[pinewurst]

The application forms are pretty ridiculous with theIr insistence on school/graduation dates (some reqs) and SAT/ACT scores (all).

As a very experienced engineer, I can’t accept being judged on (historical) trivia.

[benhurmarcel]

At least you can apply, you're American.

[rbanffy]

Same here. Understand they need to somehow weed through their applications. Experienced engineers are costly to assess and having a cheap test to remove the obvious negatives helps them at the cost of a few false ones. :-(

I'm also not a US citizen, so that's another cheap test I can't pass.

[skissane]

> I'm also not a US citizen, so that's another cheap test I can't pass.

Unlike other "cheap tests", that one is imposed by US government regulations, not SpaceX's own decisions.

I imagine SpaceX would be quite happy if ITAR was loosened, but I doubt that will happen.

I honestly can't see why ITAR applies to citizens of friendly countries such as Canada or the UK. The point of ITAR is to stop unfriendly countries like China, Russia, Iran or North Korea getting access to technologies with sensitive military applications. The US trusts its closest allies in so many other ways (e.g. UKUSA "Five Eyes" intelligence sharing agreement, the 1958 Mutual Defence Agreement under which the UK and US share nuclear weapon design information), why not in this?

[Teever]

The ulterior motive to ITAR is protectionism.

[rbanffy]

A country is friendly until it isn't. I understand it's not a requirement imposed by SpaceX, but it also prevents them from getting a lot of applications they wouldn't be able to turn into hires.

[skissane]

> A country is friendly until it isn’t

If the US can trust the UK with information on nuclear weapon designs and delivery systems, surely it can handle a few UK citizens working for SpaceX?

In the unlikely event that the UK and US had some falling out, the US government could always order SpaceX to lay off UK citizen employees.

[garmaine]

> If the US can trust the UK with information on nuclear weapon designs and delivery systems.

Bad example. The soviets got the bomb because of British spies in the Manhattan project. After that, there was very little collaboration to this day.

[skissane]

What about the 1958 Mutual Defence Agreement? That led to sharing of nuclear weapons design information, over a decade after the Manhattan project.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958_US–UK_Mutual_Defence_Ag...

[rbanffy]

And what will you do with their knowledge?

[skissane]

It seems rather silly to me to worry about the knowledge of a few UK citizen SpaceX engineers, in the event of a hypothetical US-UK breakup, considering how much information the US and the UK already share in the fields of nuclear weapons and SIGINT. Surely knowledge about the later two is a much bigger concern than the first? Yet, if they are willing to risk the later, why not risk the former as well?

Besides that, the risk of a US-UK breakup has always appeared to be low, and Brexit arguably makes it even less likely.

[inopinatus]

I've found that all really effective hiring funnels are biased for type 1 errors at the start and type 2 errors later on.

Filtering on inane academic requirements up front is the exact opposite, and you end up rejecting half the real talent pool.

[mulcahey]

I would presume it depends on whom you're asking. E.g. Elon's stated multiple times that he believes requirements of degrees on many of Tesla's job postings to be "absurd"[0][1]

[0] https://youtu.be/ywPqLCc9zBU?t=2733

[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1208841343440568320?s=20

[xiphias2]

Having a degree or not is different from having a degree with a low or high GPA. Having a low GPA at a University is a worse signal for hard working person than having no University background.

[dmix]

Does anyone even care what your grades were beyond your first job?

[pinewurst]

Much less one’s college admission test scores - how do they signal a “hard working person” especially 20 years down the road?

[xiphias2]

Why would a person with 20 years of experience want to work for a company with no work-life balance?

I prefer investing in Tesla/SpaceX instead of working there, and leave working extra hard to young people who have more energy than me.

[adventured]

> Why would a person with 20 years of experience want to work for a company with no work-life balance?

The initial comment by bfieidhbrjr already answered that very nicely: out of the desire to actually do something that is important re work. Important being subjective to the person in question obviously.

[Teever]

A lot of people already work meaningless jobs with no work-life balance and they would find it to be a substantial improvement to work somewhere with meaningful work even without a proper work-life balance.

[dmix]

Plenty of mega-corps are full of people who phone-it-in every day, you don't have to work demanding jobs.

I personally love working hard, which is why I only work with startups, which tend to have a higher personal ROI and more meritocracy oriented.

[Robotbeat]

I would apply anyway. SpaceX judges more heavily on outside projects than academic credentials.

The US citizen (and/or permanent resident) thing is probably not negotiable, though, because SpaceX does a lot of Nat Sec stuff.

[xiphias2]

It's OK, you don't need to. There are many companies with different requirements, so you're just probably not a good fit.