a recruiter for a space startup which shall remain unnamed but which anyone can guess who i am talking about, called me one day because of my experience with realtime embedded stuff in c/c++. i told her politely i was happy to consider applying but that the compensation was going to have to be significantly increased for me to consider joining, and she could not understand why i expected to be paid for my experience and education, background etc. after all, who doesn’t dream about working for a SPACE company????? i then also mentioned i will not do any coding interviews, under any circumstances, but that i was happy to share samples of my work and talk about decisions i made designing hardware and writing firmware, middleware and user space applications. she then balked BUT WE ARE SENDING PEOPLE TO SPACE! and insinuated i must be a fraud or liar since i refused to deal with their standard bullshit procedure. the conversation then quickly ended with her turning it back on me and making me feel like i was completely stupid / unexperienced / incompetent etc. needless to say i will never work for these entitled people.