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Anybody ever interviewed at SpaceX before?

19 points by bhollan ↗ HN
I feel 100% qualified to do the job I'm interviewing for this week, but I'm mostly just looking for any tips on how to study for a non-coding interview w/ them. Any horror stories? I've checked Glassdoor (and googling) and coming up with mostly small odds/ends here and there. Any tips appreciated!

38 comments

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b20000
recruiter called and offered crazy low base salary

i refused to do coding interviews i have 20+ years of experience i offered to share my code or work on a little project offered contracting

she said but we send people into space here

a job is a job i can’t pay my lanlord with space dust

hulitu
> recruiter called and offered crazy low base salary

> she said but we send people into space here

This feeling is everywhere now. "But we send people on the roads here". "But we send people on the bottom of the ocean here". We are Agile and only see the quality manager when we jave an escalation meeting with the customer.

rurban
sorry, but space must pay more, because the system must be 100% bugfree, and cannot be updated easily. on the bottom of the sea or on roads you still get live-updates, or at least car callbacks.

you also have severe space and time restrictions, more than in a car or surgical robot.

no agile for sure. there's not much room for agility or changing requirements in space.

comprev
The highest pressure jobs are at the bottom of the sea
thorin
Usually anything cool pays less: Movies, Music, Video Games etc and space is in that category for some. Also you don't work there unless you really want to.
wanderingmoose
My first job was at Industrial Light and Magic during the first star wars prequels and paid $11/hr, with OT after 8 hours, so about $32k/yr. If you didn't like it, others were lined up around the block.

I wouldn't do that now, but at the time it was like getting paid to attend a university that was waaaay more interesting than my actual university. The company was still very bohemian and you had access to the people that wrote the book on digital and practical effects.

There can be huge value, especially for junior engineers in having certain companies on your resume. ILM opened up every single door of every VFX or animation house. I'm sure spaceX would have similar benefits.

You just need to make sure the benefit is worth your time.

FreshStart
But you can get the same bugfree system from a process and 3 subengineers.

Plus you can expand the thiefdom management cake.. And that is real growth..

badpun
I don't think there's a way to communicate with vehicles at the bottom of the sea. Seawater isolates EM signals perfectly. It's actually much easier to do live updates of vehicles in space.
b20000
but it pays less

because people are ok with being underpaid in return for being able to say they work on space shuttles

we will all be fucked until we all learn to negotiate

jesterson
> she said but we send people into space here

All big companies do(did?) this - putting low salary and saying but "this is Facebook!" (real story), preying on young gullible people who think Facebook, Google or any big fish is anything worthy to be a part of.

ETH_start
Space is different in being an emerging sector where many of the potential business models are not yet viable, and which holds the promise of unlocking massive amounts of resources for humanity.

The FAANG companies are also different in that they already generate massive revenues, so can't credibly claim they can't afford to pay good salaries.

vbh21
+1. My interview experience at one of the gang companies a long time ago was pretty bad. I got grilled for several hours, and then - after clearing all their rounds, was offered a pretty menial base pay. They seemed full of themselves :(

I’ve heard from plenty of experienced people how some of these companies, especially googlee - milk you for all you’ve got while pretending to be caring and offering you competitive base pay.

SilverBirch
That's just a question of stock vs salary though. If the argument is "oh this is an emerging sector we haven't figured out the business model yet" the answer is "Ok, well then I want to share in the upside".
metabro
Senior sw make a base salary of 165k and principal at 216k. Do you. Consider these low?

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/spacex/salaries/software-en...

thewildginger
For something as specialized as aerospace engineering software? Definitely yes.
badpun
Plenty of difficult, ultraspecialized jobs don't pay much, because they're in industries with low margins.
speedgoose
Seems to be supply and demand thing. It’s easier to attract people to work in the space industry, or the video game industry, than in the ads industry or the data driven PowerPoint slides for the management industry.
nagyf
You can get higher salary with writing REST apis in Ruby. And fully remote
VirusNewbie
That is quite low. Senior level at most FAANGs will pay quite a bit more than that in salary and the RSUs will be more liquid.
b20000
a decent quality house in a te ch metro is 1.5-2 million

