[roedog]

The SoCal aerospace job market is hot right now. The driver is multiple large program starts at multiple contractors who are competing for people. This should make it possible for everyone to land on their feet. (I've reached out to my former colleagues who left to join Space X)

What's odd is why SpaceX is cutting staff with the new development underway on the larger rockets and the satellite business. I'm curious about how they're going to increase development while cutting staff. The big aero firms have room for improvement on productivity. But SpaceX has been lean from the start. I wonder how they'll get more out of an already highly productive team. That'd be something to learn from.

[HeadsUpHigh]

SpaceX switched from carbon fiber construction for their next rocket to stainless steel. My guess is at least a big part of this workforce reduction relates to people involved in cf which are no longer needed. Additionally they had a lot of people working on crew dragon which as it now nears it's launch might not be needed any more( e.g. pica heatshield, electronics, software developers etc). Same goes for the now mature f9( block 5 was supposed to be the last iteration but there might have been some small improvements. Furthermore with the speed up on the Starship timeline the potential need for an elongated 2nd stage is reduced). So it makes sense for these divisions to move people to the new projects and at least some of them end up getting fired, either due to expertise or performance or whatever.

[kurthr]

I just don't buy the Carbon Fiber vs Stainless construction. They aren't used for the same thing (low weight structural stiffness vs heat conduction, radiation & appearance).

From what I understand it was a water tank contactor that did the hopper in Boca Chica... and it will never face lanch/re-entry stresses. That won't replace anyone.

[HeadsUpHigh]

The starhopper( test article) is indeed made by a water tank contactor. The actual starship will be made by stainless steel in LA as confirmed by Musk on twitter. Also he mentioned something about stainless steel having better properties than cf.

[theptip]

> They aren't used for the same thing

The old BFR design had a large carbon-fiber hull, the new one has a stainless steel hull. Unless I'm missing your point, that's a major piece of the rocket that's no longer made with carbon fiber. (The giant molds that they were building for the BFR hull, for example, are now redundant.)

[kurthr]

It's not for production, it's for testing and looking cool.

[caconym_]

From what I understand, the plan is for the production Starship to have a stainless steel skin. I'm sure it will be a much more refined construction than the hopper, but skinned in stainless steel nonetheless.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BFR_(rocket)#Second_stage_and_...

[theptip]

Wat. Sources please to back up this wild assertion?

The stainless steel hull is a viable design (though obviously given how many times it has changed it might not be final).

Scott Manley did a deep dive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVgEKBwE2RM

[solotronics]

How will they inspect and test all the welds required... I am still shocked that the BFR is not carbon fiber.

[HeadsUpHigh]

How do you inspect small creaks in a cf build? If I had to guess inspecting welds is probably easier.

[kurthr]

It's just a hopper to test new methanol engines... it will never see flight.

[Robotbeat]

SpaceX has like 7000 employees, about twice as many as ULA (their domestic competitor). There are reasons why (Dragon, BFR, Starlink, in-house engines, higher flightrate, more in-house everything), but that's a lot of people.

What I hope is we'll see new startups form out of these folk. What I'd like to see is an ESOP/co-op newspace company bent on similar goals. A lot of these employees have vested stock (or likely will vest soon) that might help capitalize such an effort.

[roedog]

Well, Space X costs less than half than a ULA launch. I suspect that ULA spends that additional money on large sub-contracts to Boeing and Lockheed for the Delta and Atlas vehicles. This makes me think that when we add up the employees on the subcontracts the space X staffing number will be much more impressive in it's leanness.

I hope they all join my company, we've got a lot of work they would find interesting. With the retirement rate increasing it's the time to change things for the better. I want their experience at Space X on how to do things faster and better. But perhaps that's wishful thinking...

[syncmaster913n]

Launch price does not necessarily tell us anything because we do not know what profit margins SpaceX has.

[roedog]

hmm. So they could be losing money on each launch? But, why would they would they choose to sell at a loss when they could beat the competition at twice the price?

[syncmaster913n]

> But, why would they would they choose to sell at a loss when they could beat the competition at twice the price?

Because they promised to cut prices by an order of magnitude. Following a promise like that, you can't just offer a 10-15% price reduction.

Plus, if they offered at twice the current price, I don't believe they would be competitive. Part of the reason they offer a low price is that they have still-new, not-fully-tested technology. Clients accept the increased risk, but they expect significant savings in return.

Also, for certain flight configurations, SpaceX's pricing isn't particularly competitive even at its current level.

[roedog]

Ah, I wasn't thinking about their commercial business. I can imagine how that would be more price sensitive.

