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The Flight of Gifted Engineers From NASA
schwit1 writes: Rather than work in NASA, the best young engineers today are increasingly heading to get jobs at private companies like SpaceX and XCOR. This is a long article, worth reading in its entirety, but this quote sums it up well: "As a NASA engineering co-op student at Johnson Space Center, Hoffman trained in various divisions of the federal space agency to sign on eventually as a civil servant. She graduated from college this year after receiving a generous offer from NASA, doubly prestigious considering the substantial reductions in force hitting Johnson Space Center in recent months. She did have every intention of joining that force — had actually accepted the offer, in fact — when she received an invitation to visit a friend at his new job with rising commercial launch company SpaceX.
Hoffman took him up on the offer, flying out to Los Angeles in the spring for a private tour. Driving up to the SpaceX headquarters, she was struck by how unassuming it was, how small compared to NASA, how plain on the outside and rather like a warehouse. As she walked through the complex, she was also surprised to find open work areas where NASA would have had endless hallways, offices and desks. Hoffman described SpaceX as resembling a giant workshop, a hive of activity in which employees stood working on nitty-gritty mechanical and electrical engineering. Everything in the shop was bound for space or was related to space. ... Seeing SpaceX in production forced Hoffman to acknowledge NASA might not be the best fit for her. The tour reminded her of the many mentors who had gone into the commercial sector of the space industry in search of better pay and more say in the direction their employers take." At NASA, young engineers find that they spend a lot of time with bureaucracy, the pace is slow, their projects often get canceled or delayed, and the creative job satisfaction is poor. At private companies like SpaceX, things are getting built now.
Hoffman took him up on the offer, flying out to Los Angeles in the spring for a private tour. Driving up to the SpaceX headquarters, she was struck by how unassuming it was, how small compared to NASA, how plain on the outside and rather like a warehouse. As she walked through the complex, she was also surprised to find open work areas where NASA would have had endless hallways, offices and desks. Hoffman described SpaceX as resembling a giant workshop, a hive of activity in which employees stood working on nitty-gritty mechanical and electrical engineering. Everything in the shop was bound for space or was related to space. ... Seeing SpaceX in production forced Hoffman to acknowledge NASA might not be the best fit for her. The tour reminded her of the many mentors who had gone into the commercial sector of the space industry in search of better pay and more say in the direction their employers take." At NASA, young engineers find that they spend a lot of time with bureaucracy, the pace is slow, their projects often get canceled or delayed, and the creative job satisfaction is poor. At private companies like SpaceX, things are getting built now.
The talent behind xkcd is a former NASA engineer.
NASA isn't hot because it hasn't done anything since they retired the Space Shuttle in 2011. And it's likely to remain that way until 2020 when the first multi-billion dollar SLS finally makes it off the factory floor. That is two and a half generations of engineers graduating from college with no reason to work for NASA.
NASA headquarters staff votes to unionize.
http://www.ifpte.org/news/deta...
Anyone with the slightest objectivity knows that the working conditions for federal employees in Washington is glorious, with pay about double what everyone else in the country makes and benefits far exceeding even the best private packages. In addition, the hours are great and just slightly longer than what my generation would have called bankers’ hours. Moreover, if I can be blunt, these engineers are mostly paper pushers. They are not the one’s designing and building anything that might fly in space. Their only reason to unionize now is because they see a threat to their cushy jobs with the advent of private space and are organizing to secure their unneeded positions.
It's no longer "news" to find that a private sector company has a leaner, less bureaucratic environment and workflow than a Federal government agency.
NASA came into its maturity during the Mad Men era of skinny ties and big business. William Shockley had only just left Bell Labs to invent Silicon Valley. Bureaucracy was king. IBM was king of the castle. And NASA still has, I think (I never worked for NASA, but have several friends who did), very much of an IBM-era culture. Many really talented programmers and engineers would rather work for a Silicon Valley startup than get a rank-and-file job at IBM or Microsoft. Riskier, sure, but things get built. Today. Your input can be valuable, or even essential, to the shape of the product that hits the market, and there aren't so many layers of management above you that you don't get seen and respected for your contribution.
It's hardly surprising that talented young space engineers want to work for Silicon Valley-era companies. I'm sure many young automotive engineers would rather work for Tesla or Lit than GM. The era of the tie-wearing commuting suburbanite is coming to a conclusion. I'm not sure that's a bad thing.
In Hoffman's three years at NASA, she worked on only one or two projects that would ever see space, which she considers a very poor rate.
A student who, in three years, has worked on a couple of projects which will possibly see space? To me, that sounds like the stuff that makes parents proud.
Uh? Good?
So you're saying that it's NASA engineers' job to write the specs and certifications and come up with the checklists and training and contingency and mission plans, and it's up to outside contractors to actually build the shit? So, like it's always been and designed to be then.
