Meaningful place, Friendly working environment - Anonymous employee SpaceX Employee Review

5.0
20 Aug 2018
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

I've been working for SpaceX for 2.5 months. Overall, I enjoy the company culture, the working environment and job contents very much. The project schedule is generally aggressive, the job contents are meaningful and challenging, the people here are very talented, professional, working hard and self-motivated. The team communicates with each other with most simply and straight way to keep tasks rolling fast. The company culture is friendly and respectful to employees, fast moving on small tasks/directions and but compliant towards big goals. It has start-up company's character and relies more on professional employee's technical driven development rather than management top-down driven. To work here, schedule is 'King" and need to find all ways to make it. So prioritizing the tasks is a necessary skill to get your way out of stress regarding aggressive schedule. The admin and support team takes care of employees very well with both big and small benefits. Except for managing your own technical work, nothing else needs to be worried here.

Cons

Working long hours is normal whatever you are experienced or not. So need to handle work-life balance majorly by employee himself - prioritizing tasks and focusing on critical ones can help on burning employee out. First one month on-board will be hard, especially when project is on peek period. People is busy and tasks are threw to you without training and ramping time, also lack of accurate documentation (sometime, no time to read documentation). On-job learning, working closely with others and verbal communication is necessary to find ways to move forward.

Explore other reviews about SpaceX

5.0
29 Jun 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

* **Unmatched Mission & Impact:** You are literally working on rockets and spacecraft. The cool factor is 10/10. * **Brilliant Coworkers:** You will be surrounded by some of the smartest, most driven engineers in the world. * **Insane Career Growth:** SpaceX on your resume is a golden ticket. You will learn more here in 3 months than in 3 years at a normal company. * **Hands-on Experience:** They actually trust interns with real, critical hardware. No boring coffee-fetching tasks.

Cons

**Cons:** * **Zero Work-Life Balance:** 70-80 hours a week is the norm, not the exception. Say goodbye to your social life and sleep. * **Extreme Burnout:** The "hustle culture" is toxic. You are expected to treat the company as your entire life. * **Mediocre Pay:** The hourly pay is average, especially when you factor in the insane hours and the high cost of living in LA/Hawthorne. * **Chaotic Management:** Decisions can change overnight based on whatever Elon Musk tweets or feels like doing that morning.

4.0
6 Apr 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

You learn so much because the work is so freaking intense, its a lot of fun if you're the type of person who loves to get emerged in hard problems. The hours for me were not too bad but I was the exception, all the other interns I was with dealt with 60-70+ hour weeks, some interns came in at 10am and left at 12am, when I say its intense, I'm not joking. This is however very unique to the Starbase location. I've heard Hawthorne is a lot more chill. I honestly despite how challenging the role was always look back on it with a sense of pride in my work, and longing to be back there. It really does feel that you're doing world changing things.

Cons

Very un diverse upper management, I'd say the company is pretty diverse in the lower ranks, but once you start to look at the org chart and see who's in charge, you realize that its mainly just white people. Makes you wonder if as a person of color you too will be able to move up. Housing sucks: there was limited housing on campus for full time employees, you have to wait a year plus to get off the queue and once you're off you only really get tiny homes as the option that are in an inconvenient location. Interns don't even have the option to get on campus housing, they give you 3k in a housing stipend and expect you to find a place in Brownsville. I'd say its very hard to maintain a relationship while working here if you don't have an understanding partner, the work schedule is brutal and you really can't slack off.

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