At SpaceX, employees are stolen from in the form of wage theft constantly.
- Your below-industry salary is based on a 40 hour work week. Don't worry, you'll work 60-100 hours consistently, and wont be paid for the additional time worked.
- Your boss (or their boss) will tell you to work weekends. You will. And won't be paid for those either.
- Stock vests every 6 months after your first year. So when layoffs happen 3 months into a vesting period, you'll have worked the last 3 months for 66% pay. No other tech company does this.
Managers consistently fire their subordinates to take heat off of themselves for their own poor decision making. In my two years at SpaceX, I saw this happen 5 different times.
Also fair warning, they do mass layoffs on average every 18 months.
Don't expect to be promoted. If you're coming in as a Level 1, you can get promoted to Level 2 pretty easily. Beyond that, the most common way to get bumped up to Senior (or anything else) is to threaten to quit.
You'll frequently hear about coworkers who go home and cry from stress. You'll also meet plenty of people who persistently feel like they could be fired at any moment. It's a very toxic culture.
If you speak up about management's poor behavior - as five employees did in 2022 in an open letter - they'll fire you and then send out a mass email defaming you to the whole company. When a flight attendant complained about inappropriate behavior from Elon in 2022... same deal, mass email to the whole company defaming her.
Bonus Detail: Elon will act like a psycho, sending out emails asking employees to buy Twitter subscriptions and submit them as a business expense. He really is a character isn't he?
