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  "link": "https://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-work-at-SpaceX/answer/ix_/Joel-White",
  "text": "Best place on the planet for bleeding edge R&D. At first I thought everyone was half-joking that working a year at SpaceX is like working 7 years anywhere else, but nope; they weren’t joking. Turn around average is about 1.5 years. During the interviews they ask if you’re willing to work 60 hour weeks minimum. Which is a lie. It’s more like 80–120 hour work weeks most of the time. But it’s fine because you’re typically having so much fun doing what you’re doing you hardly notice the time pass. There’s near free gourmet meals made by amazing chefs everyday, free drinks and snacks floating around everywhere; all to keep you undistracted and on the go. You work with some of the best minds in every field: metallurgists, engineers of every field from mechanical to electrical to software to IT to industrial engineering, top notch welders, I enjoyed even hanging out and learning from the metrologists. Everyone generally tries to make everyone’s job faster and easier, working smarter not harder mentality.\nPerhaps the biggest negative is the adaptation of tribal knowledge. There’s constantly refreshed efforts to document and develop standardized systems but the development cycles and projects move so quickly combined with high turn around it’s probably the single most difficult thing to manage at SpaceX. We’ll sometimes have years of data and documentation cobbled together across 3 or 6 different formats or software platforms constantly being re-patched together into whatever seems the most efficient at the time. There are unified data models for most of the engineering modeling, but it’s also constantly improving requiring non-stop learning curves.\nI hear others say it’s not for family oriented types but I’d disagree. I have several children and my wife loved that she was able to “see a little boys dream come true” knowing I’ve been a NASA and space science nerd all my life growing up around the JSC and MSFC. My daughter and I have had racing competitions running up the “Stairway to Heaven” upper stairs platform at McGregor. (The blue stairs on top.) Which is a lot harder than it looks.\n\nI love hearing my wife share with her friends how she’s touched the rockets that have launched and returned. Our last privilege working there was being able to touch all 3 boosters for the first Falcon Heavy test launch.\nMy grandfather was one of NASA’s top research scientists and engineers having been on every project from the Pioneer to the STS program before passing away in the late 90s. He taught me more than probably anyone in my life about all of the various sciences and technologies, hardware and software, easily being my greatest inspiration and mentor driving me into these fields. I like to say when I see him again in heaven I’ll be able to teach him a thing or two now; since SpaceX > NASA. What they’re doing there today is literally doing what the original NASA founders had always intended: making space commercially viable for humanity.\nThe only reason I left was because I decided to start a masters degree while still working there which quickly started burning my candle at both ends and in the middle. Both work and school performance started to suffer. My degree is almost finished and I wouldn’t mind asking to join the family there again in the future.",
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    "name": "Joel White",
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    "credential": "former R&D Video and Telecom Data Specialist at SpaceX (2015-2017)",
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