[Traster]

I don't beleive this, but it's possible that SpaceX are selling launches at below cost to drive demand so that they can get up to a scale where they're economical and in order to establish a dynamic in the industry where known low cost launches enable new projects that will cause higher demand in the future.

[spaceandshit]

Which company?

[Drdrdrq]

Probably Northrop Grumman [0]?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14689610

[consumer451]

> What's odd is why SpaceX is cutting staff with the new development underway on the larger rockets and the satellite business. I'm curious about how they're going to increase development while cutting staff.

The oddness diminishes when you look at their open jobs listing [1], as it looks that they have >300 open positions.

[1] https://www.spacex.com/careers/list

[ricardobeat]

At <5% of the employee count, those hires might barely cover churn.

[consumer451]

That’s a really good point.

[roedog]

Yep, attrition was over twice that last year at some firms in the area. Partly demographics, lots of folks who can retire do. The rest due to competition for staff.

[kemitchell]

> I've reached out to my former colleagues who left to join Space X.

Good on ya.

[teleclimber]

> What's odd is why SpaceX is cutting staff with the new development underway on the larger rockets and the satellite business.

You're missing that they finished up falcon heavy development last spring, falcon 9 block 5 a little later, and crew dragon is finishing up now. That's a lot of development manpower freed up. To much for starship probably, and I don't know if many of the launcher skills are applicable to satellites.

[erikb]

Well, naturally every company has talent drain. The rockstars will not work long in one company and jump from one gig to the next. But if you have bad luck and hired some slackers, which will happen with the tightest of hiring schemes, then they will certainly stick around.

Thus over time you still have to re-hire people you really need, but get a bigger and bigger amount of people who are just there for the social benefits.

So what can you do to achieve your ambitious goals? Reduce the workforce and try to find a cutting point where you get rid of mostly parasites while keeping your ambitious work bees around.

Usually at the same time of the cut, some of the work bees also get raises and promotions, because then there's some free budget. So if you are an ambitious work bee, then "cutting staff" is actually also good news.

Finding the right cutting point is really the important point and hardest part. For instance you don't want to lay off people who really are performers but for some reason or another (e.g. they just got a baby) they don't perform right now. So at least in the companies I could look inside until now the cutting point is usually well inside the slackers group, so that the people who would recover and then start performing again have a chance to continue.

In the end, even the most tyranical ass-hole leader wants to have as many people as possible work as hard as possible to achieve his goals for him, in exchange for an amount of money that in most cases is peanuts for him. And not all leaders are even tyranical ass-holes.

[acdha]

You left out the part where managers are held accountable for failing to help their staff be productive. It’s easy to rant about slackers but in my experience they’re rare (and 100% protected by management) compared to people who are given conflicting or bad incentives or – by far the most common – work which appears simple only from a distance (e.g. how enterprise software developers can take 3 months to add a button because that involves 600 edits on 20 servers and a labyrinthine test plan).

[erikb]

> in my experience [slackers are] rare (and 100% protected by management)

Can you give an example of how you see slackers being protected by management? I wonder if we have the same definition of the word slacker.

In my experience the people protected by management are not doing much in terms of daily work, but they work a lot to always stay on top when it comes to prestige and taking credit from other people's work. So from my perspective they are working hard, just not to improve the teams results. That's why I call them parasites. They suck out the value of the team for their own gain.

What I call a slacker instead tries to do nothing but reading facebook (or HN) all day. Most of the time these are people who have given up hope to improve their careers for one reason or another. In many cases it is connected to a parasite sucking too much out of them and them not being able to recover self-motivationally.

I bet at least before readign this post your understanding of slacker and my understanding of parasite would be similar, right?

[acdha]

My thought was just that this doesn’t happen in a vacuum: their management should know that they’re not performing, irrespective of exactly how. I’ve seen some egregious examples (e.g. F500 online store which was down every morning from 5am to whenever the DBA rolled in, a dude who’d head to the bathroom at 9:30 with a coffee mug & the newspaper, someone who went out to lunch 10-3, regularly being VERY drunk, etc.), and in every case this was well known but there were reasons why nothing was done (members of the same frat, having an affair, being drinking buddies, too lazy to do the paperwork, being high enough in the management hierarchy that you’d have to explain not having acted before promoting then, etc.). So while I blame the person for taking a paycheck they weren’t earning, I attribute more blame to the people whose job it is to correct problems like that, especially since they’re paid more and given greater status and authority for [theoretically] improving the performance of the larger group.

[AdrianB1]

In many companies slackers are the norm, they cover each other and help them promote to cover even better. It happens a lot in non-technical companies where techies do the work, but the think layer of management and other positions are mainly paper-pushers and PowerPoint champions.