[b20000]

recruiter called and offered crazy low base salary

i refused to do coding interviews i have 20+ years of experience i offered to share my code or work on a little project offered contracting

she said but we send people into space here

a job is a job i can’t pay my lanlord with space dust

[jesterson]

> she said but we send people into space here

All big companies do(did?) this - putting low salary and saying but "this is Facebook!" (real story), preying on young gullible people who think Facebook, Google or any big fish is anything worthy to be a part of.

[ETH_start]

Space is different in being an emerging sector where many of the potential business models are not yet viable, and which holds the promise of unlocking massive amounts of resources for humanity.

The FAANG companies are also different in that they already generate massive revenues, so can't credibly claim they can't afford to pay good salaries.

[SilverBirch]

That's just a question of stock vs salary though. If the argument is "oh this is an emerging sector we haven't figured out the business model yet" the answer is "Ok, well then I want to share in the upside".

[vbh21]

+1. My interview experience at one of the gang companies a long time ago was pretty bad. I got grilled for several hours, and then - after clearing all their rounds, was offered a pretty menial base pay. They seemed full of themselves :(

I’ve heard from plenty of experienced people how some of these companies, especially googlee - milk you for all you’ve got while pretending to be caring and offering you competitive base pay.

[hulitu]

> recruiter called and offered crazy low base salary

> she said but we send people into space here

This feeling is everywhere now. "But we send people on the roads here". "But we send people on the bottom of the ocean here". We are Agile and only see the quality manager when we jave an escalation meeting with the customer.

[rurban]

sorry, but space must pay more, because the system must be 100% bugfree, and cannot be updated easily. on the bottom of the sea or on roads you still get live-updates, or at least car callbacks.

you also have severe space and time restrictions, more than in a car or surgical robot.

no agile for sure. there's not much room for agility or changing requirements in space.

[comprev]

The highest pressure jobs are at the bottom of the sea

[b20000]

boom crack

[thorin]

Usually anything cool pays less: Movies, Music, Video Games etc and space is in that category for some. Also you don't work there unless you really want to.

[wanderingmoose]

My first job was at Industrial Light and Magic during the first star wars prequels and paid $11/hr, with OT after 8 hours, so about $32k/yr. If you didn't like it, others were lined up around the block.

I wouldn't do that now, but at the time it was like getting paid to attend a university that was waaaay more interesting than my actual university. The company was still very bohemian and you had access to the people that wrote the book on digital and practical effects.

There can be huge value, especially for junior engineers in having certain companies on your resume. ILM opened up every single door of every VFX or animation house. I'm sure spaceX would have similar benefits.

You just need to make sure the benefit is worth your time.

[badpun]

I don't think there's a way to communicate with vehicles at the bottom of the sea. Seawater isolates EM signals perfectly. It's actually much easier to do live updates of vehicles in space.

[b20000]

but it pays less

because people are ok with being underpaid in return for being able to say they work on space shuttles

we will all be fucked until we all learn to negotiate

[FreshStart]

But you can get the same bugfree system from a process and 3 subengineers.

Plus you can expand the thiefdom management cake.. And that is real growth..

[metabro]

Senior sw make a base salary of 165k and principal at 216k. Do you. Consider these low?

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/spacex/salaries/software-en...

[garciasn]

Assuming their revenue is really moving from 4.5b to 11b+ in 2023, yes. https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/02/rocket-report-spacex....

[nagyf]

You can get higher salary with writing REST apis in Ruby. And fully remote

[thewildginger]

For something as specialized as aerospace engineering software? Definitely yes.

[speedgoose]

Seems to be supply and demand thing. It’s easier to attract people to work in the space industry, or the video game industry, than in the ads industry or the data driven PowerPoint slides for the management industry.

[badpun]

Plenty of difficult, ultraspecialized jobs don't pay much, because they're in industries with low margins.

[ttymck]

Aren't they mostly in Los Angeles? Yes that's low, and it's especially low for writing spaceship software.

[VirusNewbie]

That is quite low. Senior level at most FAANGs will pay quite a bit more than that in salary and the RSUs will be more liquid.

[b20000]

a decent quality house in a te ch metro is 1.5-2 million

so you are looking at 14k per month in payments