as a Field Energy Specialist consists of standing in a Home Depot or Best Buy (occasionally some outside events as well), location for 8 hours and talking to as many passersby as possible and trying to convince them to sign up for an appointment to have a Field Energy Consultant (FEC), come to their home. Whether going solar is ultimately the right decision for them is not what management wants you to worry about. You are there to generate as many appointments as possible and thats it. The sooner that you come to terms with this fact, the better off and more successful you will likely be. If you do not like standing on your feet for prolonged periods of time or overcoming a variety of objectives, this is not the job for you. Overall, the company seemed to have their heads in the right place, but over the course of the last year or so has really gotten away from a lot of the qualities that made them so great. They are very good at selling the company and what a career with SolarCity may be like with a lot of the flashier aspects such as, Elon Musk, Tesla, environmentalism, uncapped commissions and earning potential etc.but once the layers are peeled back the FES and FEC positions are simply glorified sales jobs. Whether the product and the inherit good that it does for the planet is enough for you to overlook a lot of the companies current shortcomings is something you will have to ask yourself before applying.
