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      "link": "https://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-work-at-SpaceX/answer/Josh-Boehm",
      "text": "SpaceX has become quite a large organization over the last few years, yet it still maintains a startup mentality and feel to it. Despite its size there's a fairly flat organizational structure. For example, I reported to the CIO, which was only a couple levels down from Elon.\nI actually started out as an intern, and converted to full-time after a year of continuously extending the 3 month program. Even when I was an intern though, I felt like a full part of the company. If you do get hired on full-time, you will need to be approved by Gwynne and Elon; they used to actually interview everyone but the company has gotten too large for that.\nWhen I, and many of my coworkers, first got an offer from SpaceX, they  paid to relocate us and set us up in some nice furnished corporate housing while we settled down and got to work.\nThe factory itself isn't in a great neighborhood; you need a lot of space to build rockets and that doesn't come cheap in LA. It's located in Hawthorne, in between Inglewood and Compton. The neighborhood has gotten safer and nicer since we moved in, but we've had a stray bullet knock out a window before. \n\n\n\nPhoto: Dragon, Octoweb, & Mission Control view from the Mezz. Note: we are not allowed to take and release photos of the factory, so I can only use what has been publicly released.\n\n\nThere are almost no private offices, as just about everyone has a cubicle, including Elon. You get pretty much full access to the factory, and can walk around and explore on your breaks. It's amazing to be able to see the process of building a rocket, basically from start to finish. They even have cameras set around the factory, so you can watch what's going on from your desk; I used to like watching what they're making in the titanium 3D printers, or what was on the 'octoweb' video feed.\nDepending on your department the culture can be quite different. My department was pretty flexible about where and when you work, just so long as you got your work done, where as other departments had 'time cops' and you have to clock in and out. \n Communication is very open, and even Elon is approachable if you have a good reason. Anyone in the company could email or talk to him. I had even gotten him a birthday gift one year of a 3D printed version of his head on an Iron Man action figure. Not only did Elon have a cameo in Iron Man 2 (see below), part of the movie was shot at SpaceX, and behind one of the elevator shafts (they're glass) there's a life size Iron Man statue signed by Robert Downey Jr.\n\n> \"Hammer's factory is really Elon Musk's SpaceX facility. The people walking in the background are actual employees even though filming there took place at night.\"  - IMDB\n\n\n\nPhoto: 'Iron Musk' Action Figure\n\n\nVideo: Elon Musk's Cameo in Iron Man 2\n\nWhile no one will be forcing you to, you'll end up working crazy long hours, just to keep up with your workload, and because you don't want to leave the place. A phrase I've heard thrown around SpaceX frequently is everyone is their own slave driver. I was frequently there late at night for my job, and I never really felt alone. The factory is always alive and cranking out rockets no matter what time of day or night you go there.\nPretty much all employees are involved in the hiring process. That is, just about everyone does phone calls and in person interviews to screen potential candidates for their department. Everyone would have to sign off for a hire to go through, so sometimes it could be difficult to get people through, but that's how we ended up with such high quality talent there.\nEven with as much as we've expanded recently, we've had headcount and ITAR limitations to worry about as well; everyone wears many hats/works many jobs at SpaceX. Our sister company Tesla, actually runs a fork of the ERP software I worked on there, but since they don't have International Traffic in Arms Regulations to worry about, they can outsource work and hire non-Americans, whereas we couldn't. My job was done by a whole team of people at Tesla.\nWe would work hard and play hard. It was not uncommon for me or other people I worked with to pull 12+ hour days, weekends, but honestly the time flew for me and it was never boring, because I always had interesting work on my plate. Around the office there's some fun stuff like free froyo and coffee, some arcade games, a masseuse (my favorite perk), a relaxation room, and more. Whenever there's a space themed movie coming out, we'll usually buy out all the tickets for a couple showings and send the whole company. I'm actually going to see the Martian with SpaceX on Friday (last week was my last week there, so I still got the free tickets). Oh and SpaceX parties are insane. Elon knows how to throw  company Christmas party! They're usually so big that they have rickshaws drive you around the party.