Stmichael said:

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Enrico Pallazzo said:

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Been in Fortune 100 a long time, and in that time have done a number of RIFs. That said, one thing that always holds true is that I've never fired any of our better people. You find a spot for those folks.

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As measured by what, the ones who sacrifice their family life and spend 60-80 hours a week in the office? If living in my cubicle is the measure of what makes a "good" employee, I'll take my chances with whatever rises out of the ashes of the post commie apocalypse. My responsibility as a father and husband is more than to be a bank account.

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Nope. My most productive ones have always been those driving improvement and efficiency, not grinding longer days. They are just better at getting the job done reliably. And I'm my own example - VP and financially set to retire very comfortably in a few gears at 55, but I coached both kids' softball teams for 8 years, play golf once a week, have A&M season tickets that I use to visit my kids at school, etc. Knowing how to prioritize and drive improvements goes a long way.

hph6203 said:

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Starlink will ultimately make AT&T's subscriber base look quaint. They are about to surpass them in broadband subscribers (on pace to do so around October). Their Starship and v3 Starlink satellites will be able to double their bandwidth capacity in 15ish launches at a fraction of the cost. In conjunction with V3 they will launch Starlink as the backbone to cellphone providers across the globe, as well as compete for subscribers in their own right.

Take AT&T, double their subscribers, cut their costs, and exclude 90 years of bureaucratic bloat. That's the Starlink business long term.

Since their initial filing of their S1 SpaceX added $26 billion in annual contracts from Google and Anthropic. The amount they're receiving in a single year is more than the amount spent on building the compute capacity. The promise of SpaceX is taking what is a bespoke construction challenge with heavy regulatory burden, building data centers, and turning it into an assembly line process.


I think SpaceX is early to their $2T valuation, but also think people who buy today and hold for a decade will be happy with their purchase. Not too dissimilar to people who bought Tesla at its IPO price. Probably not quite as good of a return.

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I still get a cheap iPhone, right?

Ag with kids said:

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I still get a cheap iPhone, right?

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Are there still 5 yr old Chinese kids at FoxConn, making them? Yes? Then...."Yep!".

Stmichael said:

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ProgN said:

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Stmichael said:

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ProgN said:

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Stmichael said:

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And for the record, this isn't my first rodeo with job loss. I got furloughed from Fluor the day I finished the work I was assigned on an ethylene cracker. I was only there 2 years, and because I only had 1 job under my belt they decided I didn't have the specialty expertise to keep around and was an acceptable casualty after losing 25% of their stock price in a bad earnings miss.

Then I spent 3 months looking for a job, found the one I just got fired from, and only spent 9 months there before the new CEO decided that they would rather replace me with someone who had more industry experience rather than just finding more work for me to do.

If that's all I'm worth to corporate America, then I'm rooting for the reckoning that it's long overdue for. And if the supposed adults in the room can't be bothered to fix anything about it, then I hope they get theirs too.

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Instead of raging about Republicans and wealth, why not tell us what your professional skills are and see if our Aggie Network might be able to help. Or just rage drink and blame wallow in your TDS.

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I do, in the job network. I'm a process engineer with 8 years experience: 2 in manufacturing support, 3 in process scale-up, and another 3 in engineering design. And that's apparently too expensive for American companies to pay for, so they'd rather off-shore the work or bring in H-1B's and **** up the job market.

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What field? I'm not an engineer.

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I've worked in manufacturing engineering support (construction materials for my first job, asphalt based waterproofing. Moved to a biopharma facility doing much the same thing for my second job.) From there I moved into process development at the same company designing scale-ups of biopharma manufacturing processes based on bench scale proof of concept. The pay was terrible though, so I left and went to Fluor doing detail engineering design on an ethylene cracker for Dow. Spent 2 years doing that before getting furloughed, looked for a new job for 3 months before going into midstream oil and gas doing the same EPC type work I was doing at Fluor. Just got fired because I don't know the oil and gas industry at the same level as the person they hired to replace me.

That's the truly infuriating thing about the job search these days, at least for the engineering world. They hold out for a unicorn who has a decade in the exact job they're hiring for. Don't have it? We'll just overwork our existing staff until we find someone who does. Anything but invest resources in training people to be better employees. That's just money down the drain, we can't have that.

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Stmichael said:

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Nice deflection. Care to explain to me what exactly investors in Tesla and SpaceX got for their collective $75 billion dollars on Friday? Because they purchased a total of 5% of a company that lost $4.9 billion last year. In fact, they posted a loss of $4.3 billion in 2023, and only profited $0.9 billion in 2024.

Stack that up against companies like AT&T or Visa. See how they compare and tell me what, other than hype and promises, is keeping that bubble from popping.

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SpaceX is 6-12 months away from perfecting reusability for a launch platform that will take 100 tons into orbit at a time. Once they hit these targets, the cost to take a kilogram to orbit will be $300-600. For comparison, it was $50-60k for the space shuttle (so a 99% reduction). Additional cost improvements are on tap that could reduce it by ANOTHER 50%+. So we're talking $150/kg, which is a price that lets you send a 1 ton satellite to orbit for a quarter million bucks.

SpaceX's "competition" charges $2.5B per flight for a much smaller rocket (space launch system) or just blew up on the launch pad (blue origin). In other words, for the foreseeable future, SpaceX has a complete monopoly at a price that opens space for myriad use cases that weren't previously feasible (eg the orbital data centers). If you think a company like that deserves to be valued like freaking AT&T, I don't think we can have a serious, nuanced conversation.

Also, the AI "albatross" has turned into a serious cash cow almost overnight. After the Google and Anthropic deals, SpaceX is now the 4th largest cloud provider on earth. Those deals are now generating $30B+/year, and if the company can make the space data centers happen, they'll probably shoot to number one.

For anybody interested, this is a great discussion of SpaceX's various business segments and prospects. The guys are fan boys, but they're smart as hell and very analytical.

I've worked in the EPC world nearly my entire career. It is not a career for the faint of heart.

But, you know what, even with all of my personal faults, I've never been laid off or fired. Why? My attitude. I show up. I work hard. I contribute to the team. I perform. I managed to show up to my kid's games and events, volunteer coached her basketball team, and managed to get an Master's in there too.

It hasn't always been easy either I've had some rough years. Really rough. It's kind of rough right now.

I've seen a lot of people come and go in this industry, but a defining factor in those let go was almost always attitude, and you seem like you have a bad one. Maybe stop blaming rich people and take a hard look in the mirror.

Your desire to bring everyone else down to your level of misery is unbelievably selfish.