Thread by @ErinIshimoticha

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.

https://twitter.com/ErinIshimoticha/status/1437972536499871752

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."

This thread has apparently made it to Reddit. I deleted my account years ago but rejoined in order to clarify some things there.

May I not regret it.