\n\n\n\nPhoto: At the SpaceX Christmas party 2013, Elon is in the background\n\n\nThe job satisfaction and team camaraderie is like nowhere else. Every time there is a launch, everyone crowds around mission control and cheers it on. Getting your mission patch after a launch was always a very satisfying feeling. If there was ever a failure, you definitely felt it in the air, but it wouldn't stop any of us from working or demotivate us. The pride for the company is unbelievable. How do you spot a SpaceX employee?  They're covered head to toe in company swag, and keeps mentioning how they work for SpaceX. To be fair though, it is the only job I have really worked that has had a fan base. More often than you'd think people would come up to me off the street, at bars, at the airport or anywhere in public if I was wearing my badge or any SpaceX gear. If you're a fan of the company, I would encourage you to do the same. I always loved talking to people about my job. \n\n\n\nPhoto: Some of the mission patches I collected during my time at SpaceX. \n\nIf you're considering working for SpaceX, I would highly recommend pursuing it, as it's an incredibly rewarding experience. The only reason I left is that my post-quantum encrypted communications startup, Cyph, really started to pick up steam to the point where I could no longer afford not to dedicate my full attention to it — from supporting serious stuff like the coordination of smuggling humanitarian aid into Syria, to the initial rollout of an enterprise offering, to ultimately closing a recent $0.5m Seed funding round. \nIf you're interested in checking it out, we have a public beta available which we intend to always be free for regular non-commercial users, and we're currently offering both custom and off-the-shelf enterprise encrypted chat solutions to monetize.\nI still hope I can go back to SpaceX some day, as I do miss it (maybe if Cyph gets acquired down the line), and help continue the mission to get the human race to Mars.\nFeel free to ask questions. Depending on the content, I may or may not be allowed to answer it, however most things about the awesome company culture are pretty public.\n\n\nDisclaimer: I am a former SpaceX employee, speaking about my personal experience while working there. I am not speaking and can not speak on behalf SpaceX, for official inquiries about SpaceX go to the SpaceX Press Center.\nFor inquiries about Cyph, email press@cyph.com or visit our contact page.",
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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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      "text": "I've been an engineer with SpaceX for over five years now. I've seen and helped the company grow from less than 500 people in to the powerhouse it is now. I highly doubt that there is a cooler company in the world than SpaceX. Everything that's been said is certainly true. SpaceX really is awesome. What's been said is just one part of what it's like to work with Elon Musk so I'll discuss the side that you won't often hear.\nIf you want a family or hobbies or to see any other aspect of life other than the boundaries of your cubicle, SpaceX is not for you and Elon doesn't seem to give a damn.\nThis side of what it's like to work with Elon shows that no one likes working with Elon. You can always tell when someone's left an Elon meeting: they're defeated. These are some of the hardest working and brightest people in the world, mind you. And they are universally defeated. At least in engineering, who knows what HR and finance does.\nThe reason for this is that Elon's version of reality is highly skewed. It's much like Steve Jobs's \"reality distortion field\" except Elon isn't great at public speaking. If you believe that a task should take a year then Elon wants it done in a week. He won't hesitate to throw out six months of work because it's not pretty enough or it's not \"badass\" enough. But in so doing he doesn't change the schedule.\nOne of the most famous quotes that runs around the office is one from a company wide talk Elon gave a couple of years ago where he said \"Not enough of you are working on Saturdays.\" Of course reality kicks in and either junk product gets flown or something terrible happens. Ultimately the schedule slips--surprise surprise, fatigue is real.\nIt's understandable. Putting people on Mars is not a small task especially given the overwhelming political obstacles that face SpaceX's mission. Continuously being the underdog, fighting the ULA behemoth and the entrenched politicians that strangely want SpaceX to fail is only a small part of it. SpaceX certainly requires a hard mentality. But so often Elon's leadership is best compared to a master who berates and smacks his dog for not being able to read his mind.\nNothing you ever do will be good enough so you have to find your own value, not depending on praise to get you through your obviously insufficient 80 hour work weeks.\nIn order to continue working with Elon, you have to learn to ignore almost everything he says and you have to be prepared to be jabbed over and over. \"Just six more months and we'll go IPO!\" is among his most repeated lines though he stopped trying to sell that a couple years ago as people stopped believing it long ago.\nIt is a great company and I do love it. But it isn't the pie in the sky, everything's great idea that so many seem to think",
