I got an award today at work. It’s called the Flown Bolt Award. This bolt was flown on the CRS 20 1st stage - flown to space and back. Thank you @elonmusk and @SpaceX what an amazing award.
When I started at @SpaceX @ElonMusk was insistent that everything look cool, but as an engineer I didn't care how they looked as long as they worked. What I didn't grasp at the time was that Elon wanted to get the whole world excited about flying in space ...
SpaceX has reserved 5 new registration numbers for aircraft. SpaceX has been transporting employees for a long time now on @SpaceXJet and sometimes on @ElonJet. Just an increase in employee transport or something else?
And now SpaceX bought another Gulfstream G550 registered as N502SX. Registered yesterday.
One day I’m going to do a thread about SpaceX’s negative reputation and actually how nurturing and proactively positive it is. I’ve never experienced this anywhere else. Well since I'm not writing the unit tests anymore I've got another slot open in my multi-tasking masochism.My first engineering job was at a telecom company where I got a contractor position because my abusive ex-husband worked there. It took a while to convince anyone I could do the job. I was writing Jira plugins. We eventually identified that we were using Jira all wrong. We needed a major upgrade anyway, we had a source code license, and we decided to do a major version upgrade along with a very extensive data migration. "We" meaning me and my manager. "We" identified that we weren't using Jira as intended. We were using "components" where we should have been using "projects". instead, our Jira "projects" were actually our departments. Terrible way to organize tasks. My manager and I worked together on this, bc both me and this service was under his purview. I was a contractor and then junior engineer, thought I never held that title. He had good reason to deal with me as a junior engineer. But he undermined me at the last minute. I spent weeks testing the upgrade and data migration, fixing edge cases and mitigating performance issues. My manager and I worked closely on this. He knew exactly what was going to happen and signed off on it all. We spent a couple of months validating that this deploy/upgrade/data migration would go smoothly, and he gave the the go-ahead. We scheduled it. We communicated it to our users. I don't remember the timeframe but I remember setting aside time for fallout. We planned this so good. So. We performed the upgrade and the data migration and It was all nominal. All our manual smoketests passed. This is what we expected. We'd tested it 20 times. Then suddenly we were flooded by people who couldn't access the things they had access to yesterday. This is where I think my perceptions get fuzzy. I experienced an immediate backlash and blame. After all, I designed and oversaw both the upgrade and the very extensive data migration. We started investigating, my supervisor and I. We discovered that someone had wanted the group names to look prettier, so they changed them from dash-limited to space-delimited without also updating all of our integrations. You've probably guessed by know that it was my direct supervisor who did this. Making a mistake is fine, but he actually blamed this on me, and that is not OK. This is only the first reason I was so relieved to leave my first engineering job. I applied rigorous engineering testing principles to this effort and was undermined at the last minute by the person I trusted to help me survive in my first job as a non-degreed engineer. Eventually, I realized I could do better. I interviewed at Facebook and Google and was offered positions with much higher salaries. Both times, my ex-husband forced me to decline the offers. If he couldn't get a job, no one could. We spent several years trying to get him a job in Silicon Vally just so that I could take the lucrative jobs I'd been offered. I don't know exactly the skill he lacked, but he did veto me advancing my career. He flunked out of the Tesla interview process. We also had personal problems, so we got divorced in 2017. Best thing that ever happened to me. Fast-forward: I was dating someone else. I got an email from a SpaceX recruiter and immediately deleted it, as I do. I knew I needed to leave NodeSource imminently, but I never thought SpaceX would take me on. A couple of weeks later, @maxharris9 said, "actually, you should try." Won't hurt, right? So I laughed, and said, yeah, can't hurt. We'll have some fun, get to tour the factory, and then I'll get turned down. The interview process was intense, but a lot of fun. But it was successful, which blew my mind. I never expected to come out of it with a job at SpaceX. I never expected that I would interview at SpaceX and end up working at SpaceX. My first week there, I found out one of my coworkers was also a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. #NativesInTech But I'm talking about a healthy work environment.I don't have a college degree at all, much less formal training in Computer Science.I'm a college dropout. They kept me on more than 3 years just because I love math and programming and space and I'm willing to give them 8 hours a day on that subject. And I've been approached out of the blue, not once but twice, for promotions I wasn't angling for. My managers ask me how I'm doing on a personal level every single week. Even since taking the job, I've made my share of mistakes. I've deployed more than one bug into production.I haven't deleted a production database yet. 😅 But more importantly, I came into this position from a place of ignorance. Everyone around me knew it, but no one held it against me. You can't. We have to work together. We don't have room for insults or power struggles. We're all going somewhere else. And this starts to explain why all of us struggle to believe we actually belong here. Most of us aren't "in aerospace", we're just in software engineering or in manufacturing. Or a hundred other verticals. But now all of a sudden we're the most successful aerospace company of all time, Going back to my initial point, I have experienced more surprising interactions here at SpaceX. I keep writing this tweet with words like "compassion," "mentorship," and "understanding", and then I keep realizing how I'm undermining myself by using those words. This is yet another area in which I can always count on my folks at SpaceX to not let me undermine myself. They listen to me and they also encourage me to improve myself when I'm ready to do so. This is SpaceX culture. It's not "work yourself to death." It's "we can accomplish this crazy thing together if we do it right." My managers encourage us to take mental health days and just generally, if you need something, do it. If you have vacation days, take them.And so the next sentence is "so keep yourself healthy, and let's do this crazy thing."
