It also helps that there is no union stopping SpaceX from driving it's engineers and technicians to tens of hours of unpaid overtime.
Any engineer or tech at SpaceX is likely worth their weight in gold at any other company due to the company's perceived high bar. Additionally, I don't hear complaints about their pay either, which is likely extremely good.
No one is locking them into cages and telling them they can't leave. I would bet most everyone who is there strongly believes in the mission.
EDIT: Eh. They aren't paid fantastically but not slave wages either. Additionally this is spread out over three very different cities.
https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/SpaceX-Engineering-Salaries...
That's true for a lot of other companies where people here have advocated the employees would benefit from unionization.
For the record, I am conflicted on engineer unionization, and my original statement was intended to be neutral.
As to this specific example, on one hand I understand the drive that comes from having a real mission (as opposed to an MBA-concocted "mission") and how a team who share that drive can execute with amazing speed; conversely, I have seen how poorly teams of clock-punchers putting in the bare minimum can perform.
On the other hand, I have also seen "the mission" used as a means to guilt trip people into overwork or accepting substandard compensation.
Of the two, I lean towards the SpaceX approach being the better one. In the absolute I don't particularly like either of them.
> EDIT: Eh. They aren't paid fantastically but not slave wages either. Additionally this is spread out over three very different cities.
> https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/SpaceX-Engineering-Salaries....
Those salaries look to be in line with what equivalent engineers at Raytheon, Lockheed, and Boeing are making in those same locations, maybe a bit higher. Thus, if the WLB reports from SpaceX are to be believed, their per-hour pay is much lower. It's hard to tell, though, without a proper breakdown by years of experience. Also, there are certainly teams within those companies where the engineers put in just as much time and effort as SpaceX engineers. Boeing is the only one I am aware of that has unionized engineers, though.
Not that it's impossible, but you'll need tooling that prevents you from making the mistakes you'll unavoidably make when tired.
Einstein would certainly not have solved relativity by saying "Uh I guess from 9 to 5 I will work on this with a one hour break in between and then I am heading off to the fun stuff called leisure time".
No... Only if you think about these problems day in and day out you can work at in the top percentiles and this is the kind of people that get hired there.
People want to work on cool stuff (in the sense of rockets or in the sense of making the world better, or both). They will accept lower pay (per hour) to do that. Therefore, working on cool stuff demands longer hours and lower pay compared to less glamorous things. It's not an inherent requirement of the field; it's a side effect of human preferences.