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      "text": "Well where do I start. This place has no life at all beyond work. Elon is a horrible human being the way he treats people.\n      Now if you a workaholic with nothing else to do with your free hours, all you think is mars mission and get a Self Esteem and Ego kick as you worked for a brand this place may work for you. \nNow there are few good managers and team ,few I mean few like 30 out of 100. Remaining are bootlickers. No benefits excessive work hours , Elon once personally came out as people were having dinner after work and said that you need to work for Atleast a few hours after dinner. Then the late free dinner closed down. \nTruth is always grey , the most excited will be only interns and new folks who are just in. \nIf you want a life , not being used  and abused please DO NOT JOIN THIS COMPANY.\n \nThis man is one narcissistic person he runs it for his own benefit and ego not humanity. Like I said truth is grey not black and white always. Do not believe me read glassdoor on Spacex. Marketing and commercials are good  Elon,learn to hire management who respect ground workers not yes ministers. \nWish spacex luck. Life is short to spend it slogging at this slave factory to get an EGO kick.\nRecommended my friend here for a manager post the interviewer was the worst Rascist you can meet. He was arrogant and kept interrupting my friend and was very rude to him. He was insecure for his job I guess. My friend was like good riddance. Too much value on brand name and value given by media.\n   Elon would surely mistreat and disrespect enough people in his company before he sends people to mars.",
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      "text": "There's free coffee, froyo, and an in-office masseuse. \nIt has its own restaurant (Elon refuses to let anyone call it a cafeteria) called the Lunch Pad. Get it? Haaa! Food is $3-5\nThere's cool furniture and artwork made from not-for-flight parts.\nSince a rocket is so similar to an ICBM, they are considered munitions according to International Traffic in Arms Regulations, and thus we can only hire and work with US citizens.\nAs an employee you can pretty much go to any part of the factory and get to watch the rockets being built from start to finish.\nA lot of internal project names are Star Trek references.\nBehind the elevator shafts is a wheel of cheese that was launched into space on a test flight, a Dragon panel, and life sized autographed statues of Iron Man and a Cylon by their respective casts.\n\n\n​\nPhoto: Items mentioned above, but in a different location.\n\nElon had a cameo role in Iron Man 2, and Hammer Industries is actually the SpaceX factory in Hawthorne. Not only that, but the characterization for Tony Stark in the Iron Man movies is based on him.\nHe was also in The Simpsons, Machete Kills, and an executive producer on Thank You For Smoking\nJust about everyone is in a cubicle, even Elon. Behind it there's two canvases depicting Mars as it is now and is it would look if it were terraformed. (See: It is said that near his cubicle, Elon Musk has two giant posters of Mars - a before, and after scenario, once he's colonized the planet. Does anyone have a photo?)\nElon didn't like the schools his kids were going to, so he created his own private school called \"Ad Astra\" (To the stars) which will frequently meet in unused SpaceX or Tesla meeting rooms. (See my answer to What do you know about the school of Elon Musk's children? How do they teach? Are there any assignments? Do the children really like the school?)\nThe company holiday usually has a giant ball pit for adults (xkcd: Grownups)\n\n\nPhoto: Giant ball pit at a SpaceX Party.\n\n\n\nPhoto: SpaceX parties get so big you need a map and rickshaw to drive you around.\n\nDuring launches, everyone gathers outside mission control and cheers it on. It's been progressively getting more and more packed for each launch. If you own the \"Launch Day\" SpaceX poster, I'm actually in that; I like to make my friends play Where's Waldo with it.\nYou're allowed to attend rocket launches in person. I am never at the cape, but last time there was a launch out of Vandenberg I saw it live and went skydiving afterwards.\nWhen we're in mission, you can look at dragon's camera feeds at the ISS from your desk or mission control.