[HNisCIS]

Whenever you look at supersonic or hypersonic commercial aircraft plans you should assume one of two things.

A. It's a bait and switch by a founder who wants to pivot to weapons/military aircraft but wants to be able to hire high grade talent without paying the "we're gonna kill people" premium, can pivot once a good chunk of the workforce is complacent with a paycheck. You laugh but this happens SO FUCKING MUCH.

B. It's for business jet scale operations for billionaires. There are >3000 billionaires and however many corporate aviation departments and if you can build a super/hypersonic private jet that's not horribly expensive to operate the "time savings"* for that class of person will demand they buy one.

* when I say time savings I mean dick measuring contest

[nradov]

Defense contractors don't pay premium wages. Rather the opposite. Many employees specifically want to work in the field in order to contribute to the national security mission.

[HNisCIS]

I'm being a bit obtuse here to make the point, it's more complicated than that. The reality is if you create a defense startup you end up hiring defense employees which comes with its own set of issues.

That said, go look at salaries right now in the defense space.

[picture]

From my experience with working for defense/aerospace companies as well as civilian b2b ones in the US, the general situation is that defense/aero companies pay less but demands less of a grind. People usually take the lower pay (usually 70% of equivalent role in commercial sector) for the better culture

[HNisCIS]

For pure generic full-stack-whatever devs yes. For EEs, embedded, FPGA, RF, etc you can pull waaaaay more in the defense world, especially if you're willing to do cleared work.

[nine_k]

But if you need clearance to do your work, how can it be bait-and-switch? You need to hire people who are able and willing to obtain a clearance.

[HNisCIS]

Two different discussions, but I've had an earthy crunchy employer ask me to put in for one once.

[bigfatkitten]

And have work that allows employees to keep their existing clearances active.

[Seattle3503]

What companies are examples of that bait and switch strategy?

[nine_k]

Google tried to become a national security contractor, and the backlash among the engineers was very intense.

[bigfatkitten]

Google already does national security work.

https://cloud.google.com/distributed-cloud-air-gapped

https://www.defence.gov.au/news-events/releases/2025-12-19/d...

[switchbak]

I’m not in the industry, but I would say Hermeus would be a perfect example. Ostensibly building a commercial airliner, but if you look closely it feels like a military oriented startup from the inside out.

[Onavo]

Can't give any examples but I have definitely heard the same about a lot of aerospace startups through the grapevine. As for OP's point about private jets, Boom supersonic is your classic example.

[HNisCIS]

I can't name names but 3 of the startups I've worked at.

Places I haven't worked:

Skydio

Applied Intuition

Saildrone

Planet Labs

Boom

Scale AI

Also worth noting that sometimes it's on purpose, sometimes the founders are all "we're gonna save the world" then AFWERX enters the chat with a big fucking check and the founders yell "Nevermind! Guess we're the baddies now! How many slaughterbots did you say?"

[Grosvenor]

> * when I say time savings I mean dick measuring contest

And in this case smaller is better?