[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...

[garmaine]

Read the details; it wasn’t free exchange of information. It was basically a way for the US to allow sales of some nuclear plants and material, and sharing of design work only when it overlapped significantly with what the UK already did.

[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.