Delusion and Arrogance ruins a great opportunity
Pros
Great colleagues and friends work for Karma, most of the employees are genuinely great people. The opportunity to create beautiful products that, in theory, helps to promote a sustainable future is a great promise and something anyone would be excited to contribute to.
Cons
After a decade working in Automotive, I've never seen such disillusioned arrogance and condescension towards employees. I've witnessed plenty of unprofessionalism in the past, but nothing compares to the level of disrespect the management displays towards employees. Ethical concerns include racist ideology, and extreme condescension when communicating with employees. (examples include a propensity to hire Chinese for their work ethic, and comments towards employees of color for "not understanding because you're not American"). All basic problems stem from an unfounded superiority complex in which management runs their organization with complete disregard to individual opinions. I should have seen the red flags when during my interview, the director that was conducting the interview asked me one question, then proceeded to talk about himself for 30 minutes. This same director, after becoming my boss, then urged me to forget my professional past in order to start from a clean slate, learning from him. I later found out that most of the management and directors simply lack the experience and knowledge to properly function in their roles; instead they rely on a management style not unlike North Korea, reprimanding employees for having individual opinions. Their lack of experience would be fine if not for the unfounded arrogance that comes from not having a clue as to what one's job really entails. I'm also astounded at the amount of self admiration they display towards themselves- as if they're single handedly solving world hunger, disease, sustainable energy, and war at the same time, when in fact, they're assuming credit for work done by previous teams. It should be mentioned that those previous teams accepted and defaulted on $139 Million of taxpayer funded loans. Now the really sad part is that one of the suppliers that contributed to the bankruptcy and failure of Fisker (the previous company), now owns Karma Automotive, and put in place a lot of the management that led to Bankruptcy #1. I've personally witnessed the frustrations of many engineers at the decision making- putting a priority on timeframes rather than actually producing a relevant product. They've just relaunched an outdated 8 year old product, with outdated technology, and no relevance to the competition.
