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Comment by skizm | Hacker News Reader

Anyone know if there are any well paying jobs in space programs of any kind? I've been seeing a growing number of reputable universities offering a wider range of space / aerospace / engineering offerings* and I've been getting curious what's out there. Only issue is, a lot of places I looked pay well below market rates :/ (at least for software engineers). I'll admit my expectations might be off considering I've been in the NYC area for a while now, and am used to seeing NYC salaries, but the pay is well below half of what I would make now and the cut seems too drastic even in a LCOL area.

* I'm mostly talking about masters programs here.

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Just a bit of warning: Software Engineering in Aerospace is NOT fun. You're basically in a supporting role to the hardware and system engineers designing the spacecraft. It's pure drudgery... process to the point of absurdity, specs and tasks being spoon fed to you with little room for creativity and/or problem solving, etc.

The pay, benefits, and level of respect on the job reflect all of that.

If you really want to work in space, I'd go and get a MS (or higher) in aerospace engineering or space systems engineering and work at the systems level.

I got out of aerospace and am much happier for it.

To be fair, the reason for this is that if you try to be creative and don't follow strict processes, things fail a million miles from Earth or blow up entirely.

Oh, I admit there are good reasons for it. And there are people who prefer such a rigid, structured, and slow-paced environment. I ran into plenty while I was stuck doing that sort of work.

Good for them. The world needs such people, probably in much greater numbers than it needs people like me -- if it needs people like me at all :)

Nothing wrong with that. But you should know what you are getting into.

You mean the strict processes that strictly demanded mixing imperial and SI units ?

The strict processes that got even more strict after they realized they weren't being strict enough when they mixed imperial and SI units.

> You mean the strict processes that strictly demanded mixing imperial and SI units ?

You're describing a mistake that happened literally 20 years ago. Don't you think they might have changed the processes in all that time?

I really like building software that's rock solid. I never did aerospace systems, but I'm sure I'd be happy in that space.

Sadly, no need to fly me to the hardware to apply patches... :-(

I have to agree with this. Tons of extremely smart people, but day to day was hell in the software side.

Agreed. I have talked to people at JPL and all their tools are completely outdated, they have no room for creativity and everything they do is constantly watched and reviewed. Unless you are way up in leadership this doesn’t seem much fun.

Maybe it works at a startup where they try do something completely new but as soon as your stuff gets close to production it won’t be much fun.

This is an over generalization.

There’s a big range of agility at JPL depending on how close your work is to spacecraft operations. Here are two current job openings placed by good groups at JPL that many people here would find challenging and innovative —

https://jpl.jobs/jobs/2018-9779-Senior-Software-Engineer-Aut... (group webpage: https://ai.jpl.nasa.gov/)

https://jpl.jobs/jobs/2019-10706-Big-Data-Analytics-Software...

I think what they build doesn’t run on any probe but on Earth so the world doesn’t go under if they make mistakes . It’s the same in medical. The closer you get to the patient the more regulation you get.

I agree with your medical analogy.

Like I said, there’s a range of work at JPL, and some of the autonomy work by the linked group most definitely has run on Mars and in Earth orbit.

I worked for that AI group for a little while 20 years ago. It was one of my favorite jobs, but did not pay competitively (maybe it would've if I'd had a degree) and you're right that my code never flew (though others had better luck there).

Oh, to continue the theme I also interviewed for a couple of startups spun off by JPL people. The one that got to an offer offered way less money than the big internet company I was also interviewing with then.

Thanks for your insight. I was actually eyeing the "space systems engineering" degrees. If I did ever make a move I'd probably want to transition from the individual contributor software engineer to something higher level (like you say, systems level). Space seems super interesting from the outside looking in, but I supposed there is a lot of careful work involved given the higher stakes, which makes the process much slower than most software companies.

Probably won't actually make the switch, but just interested in seeing what's out there I guess.

I had to agree. Never thought that web development would be more than aerospace software development. Hopefully, our project will change that part.

Just adding on to this. The government funded research labs and DoD contractors I've had offers from have been seriously sad, which makes me concerned on the quality of their missions, personally. Also it's frustrating because I'd much rather work in that space. I'm a senior dev making ~140k and was just offered 80k in a higher cost of living to manage a team of 10 developers with TS clearance working on spy satellite imaging. I don't consider myself a particularly strong developer, so who is taking these jobs?

That's really weird... I made more than that as a jr engineer doing imaging satellite flight software. Most of us are over 100k in the Denver area.

Can you name companies?

I can! Denver: Northrop Grumman, Level 1 software engineer, 75k. Denver: Northrop Grumman, level 2 SWE, 82k. I talked to lots of colleagues at my level while there and they were all within 3k of those numbers at those levels.

That company might've just been lowballing you. I'm much closer to your current salary at my job and I'm not management or a particularly senior developer. If that was a job direct from the government, they might've put you on the GS scale, which sucks (although you don't need as much in retirement savings if you have a pension that pays 40% of your salary)

That's definitely a lowball offer.

Government research labs are on the GS scale (mostly). We're capped at $166,500/year in the DC/NY/SF area (and also, as it happens, the Denver area). $80k is what we offer fresh-outs. A senior flight software engineer managing ten developers with a TS should be near if not at the top end of the salary range.

Contractors doing that work should be similar or higher. I've tried to convert contractor senior flight software engineers to civil servants, and I couldn't... because our ~$150k/year offer was $30k/year too low.

Here are the GS pay scale tables. The job you've describes should be either a high GS-14 or GS-15. So, $133k/year and up.

https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries...

If it was direct government employment did they clarify final salary? There's the 'salary' and then the locality increase [1] which is a base of around 15% and goes up to 28% for places like DC. 102k (1.28*80) is still not worth it especially without prior federal service as you have pension vesting etc to wait for before your benefits are worthwhile.

[1]: https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries...

Fixed math.

I'm betting that in 5-10 years, there will be an explosion of aero startups. But fast and loose don't work as well in space, where everything ends up going 11,000 meters per second at least. The culture will necessarily be a bit more conservative, and as others have mentioned, software is usually a supporting element at best, a necessary evil at worst.

With launch costs falling and hardware getting smaller/lighter it's getting less conservative. It used to be everything was C99, VxWorks and SPARC or worse but a lot of companies are starting to look at newer technologies. Good luck finding one of those projects right now but it is happening.

You can have a look at ours: https://www.exodusorbitals.com

Cube sats don't count :)

The requirements and budgets for them mean that they're much more expendable than something flying on a full size bus. As such, the level of risk tolerance is much higher.

Even CubeSats today still use the SPARC (LEON) since it's easy to implement on a FPGA as a soft core. I'm personally not fan of SPARC though.

> Only issue is, a lot of places I looked pay well below market rates :/ (at least for software engineers)

aerospace places tend to just have one engineering rate, and it's dominated by what aerospace engineering graduates cost. which is less than what software folks cost.

aerospace graduates are all high on hubble pictures and "we're doing spaaaaace!", so they charge way less.

ESA in Europe has decent salaries and you don't pay income taxes from them

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