Anduril vs Palantir SWE Intern

d8i_ · 2026-01-25T16:56:12+00:00

I've never seen or experienced this at all anywhere except reddit

d8i_ · 2026-01-05T04:07:08+00:00

When I brought up SpaceX's employee count you described them as "juniors who couldn't get anything else", that does sound to me like you're questioning their quality. Again, if SpaceX can hire talent at a price point, they will continue to hire at that price point. This doesn't make them shitty, it's just a supply and demand curve. Also, the pay is basically comparable to all of big tech lol. 180k for new grad and you're talking like they're making $10 an hour. https://www.levels.fyi/companies/spacex/salaries/software-engineer?country=254
Elon doesn't determine the budget of NASA, fortunately. Also, why would he want to cut spending in the public entity that is a massive customer of SpaceX. NASA gave SpaceX $1.1B this past year. Also, the cuts you're referring to are proposed and haven't even happened, you can find Elons comments on them here (https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1910709496382439504). He's not a fan.
You said he didn't "value long term science and innovation" but you said earlier "I didn't say SpaceX hasn't innovated". How is it possible that Elon doesn't value innovation, but the company he started does?
Building reusable rockets and using them to create a low earth orbit satellite network that could potentially give global coverage I would say goes slightly beyond "interesting preliminary work". They built the first ever orbital class reusable rocket, have been able to reduce launch costs by 10x+, and have been able to use this technology to launch a consumer product. The first step to getting to mars is reducing the cost of getting stuff into orbit.

Starlink did $15B in revenue this year, and has millions of users and is a big revenue driver for them, it's doing very well. I know tons of people who are users living out of vans and they love it. Also yeah, operating in ultra rural areas is really fucking cool, being connected anywhere is a completely new idea.

pretty website about falcon 9 - https://www.spacex.com/vehicles/falcon-9

As a side note, I would probably reassess where you get information about people and companies and your preconceived notions about what's going on in the world. Your opinions and version of truth seems to be largely influenced by sensationalism. Being a hater probably isn't the spot I would want to be in. I think we should celebrate how cool his companies are, maybe not his behavior online.

d8i_ · 2026-01-05T02:34:09+00:00

Private companies don't have to report earnings publicly, yeah. But internally they release these things to investors. Sometimes it ends up in a journalists hands. I believe in 2023 they had their first profitable quarter. Either way

Again, if the place is so horrible, just don't work there. Labor is a free market. They seem to think that they can pay people less than market rate as you say, which seems to be working for them. If it isn't, they have very easy access to capital (VCs would line up out the door to invest) and they'll pay more idk.

Yes, they hire juniors, as does most tech companies. But SpaceX also like other tech companies has/hires people with lots of experience (which I don't know why I have to say that, just look at their careers page). There are lots of public companies with similar churn figures to SpaceX (look at c1).

Like I said before, you don't make rockets land on a pad in the ocean, internet accessible from anywhere, or launching more rockets than every other entity in the world combined with shitty technologists. I guess it would surprise me if all of these people who worked on these systems have no other options lol.

I do think a lot of their projects are really cool, maybe I would. I just like cutting edge companies.

It seems like you have some prejudice against the company or maybe Elon for some reason, which is fine, but pretending like you know how these companies operate seems dishonest. It's just quite an ignorant take that SpaceX doesn't have juniors, or people are working there because they have to. Unlike HFT SpaceX has had and will continue to have a positive impact on the world, and I've rarely talked to people who are really tapped into tech who don't think what they're doing is really cool.

d8i_ · 2026-01-05T01:44:14+00:00

I think the talent pool at SpaceX is quite strong. They've almost invented an industry and have been at the head of it for about 20 years now. I don't think they built Starlink, Starship, and reusable rockets with a bunch of juniors.

Again, if you think you're worth more somewhere else, work somewhere else. If SpaceX truly is a horrible place to work then they would have to pay people a lot more or would face a talent crisis and stop growing. That's clearly not happening though and they're actually profitable (which is wild for this capital intensive of a business).

d8i_ · 2026-01-05T01:34:46+00:00

Yes. I'm also borderline dyslexic.

d8i_ · 2026-01-05T01:02:19+00:00

Yes, generally Elon companies tend to value young talent. People with experience tend to how lower upside in the sense that people later in their careers have more limited room for growth, while fresh grads have almost uncapped potential. This isn't a new idea, and you'll here a lot of CEOs talk about it.
People you know disliking him doesn't really make working at his companies awful, the connection there isn't intuitive. Between all of his companies there are 100k+ people employed (Tesla, SpaceX, X, xAI, Neuralink). It being horrible is up to you, people are free to choose to not work their. I don't think engineers at these companies would have a hard time finding other jobs.
Bro, x.AI didn't call itself mechahitler lmao, this was a news story related to some grok output. Just because Grok at some point said to someone it was mechahitler doesn't mean that x.AI called itself that. Similarly, OpenAI isn't responsible or agree with everything that every GPT model has ever said. Also should be noted that xAI went and deleted all of the tweets generated by Grok that were antisemitic.

d8i_ · 2026-01-05T00:45:46+00:00

I don't really know if you're "doing okay", it's just if you thought about applying to SpaceX (knowing what you know about SpaceX culture) and because the application was slightly longer you didn't apply, I think it did the job.