\nEvery now and then SpaceX will buy out all the tickets for the premiere of space-themed movies as a company outing. We did it with Gravity and just recently with The Martian.\nEven though my job had nothing to do with mission control, I got to do a launch simulation there which was a really cool experience.\nAs cool as the place is, you cannot take or share pictures of the factory or release anything that may be considered confidential unless it's been explicitly approved for release.\nAs a SpaceX employee, I occasionally worked with our sister company Tesla Motors as well, and was offered a private tour of the Tesla Design Lab, which is right next door to SpaceX HQ in Hawthorne. It's not nearly as big as the Tesla HQ, but is still incredibly cool. While I was there I even saw the James Bond submarine car that Elon is converting into working car with a tesla drivetrain. (Tesla's Elon Musk buys 007's sub to make it real)\n\n\n\nPhoto: Wet Nellie, a custom-built submarine, created for the 1977 James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me in the shape of a Lotus Esprit S1\n\nI was also privy to going to special Tesla events like the unveiling of the Model D. There was an open bar and the Jack Northrop airport was shut down so we could use the runway for a test track. Everyone got to 'test drive' the autopilot features.\nCelebrities will come through for private tours and doing interviews with Elon. I was at lunch one day and realized 2 tables away from me Elon was eating with Jennifer Aniston. I bumped into Joseph Gordon Levitt in the bathroom when he was there for filming Hit Record on TV. Will Smith, Morgan Freeman, and so many that I missed because I was at my desk working haha.\n\n\nDisclaimer: I am a former SpaceX employee, and even as a SpaceX employee would not be allowed to speak on behalf of the company. Everything I'm saying is public knowledge from tours and from my personal experience working there. My opinions do not necessarily reflect SpaceX's and nothing I said should be taken as an official statement from SpaceX, Elon, or Tesla Motors.",
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          "text": "It is said that near his cubicle, Elon Musk has two giant posters of Mars - a before, and after scenario, once he's colonized the planet. Does anyone have a photo?",
          "link": "https://www.quora.com/It-is-said-that-near-his-cubicle-Elon-Musk-has-two-giant-posters-of-Mars-a-before-and-after-scenario-once-hes-colonized-the-planet-Does-anyone-have-a-photo",
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          "text": "See my answer to What do you know about the school of Elon Musk's children? How do they teach? Are there any assignments? Do the children really like the school?",
          "link": "https://www.quora.com/What-do-you-know-about-the-school-of-Elon-Musks-children-How-do-they-teach-Are-there-any-assignments-Do-the-children-really-like-the-school/answer/Josh-Boehm",
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          "text": "Tesla's Elon Musk buys 007's sub to make it real",
          "link": "http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2013/10/17/elon-musk-tesla-james-bond-submarine/3004955/",
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      "text": "Elon Musk stated SpaceX hires the civilian equivalent of Special Forces people to the armed forces.\nSo if you have the civilian equivalent of that mental profile (AAA team) you will absolutely love it. They expect 110% from everybody. Not a place for slackers.\nBut if you aren’t part of the AAA team, you might just hate it.\nSome people are born for it. Some aren’t.\nThe right people that end up liking to work at SpaceX would probably hate working anywhere else. They’re 100% driven. So you need an environments that nurture that.",
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      "text": "For friends that I know who have worked at SpaceX, it can be an interesting experience that definitely depends on you. It is a faster paced than other big aerospace companies, from the sounds of it, and has a competitive environment with a lot of workaholics, from what I hear. People are smart and skilled, and so I can imagine the pressure is on to be good at what you do. \nThis company is really pushing the envelope, though, so I think the challenges would be quite worth it, especially with all you may be able to learn in the dynamic environment.\nNote, again, this is what I have heard through others who have worked there, I personally haven't worked for SpaceX.",
