> To conform to U.S. Government space technology export regulations, including the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) you must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident of the U.S., protected individual as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3), or eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State. Learn more about the ITAR here.
If not for this, I would have applied years ago. Your company is changing the world and I just wish I could be part of it.
I sometimes wonder what "or eligible to obtain the required authorizations" means. Does that just mean that SpaceX has to sponsor the clearance process for you?
I remember reading another thread where they were talking about one or two non-US people working there, it would be nice if they elaborated more on what the process is for foreigners and maybe had some profiles of non-US people in their employee gallery. Even confirmation from a SpaceX person here that they do have people like that would be nice :)
> I sometimes wonder what "or eligible to obtain the required authorizations"
For stuff that goes beyond just being a US Citizen or Permanent Resident with no criminal record:
If they want you to do an SF-86 with the US OPM for a Secret or better clearance, it really means "if you even THINK you have something negative in your personal background, don't waste our time or yours in applying"
(reference: I'm one of the peoples whose full set of personal data was stolen in the OPM data breach)
Not really in any way SpaceX specific, but this is something you will commonly see if applying with any large defense contractor/US-based aerospace industry firm.
Please don’t spread this sort of FUD. I’ve had cleared colleagues who had nuanced opinions on which pot or acid to use, or who were draft dodgers from their home countries, or who were flamingly out with any kink you could care to name.
They care about blackmail material, oaths to other governments, felonies, and not a lot else.
Not my experience at all - prior clearances and NDAs preclude me from going into detail, but I personally saw a number of people who wasted a lot of time going through the process and getting denied for things in the same category as the first part of your statement.
It's true that almost any randomly chosen member of the DoD can get a regular 'secret' clearance for things that aren't especially super sensitive (I've met some very immature 20 year olds who only had Secret probably by virtue of the fact they were too young to have made any major mistakes in their life yet), but when you go beyond that, the requirements are greater.
Re: being flamingly out and kinky, the key part there is out. This isn't the 1950s were getting blackmailed over being gay is a super high risk to somebody if they're already voluntarily flamingly out.
>Must be willing to work extended hours and weekends
I'm not completely sure that a web developer doing typical frontend work would consider "being in the same company as people building rockets" to be exciting enough to justify the extended hours and weekends thing. For a mechanical engineer getting to practice the pinnacle of mechanical engineering? Yeah, I get it. For react work? Maybe not so much.
There’s not many greater missions out there than helping pioneer human space exploration. Realistically whatever your role, it’ll be incredibly small - SpaceX has thousands of employees. But however small, it’s moving the needle forward.
If you’re at the point in your life where you can make major sacrifices to a greater cause I’d say this is a fantastic opportunity.
Disclaimer: I’ve have no affiliation to SpaceX, I just believe in their mission.
For a mechanical engineer, working at SpaceX is not making a major sacrifice. You're earning a serious pedigree from a place that is on the cutting edge of your field. If you're a frontend developer, you're going to be paying the cost and not collecting the benefit. It would be nice to hire a React dev from spacex, but we all know they'd be the same as a react dev from any other startup. That is not true for people in engineering career paths. A SpaceX line on their resume will help them for the rest of their career.
I've said this a few times in other comment threads on HN, but be careful with this mentality. Any hiring manager who sees you as a person who always "watches the clock" downgrades you to someone unreliable for the team, and probably added to a list of "first people to cut" when the opportunity or need arises.
If you are the only person in the world with your skillset, you can maybe get away with this. But "web developer doing frontend work" is one of the more replaceable jobs out there, and it's only getting more competitive.
Don't underestimate the hunger of others in the marketplace. Just because you have a comfortable setup now doesn't mean this will always continue.
I assume you're talking about staying a little late during an emergency, balanced out by leaving a little early when nothing important is going on. SpaceX is talking about 80 hours a week baseline. I understand your platitudes about not being a clock watcher, but if you go to work for spacex expecting to merely not watch the clock, you will find yourself unpleasantly surprised. If we're talking about the average hiring manager, the average hiring manager could not handle SpaceX hours.
Damn. ITAR requirements? Surely with Starlink expanding globally (and focused on functioning in space, rather than the "easily-converted-to-ICBM's" that get it there) there's potential for hiring a more global workforce.
Hit me up when EU nationals can apply for the more interesting positions.
It sounds like you're passionate about your work and that's an important quality. As gorgoiler points out, "Making a difference in the world is what counts."
Same here. Understand they need to somehow weed through their applications. Experienced engineers are costly to assess and having a cheap test to remove the obvious negatives helps them at the cost of a few false ones. :-(
I'm also not a US citizen, so that's another cheap test I can't pass.
> I'm also not a US citizen, so that's another cheap test I can't pass.
Unlike other "cheap tests", that one is imposed by US government regulations, not SpaceX's own decisions.
I imagine SpaceX would be quite happy if ITAR was loosened, but I doubt that will happen.
I honestly can't see why ITAR applies to citizens of friendly countries such as Canada or the UK. The point of ITAR is to stop unfriendly countries like China, Russia, Iran or North Korea getting access to technologies with sensitive military applications. The US trusts its closest allies in so many other ways (e.g. UKUSA "Five Eyes" intelligence sharing agreement, the 1958 Mutual Defence Agreement under which the UK and US share nuclear weapon design information), why not in this?