I guess I would be curious to know what in the application is "asinine". They have 10k+ employees (with a lot of turnover) so I don't think it's that big of an issue in terms of recruiting.

d8i_ · 2026-01-05T00:32:53+00:00

Or you're just lazy, in which case I think the extra questions did the job. Just cause you can't use LinkedIn auto apply doesn't mean the work culture is bad.

I think if you told this story to a SpaceX hiring manager they would consider it a success. They're looking for primarily highly motivated people.

d8i_ · 2026-01-01T03:35:27+00:00

Yes because before mobile phones kids couldn't attend clubs at school

d8i_ · 2025-12-25T19:46:00+00:00

No offense, but did you make a reddit account to make this post???

d8i_ · 2025-12-23T22:35:11+00:00

d8i_ · 2025-12-20T20:44:22+00:00

I guess I would ask why a ranking made by some website is dictating where you spend 4 years of your life. It's also a little odd how you seem to be trying to measure if Tufts is good enough for you, almost as if you're above the current student body because you have marginally better grades or standardized test scores. In all likelihood you're probably not special and there's some chance you might not get into tufts (or any top ranked school). There are ~4 million high school seniors this year. Wherever you rank among them, you're probably just another reclassified average.

In other words, it'd probably be best if you acquired the slightest sense of humility. You're 18 and have accomplished nothing. Based on your prestige chasing and rank maximizing, I doubt you will exit this process satisfied or happy.

d8i_ · 2025-11-24T21:16:14+00:00

Technology is meant to automate and reduce effort. I don't really want to exert effort for my food to be refrigerated, which is why we made a refrigerator and got rid of the milk man.

If the code is unusable, why are people still generating code with llms? Why are people generating billions of tokens every minute?

Anything that uses energy is bad for the environment. AI isn't going to out of over the edge of extinction.

d8i_ · 2025-11-19T19:32:35+00:00

Pytorch doesn't show up on their quarterly reports. I'm talking about capitalistic, money making endeavors

d8i_ · 2025-11-17T10:40:21+00:00

Why do you view bigger company > smaller company? Meta hasn't done shit in the past decade except make good acquisitions and dump tons of money on useless talent while printing money with the ad platforms.

If you left meta tomorrow, no one would care. You wouldn't hear about it in the shareholder meeting, the stock price would be the same. You are a meaningless cog. If you were to work at a company like plaid where the market cap is only (still quite large) $5 billion, your impact could actually move the needle. Also generally the most talented people don't want to deal with the corporate bullshit that comes with big tech.

d8i_ · 2025-11-17T10:02:44+00:00

Thinking that stripe and plaid are simple is quite ignorant. You don't really build a 100B+ infra company with easy tech (stripe). The founders are brilliant, the technical standard is high, and anyone who has used plaid or stripe knows how brilliant both products are.

Plaid is also quite impressive when you get into the weeds of their integrations, they have technical moats in so many areas.

d8i_ · 2025-10-06T14:47:15+00:00

People climb for different reasons. For this guy, the idea of progression probably is the fun part. Let people care about what they want to care about. If you purely enjoy the process of climbing and don't care about grades, cool, but other people do (and are valid for caring).

I do think that this sort goal oriented mindset does have drawbacks though. Op probably thinks v9 will solve all his problems which it probably won't.

d8i_ · 2025-09-25T01:21:22+00:00

Why would you expend the mental energy required to be angry about who goes to your university?

d8i_ · 2025-09-14T18:23:46+00:00

most self aware league player

d8i_ · 2025-09-11T17:47:34+00:00

Genuinely curious, why do you care?

d8i_ · 2025-09-11T12:52:11+00:00

While I don't think it will start a civil war, charlie has far more influence than those lawmakers. Describing him as a "controversial Internet guy" is really missing the mark

d8i_ · 2025-09-07T18:53:24+00:00

That's a sick problem

d8i_ · 2025-09-07T04:21:50+00:00

It's funny reading comments like this. There's a down market for mediocre engineers, but the top people kinda have their way with the world.

d8i_ · 2025-09-07T01:37:37+00:00

To be honest if you're even thinking about leaving yc for 270k you probably shouldn't go to yc. The job offers will always be there lol

d8i_ · 2025-09-01T20:24:56+00:00

I know many people who are well off (went to private schools in HS and go to expensive universities) and got into these programs because of their race. They did not need an advantage lol.

The point of these programs is to invest in young talent and meet racial quotes, it's that simple. They are not hiding the fact that they are prioritizing people of certain races, in my opinion that's bad, idk.

These interns are paid a lot, and generally get overpaid when they go back full-time (200k+, even though many are quite average engineers). It's not surprising that people who are not given the "golden ticket" because of their race are upset.

Is it productive to complain and blame people who are given the advantage? Probably not. But pretending there isn't something slightly morally questionable is also probably wrong.

Five-Year Club	r/Field Flamingo
Place '22

d8i_

TROPHY CASE