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      "text": "Yes you can! Elon made himself very approachable at SpaceX. His ‘office’ is an open cubicle just like everyone elses, and has frequently said anyone in the company can contact him if they believe there’s an issue with anything that could affect a mission.\nNot surprisingly though, he’s very busy, so you’d want to be sure it’s important enough to go to Elon for instead of someone else on your team. I’ve made some small talk with him on a few rare occasions when he wasn’t busy, but that’s a bit of an exception.\nYou’ll see him around the office though and occasionally eating in the Lunchpad (the SpaceX kitchen/restaurant). I was on the mezzanine eating lunch one day and noticed Elon was eating lunch with Jennifer Aniston right across from me, which caused a bit of a double-take reaction!\nHe remotes in sometimes though and splits his time between SpaceX and Tesla, so he frequently isn’t at his cube, but has always been reachable by internal company chat or email.",
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      "text": "It’s like underpayed engineering slave labor. As others have said 60+ hour weeks, average turnover is 1–3 years. So if you are a US citizen because they are all US citizens and want no home life for a couple of years go for it. Realize that the guy asking you if you want fries with that at McDonalds goes to see his girlfriend several times a week and you are doing 75 hours this week because the rocket blew up. You still get paid the same as a person with your salary who works only 40 hours a week at a better run company and has a house, girlfriend and a cool dog because at 60–80 hours a week you don’t have time for those things and realize that raises are usually terrible at SpaceX so be able to live off what they offer you. Don’t get that offer and think the annual raises will make it into a living wage for you. I know several people who SpaceX was surprised they’d turned down offers of 20–40% less then they were currently being paid knowing about all that unpaid overtime that was going to be expected every week. People talk about $2 worth of raises over the 4 years they were there, if you only get that much raise over 4 years at my company you are probably on my layoff list, at SpaceX you are doing good, but could you do a few more hours a week we really need it, going to save mankind by going to Mars. (Which it’s not but that’s a whole different thread)",
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      "text": "I recently went to a SpaceX recruiting session at my college. One of the presenters told a story about how Elon Musk hires employees. An ice cream bar had been opened in SpaceX HQ and they needed someone to man the post. The recruiters were informed that they should go down to the local ice cream shop, find the employee of the month, and hire that person away. That is how SpaceX staffs itself.\nSpaceX has no easy jobs and hires no mediocre workers. If you want to work at SpaceX or Tesla, be prepared to prove that you are the best person who can be hired. There are no exceptions.",
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      "text": "SpaceX employees measure their tenure in \"dog years.\" Inside the company, an engineer can design, build, and destroy more actual flight hardware in 12 months than others do in a decade.\nThe intensity of the SpaceX environment generally comes down to three main operational philosophies:\n- Cradle-to-Grave Ownership: At traditional aerospace companies, an engineer might spend three years running computer simulations on a single valve before passing the schematics to a separate manufacturing department. At SpaceX, engineers are given total ownership of their hardware. They design the part, source the materials, oversee its fabrication on the factory floor, and personally test it. If it fails, they are the ones responsible for fixing it. This condenses a massive amount of experiential learning into a very short window.\n- Rapid Iteration: Legacy aerospace operates on a philosophy of avoiding failure at all costs, resulting in years of paper studies and endless review boards. SpaceX employs an agile, \"hardware-rich\" approach. They build prototypes quickly, push them to the breaking point on test stands, analyze the failure data, and build a better version just weeks later. An engineer might cycle through a dozen design generations in a single year, achieving a pace of iteration that takes decades elsewhere.\n- Relentless Timelines: The company operates under aggressively ambitious deadlines set from the top down. To meet these targets, 60- to 80-hour workweeks are common, particularly leading up to a launch or a critical milestone. The workflow often resembles a continuous sprint rather than a marathon, requiring high levels of sustained focus.\nThis environment attracts highly driven individuals motivated by the overarching mission of space exploration. People willingly trade standard work-life balance for the rare opportunity to touch actual flight hardware and make historical contributions early in their careers. The resulting crucible produces rapid technological leaps, but it requires a level of stamina that makes a single calendar year feel like an entire career chapter.",
