Tesla Autopilot Worker Horrified by What Job Actually Entails

"I thought it would be a great opportunity for my career, but now I view it as this dystopian company."

Watching the Watchers

One of Tesla's unfortunate Autopilot workers learned the hard way that the problematic assisted driving feature comes with a hefty human toll.

In an interview with Business Insider, the employee — who was not named to protect their privacy and employment — suggested that surveillance can be daunting at the Buffalo, New York facility where they work.

As BI previously reported, Autopilot workers only make about $20 per hour to sift through hours of footage from Teslas' nine cameras to help train the assisted driving technology. Beyond the strangeness of seeing intimate cabin footage and the gruesome aftermath of accidents, employees like the one who dictated this latest essay are themselves constantly monitored.

Workers are, as this employee and others who spoke to BI noted, required to watch between five and six hours of footage per day, and are given one 15 minute minute break and another 30-minute break for lunch. Tesla tracks their productivity with an in-house monitoring system known as "Flide Time," which records keystrokes and clicks within the company's video software — and sends automated alerts to supervisors if workers aren't grinding hard enough.

"To properly label some of the clips you have to use outside resources," the employee said. "So you'll have to go out of the labeling system to review traffic laws or Tesla's labeling policies, but anytime you're not clicking around in the software program, it tracks you as if you aren't working and it basically sets off an alarm to your superiors."

Flide or Die

As BI previously reported, workers who don't "hit Flide Time," even just by a few minutes, almost immediately end up in disciplinary meetings and get points against their records. If they get three of these points within a six-month time period, they can be fired.

The employee in this interview said that they'd been pulled into meetings for not clicking around in Flide Time for a mere 15 minutes.

"You could basically get fired for spending too long in the bathroom," they said. "There's definitely a feeling that we're just worker ants."

Between the mental "fog" that accumulates when looking at hours and hours of driver footage and knowing that they're constantly being monitored not only by Flide Time but by cameras around the office as well, this Autopilot worker said they've now all but lost faith in Tesla.

"I thought it would be a great opportunity for my career," they said, "but now I view it as this dystopian company."

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