[Pedestrian]

Elon Musk Has an Awkward Problem at Tesla: Employee Parking
With more employees competing for limited spaces, cars are often jammed diagonally in spots, propped up on curbs or left on gravelly medians; ‘you’re getting your tires slashed’
By Tim Higgins
April 11, 2017 11:57 a.m. ET

. . . In Silicon Valley, parking is a classic barometer of booms and busts. Desolate lots at sprawling office complexes symbolized the dot-com implosion in 2000. Today, shuttle buses from Tesla, Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Facebook Inc. rumble across San Francisco and down Highway 101 to relieve congestion at ever-expanding corporate campuses. Yahoo Inc.’s empty parking spaces in recent years were said to illustrate its troubled times.

Tesla’s parking hell reflects a hiring binge that has expanded its head count by about 75% over the past two years to more than 17,000, not including employees of SolarCity Corp., which it acquired late last year. Its market value has soared to about the same level as the largest U.S. auto maker, General Motors Co . . . .

The chaos has forced employees to come up with clever workarounds, including secret deals at the factory to share spots with workers on opposite shifts. “Employees would enter into exclusive relationships, and payment would be made in the form of cash or a barter deal,” such as cigarettes or help rebuilding a car on the weekend, said Marissa Peretz, who spent five years as a recruiter for the auto maker until 2015, when she left to cofound her own headhunting firm.

Some workers arrive early to find spaces, and then go back to sleep in their cars until work begins, employees said. Others idle in their cars waiting for co-workers to leave, so they can pounce when spaces come open . . .

Getting out of the parking lot is a mess, too. Double-parked cars often box others in, causing employees to blow a gasket. The Instagram account captured a photo of a note left on a windshield that read, with some pointed expletives: “Next time you block 100+ people from getting out of the parking lot you’re getting your tires slashed”—signed, “Everyone” . . . .

https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-mu...ing-1491926275

Apple is clearly booming. "Ha-ha".