SpaceX reviews

~Alot of managers /people in leadership positions have no clue of the technical challenges they ask their team or others to solve. So schedules are so ridiculously short, when they aren't met the managers typically just blame the team and the team gets traded/pushed out. ~Knowledge sharing was stopping amongst team members because managers would frequently have one or two people "help" with a part of the project , then suddenly have them take over and said RE or ME would either get pushed out or quit. The more I stayed with the company the more toxic the environment became. I think mostly due to the managers, many became scared of sharing any nugget of knowledge for fear they'd get replaced with someone else. ~Many , including myself would pull numerous all nighters / work 80 hr weeks to get the work done. (And not get paid anymore nor noticed) One engineer would be doing the job of 5 people. Because of the high turnover, SO much time and energy is wasted, they are constantly reinventing the wheel since the team is never the same from start to end of a project. ~There is NO work/life balance , there are no programs/help to continue an education (what time?), pay is the lowest of any Aerospace company, and in general the company takes great, smart engineers, tells them of the dream to go to Mars/save humanity, then churns everything they have out of them, and throws them away. ~They treat their people like crap, it's just hard to tell while you're working there with the denial claims you tell yourself of "we're building something great" and "I have to work x hrs before I can take it easy and finish this milestone."

The purity of "meritocracy and mission" pretty much stops at Elon and Gwynne. Right below them is a litany of , directors, managers, and leads, that constantly are in political battles. Coming from big aerospace this is normal, but SpaceX is supposed to not be big aerospace, so the trend into middle management kingdoms is disappointing. As an engineer actual advice from my manager was spend more time on weekly update emails and confluence pages because they need it advertise work to other engineering leads and managers. As an engineer it seems as though if you're not promoting yourself or very actively networking within the company you'll be passed by on projects and promotions. Again this is normal of bigger engineering companies but SpaceX constantly advertises itself externally and internally as a "meritocracy" that focuses on results. To illustrate this SpaceX now has 3 to 4 layers of management between Gwynne and the individual engineer. If you need to collaborate from someone in avionics or in the internal ERP team without the buyoff of 2 leads, 2 managers, and maybe a director, good luck. Another way to put this is, if you need to get one day of technical work done expect at least half a day of meetings minimum to "align and set expectations" At this point if you're looking to succeed in the engineering industry more based on your ability to change reality and less based on your ability to sell people on the "great work you did", I would suggest applying to real startups like Relativity Aerospace or RocketLab, where the team is small enough that you don't have to spend 5 hours a day going to meeting and another 2 hours making internal billboards telling people how cool your work is. SpaceX unfortunately is becoming very much like the larger companies it itself is upending. Not necessarily a bad thing but adjust your expectations before taking a role here.