Today, we’re excited to release our 50 Most Prestigious Internships for 2022. This ranking is based on our recent survey of more than 11,400 interns from 140 internship programs. In addition to asking respondents to rate and review their own internship experiences for our 100 Best Internships ranking, we asked interns to rate the prestige of other employers to determine which internships are the most desirable. Survey respondents were presented with a list of top companies and asked to rate each company on how prestigious its internship is on a scale of 1 to 10—with 10 being the highest and 1 being the lowest. Interns were asked to rate only the companies whose reputations they were familiar with. Firsthand averaged the ratings for each employer and then ranked the companies in order, starting with the highest score as No. 1 down to No. 50.1. NASA2. Google3. Apple4. Microsoft5. Goldman Sachs6. Tesla7. SpaceX8. J.P. Morgan9. Morgan Stanley10. Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal
<snip>And what has Mr. Sanders contributed to the society exactly?
Planet just went public via SPAC, but more interestingly they changed into a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC), with a public benefit purpose "To accelerate humanity to a more sustainable, secure and prosperous world by illuminating environmental and social change."I wonder if SpaceX can be changed to PBC too, with a public benefit of "make humanity a multi-planetary species and build a self-sustaining civilization on Mars". It's what they're doing anyway, might as well make it official.Some info on PBC: https://www.kiplinger.com/investing/esg/603598/what-are-public-benefit-corporations-pbcs, it looks like a 2020 law change in Delaware made it more attractive now than before.
Reports of work place harrasment and poor HR response at SpaceX. It sadly seems inevitable at male dominated companies. Really disappointing. Hopefully they sort it out.https://www.theverge.com/22831380/spacex-employees-harassment-workplace-misconduct-elon-musk
Quote from: Cheapchips on 12/14/2021 07:14 pmReports of work place harrasment and poor HR response at SpaceX. It sadly seems inevitable at male dominated companies. Really disappointing. Hopefully they sort it out.https://www.theverge.com/22831380/spacex-employees-harassment-workplace-misconduct-elon-muskThis is awesome:Gwynne Shotwell, president and COO of SpaceX, sent a company-wide email to SpaceX employees, reminding them of the company’s “no A-hole” policy and that harassment will not be tolerated.
“We also know we can always do better,” Shotwell wrote in the email. “That is why HR has been soliciting feedback from groups across the company to ensure the process is effective. HR will also conduct an internal audit, followed by a third-party audit.”
Quote from: AC in NC on 12/14/2021 08:12 pmQuote from: Cheapchips on 12/14/2021 07:14 pmReports of work place harrasment and poor HR response at SpaceX. It sadly seems inevitable at male dominated companies. Really disappointing. Hopefully they sort it out.https://www.theverge.com/22831380/spacex-employees-harassment-workplace-misconduct-elon-muskThis is awesome:Gwynne Shotwell, president and COO of SpaceX, sent a company-wide email to SpaceX employees, reminding them of the company’s “no A-hole” policy and that harassment will not be tolerated.It's the right in the moment response from Shotwell, as you'd expect really. Straight to the point and about fixing it rather than excuses, which is sadly what you see too frequently.It's not much of a policy though! People and groups being a-holes rarely think they're being a-holes. "It was just a bit of fun"The other quote from the email is more important, as that's the practical bit they need to deliver on to stop anything like this being repeated or becoming endemic. Quote“We also know we can always do better,” Shotwell wrote in the email. “That is why HR has been soliciting feedback from groups across the company to ensure the process is effective. HR will also conduct an internal audit, followed by a third-party audit.”
...Gwynne Shotwell, president and COO of SpaceX, sent a company-wide email to SpaceX employees, reminding them of the company’s “no A-hole” policy and that harassment will not be tolerated.
...It's not much of a policy though! People and groups being a-holes rarely think they're being a-holes. "It was just a bit of fun"...
…The measure will be if the issue goes quiet or keeps resurfacing.