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      "link": "https://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-work-at-SpaceX/answer/Aaron-O-30",
      "text": "I went from Tesla to SpaceX, and the question I get most often is whether SpaceX is \"10x harder.\" It's not. That framing misunderstands both places.\n(For what its worth, I started my career interning at Tesla and wrote about how to land an internship eight years ago. I hope this post continues to inspire people to work at either company.)\nA lot of people are afraid to make the jump because they assume SpaceX will break them. The truth is more nuanced, and it has less to do with the company than with where you are in your own career. Over my five years at Tesla, and now at SpaceX, I learned a life skill that changes everything: boundaries. You learn to be more effective (and efficient) with your time. You learn when to cut a corner and when absolutely not to. You learn that the difficulty was never really about the company or the work you do — it was about whether you'd developed the judgment to manage yourself inside it.\nAnd here's something worth saying plainly, because the internet loves the opposite narrative: these companies are not trying to pay you as little as possible so they can extract as much as possible. They don't want you to burn out — burnout loses them the people they spent years training. Corporate revenue is simply the result of building something people genuinely want to buy, and that product is the result of passionate employees. The drive comes first. The revenue follows.\nSo what's it actually like? A few things I've found true at both places:\nPeople care deeply about the mission and the work. We nerd out about applying the engineering we learned in school. Designing something, prototyping it, watching it fail, iterating, rebuilding — that loop produces a feeling that's hard to describe to people who haven't lived it. At SpaceX, knowing the thing you're working on is literally leaving the planet adds a layer of awe on top of that. It's the same feeling you get walking into a cathedral, or standing at the pyramids of Giza, or the Great Wall — enormous things built by people reaching for something beyond themselves. And that capacity to care doesn't stay at work. It shows up in how people treat each other, too.\nEveryone is an extreme owner. We still take our lunch breaks. But when you're on, you're on — five to ten hours of continuous, focused work, unblocking your project, chasing down cross-functional teams, caring about your progress like your life depends on it. Because no one else is going to care about your project the way you do. They're all heads-down on their own. There's a real tribal-knowledge tradeoff here — a lot of context lives in one person's head — but tenures tend to run long, and there's nothing quite like watching something you built ride a rocket into space. The serotonin release is a feeling like no other.\nThe hours vary, and that's fine. Some people work past the standard day. Some work a clean 9-to-5. Some run the second or third shift into the night. SpaceX is productive nearly around the clock — building, solving, iterating, gathering data, improving. As I matured in my career, I stopped measuring my contribution in hours and started optimizing my presence — being on the factory floor solving a problem in person instead of waiting on a chat reply behind a screen. I wouldn't be scared off by the \"they work you to death\" stories. The company isn't an entity demanding more hours from you. It hires you to do your best work because your own curiosity is the thing driving the output.\nHonestly? After Tesla, I wanted to leave engineering entirely. When the SpaceX offer came, I agonized over it for weeks. I didn't take it for the money — I actually took a roughly 30% pay cut (and know a few more folks who did the same), walking away near the peak of my Tesla vesting. I took it because the mission is genuinely inspiring: to make humanity dream bigger, to make the next generation excited about what space holds. And the projects expanded on what I'd been doing at Tesla in ways I found irresistible.\nI see myself staying long-term. I think it matters that I didn't start here straight out of college — hungry, unbounded, and a prime candidate for burnout. Now I know how to run the marathon instead of sprinting it. And it's clearly possible: I work alongside people at every level with tenures of 6 to 15 years.\nThe real truth is that we're living in an extraordinary moment — rockets, AI, an entire generation of technology unfolding at once. Fifty years ago we launched our first rockets. Look at where we are now. Then try to imagine the next fifty.\nIf you’re interested in learning more, I also wrote about my SpaceX experience here.",
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