- There is a HUGE Disconnect between local team leads, and middle to upper management leading to pursuit of projects or tasks with unexpected high priority. Oftentimes a project would be mentioned with no emphasis on due dates, or minimum requirements, and then suddenly a few weeks/months after discussion, said project must be completed ASAP. Additionally, feedback would be provided from the teams doing the project that would often get ignored, leading to continuing work on projects that were a waste of company time and money, and productive employee time.
- The company has a serious departmental fragmentation. My team was frequently called upon to fix issues outside our scope, and many teams did not know what our responsibilities were the entire time I was there. Returning to new Projects in my previous issue: The demand to complete projects would often come from other teams and their managers that were not on my team, or even under the same department I was in.
-Tribal Knowledge is a massive issue, and documentation available is frequently out of date. Again, returning to project issues: Oftentimes Projects were demanded to be completed in Slack, or verbally over Zoom without providing a ticket or documentation on requirements. High demand to get issues fixed ASAP lead to many hot-fixes whipped up to close an issue on Help-desk rather than give my team time to work on a true permanent solution. These hot-fixes were also seldom documented and many series of Trucks, which should be the same all had oft times wildly different configurations between them because they needed to be back on the road for testing/hauls ASAP.
- Safety seems to be an afterthought, The sudden urgency of many projects mean that they are done often at the expense of making sure things are done safely and solutions are thoroughly tested. The things I worked on were fortunately low risk and should failure in scope occur, it would prevent startup of the computer systems and services of the autonomous system. However, there are other departments responsible for higher risk technologies. I am aware of one major incident that could’ve been prevented had management taken notice given by another employee seriously. I was recently made aware of the legal case Lindland V. TuSimple, and this seems to reinforce that this issue has been persistent since before I began working at TuSimple.
-Turnover was a huge issue exacerbating the other issues mentioned, and often caused employee departures as well. Turnover caused much of the needed knowledge of the product to simply walk out the door. Turnover made internal opportunities for promotion or departmental change over near impossible. My team lost 3/5ths of its staff by March of 2022, and we were actively seeking other, very smart and qualified people within the company to come over to our team. These requests were met with radio silence at best, from the team leads of those looking to join our team, or management of my team at different levels.
- Positive discrimination toward a certain demographic. I will not elaborate much more than this, but after a few days on site it becomes apparent who this demographic is.
