[rmdashrfroot]

Do you have any examples of this type of company? I'm a sophomore CS student looking to work in Aerospace, and this type of company, where the work is done in a self driven manner and where the work matters, that I'd love to work for.

[nogbit]

Academia has some of these qualities (and more). Depending on the school and or department you could be doing anything from basic full stack web dev on down to lower level comp sci work. Deliver good results and move around (big university) every now and then and your pay will go up pretty quick.

Just don't expect the big software firms to be knocking on your door if you need those bullets on your resume (unless you have a PHD).

[digler999]

make sure you have a github or some sort of portfolio of personal projects you've done. Write your own kerbal, or wind-tunnel simulator, drone autopilot, something that shows you are captivated by the field and took matters into your own hands to work with it.

Also, prepare to work in a formal-verification development environment. Some aerospace jobs are like this, which basically means code moves as slow as molasses. If it's flight control software, you may find yourself writing 20 pages of documentation/paperwork for every one page of code. (Think about it, if your code could destroy a $12 million jet engine, you should be pretty confident your code actually works, right ?). So research CMMI [1] and if that is a dealbreaker for you, make sure you avoid those kinds of jobs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_Maturity_Model_Inte...

[smcdow]

Look around in the EDA field.