A country is friendly until it isn't. I understand it's not a requirement imposed by SpaceX, but it also prevents them from getting a lot of applications they wouldn't be able to turn into hires.
Read the details; it wasn’t free exchange of information. It was basically a way for the US to allow sales of some nuclear plants and material, and sharing of design work only when it overlapped significantly with what the UK already did.
> The Americans disclosed the details of nine of their nuclear weapon designs: the Mark 7, Mark 15/39, Mark 19, Mark 25, Mark 27, Mark 28, Mark 31, Mark 33 and Mark 34. In return, the British provided the details of seven of theirs, including Green Grass; Pennant, the boosted device which had been detonated in the Grapple Z test on 22 August; Flagpole, the two-stage device scheduled for 2 September; Burgee, scheduled for 23 September; and the three-stage Halliard 3. The Americans were impressed with the British designs, particularly with Halliard 1, the heavier version of Halliard 3. Cook therefore changed the Grapple Z programme to fire Halliard 1 instead of Halliard 3.[85] Macmillan noted in his diary, with satisfaction that:
>> in some respects we are as far, and even further, advanced in the art than our American friends. They thought interchange of information would be all give. They are keen that we should complete our series, especially the last megaton, the character of which is novel and of deep interest to them.
> An early benefit of the agreement was to allow the UK to "Anglicise" the W28 nuclear warhead as the Red Snow warhead for the Blue Steel missile.[87] The British designers were impressed by the W28, which was not only lighter than the British Green Grass warhead used in Yellow Sun, but remarkably more economical in its use of expensive fissile material.
Wikipedia doesn’t appear to support your version of events. (Of course, Wikipedia is sometimes wrong; but if you think it is wrong, which of the above claims it makes is wrong specifically?)
It seems rather silly to me to worry about the knowledge of a few UK citizen SpaceX engineers, in the event of a hypothetical US-UK breakup, considering how much information the US and the UK already share in the fields of nuclear weapons and SIGINT. Surely knowledge about the later two is a much bigger concern than the first? Yet, if they are willing to risk the later, why not risk the former as well?
Besides that, the risk of a US-UK breakup has always appeared to be low, and Brexit arguably makes it even less likely.
I would presume it depends on whom you're asking. E.g. Elon's stated multiple times that he believes requirements of degrees on many of Tesla's job postings to be "absurd"[0][1]
Having a degree or not is different from having a degree with a low or high GPA. Having a low GPA at a University is a worse signal for hard working person than having no University background.
> Why would a person with 20 years of experience want to work for a company with no work-life balance?
The initial comment by bfieidhbrjr already answered that very nicely: out of the desire to actually do something that is important re work. Important being subjective to the person in question obviously.
A lot of people already work meaningless jobs with no work-life balance and they would find it to be a substantial improvement to work somewhere with meaningful work even without a proper work-life balance.
I find it completely baffling that it's your dream to work for SpaceX but you're unwilling to relocate? I'm stuck in the bay area (which I absolutely despise) because of my job, but I get to write flight software for spacecraft so I deal with it.
0xffff2, you yourself just said, "I'm stuck in <location> because of <reason>." It can't be that baffling to think that h3rsko is also stuck (e.g. because of a family).
Yes, that's because I was using the word "stuck" metaphorically. I choose to be stuck because I actually find the benefits of being stuck to outweigh the costs. If I lost my job it probably wouldn't take me 24 hours to pack my shit and be gone. But as long as I'm here getting to do what I want to do I stay.
If you can't figure out how to move to a different state to pursue a dream, it's not much of a dream.
Hopefully tjtrapp can give you more details, but I have a friend who joined SpaceX as a software developer and they are fully remote if they want to be for the foreseeable future.
So, just like that Mercedes CLS I was talking about. It will keep itself in its lane and slow down for any speed limit that it detects. My point of that entire wall of text was that this detection of limits is unreliable, because in real life the signs are sometimes placed in such a way that the cameras detect them as applying for the road you are currently on while in reality they do not.
This response echoes my sentiment. I've been coding for 20+ years and have found that literally writing the code becomes a smaller and smaller portion of my day-to-day as my career moves forward. The solution design, guidance for less-experienced team members, pull-request reviews, solution design with customers/partners, etc. becomes a larger portion of my daily responsibilities.
It doesn't matter where you live or where the company is based... afaik, the determining factor is where the company stores data. In other words, if they have servers in the EU, they are bound by GDPR.
iirc the last time i used a switch was to create a static factory method to instantiate objects. the static class had a static method that took an enum as input. the return type was an abstract base class. the method switched off of the enum, new'd up the type - did some common initialization - and returned the new object to the caller. this approach keeps your "creation" logic in one place.
I disagree. The attacks are becoming more sophisticated and fool the most seasoned techies. Additionally, when I ask "Baby boomers" if they understand phishing, they oftentimes say yes but then have trouble explaining what it is or how it is executed.
Wanna work with us? Check out this role on my team - aerospace experience is not required: https://grnh.se/25a344122us
If that's not your flavor, we have others: https://www.spacex.com/careers/index.html?department=Softwar...