so you are looking at 14k per month in payments

ttymck
Aren't they mostly in Los Angeles? Yes that's low, and it's especially low for writing spaceship software.
aborsy
No experience, but the company’s hiring practices seem a scam to some extent. They pay little, usually fooling inexperienced people, like, as the commenter above said, that they are sending people to space, and stuff like that. Funny, you over work too.
deepgrey
I interviewed with them a bit over a decade ago for an engineering position after I got my master’s degree. The interviewer straight up asked me if I was okay working something like 60 hour weeks. I said nope right then.
thorin
At least he came out with it. Although if he said 60 he probably meant even more. In the UK or Europe it would probably have been illegal to mention this. I wish someone would have just come out and said this at a startup I worked at.
SilverBirch
Under EU law it is illegal to work more than 48 hours a week.... unless you opt-out. So everyone just opts-out.
thorin
I was forced to opt out in my last few jobs. It's kind of weird.
askafriend
They're currently raising at a $150B valuation so you would have been retired and on a Yacht by now (and yes they do tender offers, so your equity wouldn't be illiquid).
deepgrey
Pfft. My health is more important than money.
askafriend
60 hrs a week and you're already posturing about health?

I mean you can do whatever you want - but for most of history people have been working far more than that.

60hrs a week is not bad, especially if the work is interesting and you get to work with talented people. It's not like you would have had to work there for the rest of your life.

Just a couple years there would have meant never needing to work ever again. Sounds healthy to me!

2rsf
> for most of history people have been working far more than that.

Are you sure? can you support the "most" part?

deepgrey
1. If they say 60 up front, it’s likely much more than that.

2. I don’t do good work when I’m tired.

3. I have some health issues that make managing 40 hours difficult sometimes, so I’m not “posturing.”

Also, I’m pretty sure stock options didn’t vest until like four years or something. IIRC, Musk’s companies were well known for chewing up young engineers and spitting them out. Their modus operandi seemed to be taking advantage of young idealistic graduates who would work themselves to death for some “cause” (and not enough compensation).

askafriend
All of that is fair. Sorry to hear about your health issues - that's totally understandable.

Just wanted to push back a little against your initial snark :)

sethgoodluck
One of my best friends worked there for several years. Ignore the condescending and unrooted drivel in most of the comments. He loved it. But make no bones about it, you work your butt off like there isn't a tomorrow because the ethos is that there may not be if you don't.

If you're down for hard grueling work but doing so with a bunch of brilliant people and care deeply about the mission it can be an incredible opportunity and open many doors. If you're wanting to be chill and have "balance" it isn't a place for that. They have some of the best tech on earth and are among the most innovative companies in history. They work for it though. My buddy rolled out after getting married and having a kid. He has no regrets.

ActorNightly
>If you're down for hard grueling work but doing so with a bunch of brilliant people and care deeply about the mission it can be an incredible opportunity and open many doors. If you're wanting to be chill and have "balance" it isn't a place for that. They have some of the best tech on earth and are among the most innovative companies in history. They work for it though.

Not quite.

https://twitter.com/atomicthumbs/status/1032939617404645376?...

There are definitely some smart people, and things move fast, but there are 2 sides to the company I had friends that worked for Space X and Tesla, and I have worked for a UAV companies, and its the same story over and over again. My CEO straight up told us "your reward for working hard is that you get to continue working".

Within the company, there exists a clique of upper level managers/engineers and some lower level engineers, where the talent lies. If you are part of this clique, you love it, as you get a good amount of input on how your work goes, what areas you wan to take on, and it feels like you are doing cool shit with friends where you can easily work 60 hour weeks because you are having fun. And if you do quit, you always have connections and stay in touch and are able to find work .

If you are not part of this clique, you work on stuff you are told, have to put in extra hours to get shit to work because of barriers in the way, you have no say in any direction, and you eventually get burnt out.

The thing is, to join that clique, you have to be hired based on reworking through someone in the clique who can vouch for you, or spend a shitload of time in a company suffering through the burn out to get into an established position when other clique members quit (and hope that they don't hire someone external to fill the role rather than giving it to you).

lowbloodsugar
When I was a "kid" I worked 70 hour weeks making video games. It was a blast. If I was young again, I'd go work for pennies at SpaceX. It would be a similarly stupid decision, but I don't make good life decisions.