SpaceX pays below comps, works engineers like dogs http://www.reddit.com/r/engineering/comments/26k4b0/why_is_pay_at_spacex_so_low/ and is even bent sued over blocking employees from taking lunch breaks.
This has got to be the most blatent white-washing of an advertorial I've seen in a while (even worse than Timothy's posts).
Take that garbage back to the dice.com job boards where it should have stayed.
They've always wanted to fly. Now they want to flee!
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
Summary: Females given special perks choose a workplace with more opportunity for human interaction.
I co-oped at NASA Goddard, and we actually built stuff. At Johnson and in most of the Government offices at Kennedy and JPL it's all contractor management. Marshall had some real space work going on at the time. Ames does more aeronautical, iirc.
I lucked out and landed in a small division that built and flew small expendable payloads and secondary shuttle payloads. We were housed in half of a building that had been converted from a high-bay shop. The other half was still a shop - an actual machine shop - and optical facility. You designed stuff, and then could walk over and talk to a machinist about the project. Finalize a drawing and it might be fabbed on site or sent out, but it came back and got assembled in a clean room that was at the end of a hall of engineers offices. The controls group had benches full of electronics and components - they even did basic balancing and testing of momentum wheels in the same pod as where the offices were.
It was, possibly, one of the coolest jobs on the planet - and I was there for almost 9 years in all. But there was precious little of that in the agency as a whole. We had been moving more and more to contractors over the years - more than half of the people I worked with side by side were actually contractors. A contract would end and be re-bid, and whoever won would hire 98% of the people who worked for the old contractor and nothing would change except who the agency made out the check to each month. At JPL it's all contractors - when my life took me to LA I found out that they don't have engineers, just staff to manage the contracts with CalTech and the other contractors who do pretty much everything. At Kennedy you can be written up for holding a wrench if you're not a member of the union for one of the contractors there. We got out own cleanroom to isolate our team from the rest of those politics when we did integration at the cape.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Exactly. This has been the goal of NASA from day 1. To inspire people to actually go *DO* this stuff.
NASA was ever only a way to encourage private industry to make these leaps themselves. Well, and probably to be the FAA for LEO
An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
My brother interned there for a summer and said he would never set foot in there again. It was corrupted by bureaucracy and innovation was frowned upon. He works in the private space sector where he makes much more and isn't hamstrung by politicians.
No good deed goes unpunished.
young engineers find that they spend a lot of time with bureaucracy, the pace is slow, their projects often get canceled or delayed, and the creative job satisfaction is poor.
Yes. im sorry you had to find out this way, but most engineering work is a bureaucratic rats nest. most of the meetings you're involved in are already pre-determined. That is, tens or hundreds of meetings in the past, before you were hired, determined the scope and pace of the particular project you've been tasked to work with. I dont task my young engineers with small tediums like compressor analysis or or structural meshing to torture them. New hires and college grads need to understand the fundamentals of our project before they dive into the bigger picture. the thermodynamic elements of most projects are a moebius strip of endless complexity few people under 10 years of experience with the company could ever comprehend. If you want creative freedom, pack your cube and go be a designer. Creative freedom may make you feel good, but when we're designing a thermonuclear power plant turbine, your special snowflake idea isnt being rejected because we dont like you but because our design has 40 years of in-the-field testing and functionality, and includes a fully scoped maintenance cycle that keeps america from celibrating its very own chernobyl.
projects can and do get cancelled. deal with it, because its rarely the result of anything you did. Maybe the nation-state that wanted your new jet engines decided to spend the money on ethnic cleansing, who knows. dont take it personally. make sure you at least learned something from that project. Finally, i cant stress this enough: you are an engineer, and the pace should be slow. part of that is in your software. ansys, nastran, and fluent jobs will run for weeks at a time, wiping your ass to make sure your design or part is solid and incapable of immolating a school under normal operational parameters. you can quicken the pace by specifying realistic resources to use before you submit to the simulation cluster, and optimizing your simulations instead of queueing them up, locking your screen, and going off to lunch. monitor your checkpoints for failures in convergence. use the latest software instead of demonizing it. run it multicore, and for god sake stop being retiscent and stubborn about new shit that can help you like simulation timing blocks. and another thing, close the application so your license is returned to the pool and can be used on other projects, most of which yours depends on.
now get off my lawn.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Need we more proof that the government literally(figuratively) sucks at everything at 10x the cost.
Is there anyone surprised that work at private companies is more successful than work in big government institutions? In other news, South Korea better off than North Korea, West Germany than East Germany, Taiwan than Mainland, Florida than Cuba,...
Working at Space X would be cool; just like Tesla, until you're part of the 6% summarily shit-canned and told it wasn't a layoff, you just suddenly weren't good enough anymore. I assume this would happen less often or at least far more slowly with far better protections at NASA.
I work in an office that is packed in with three people constantly talking on the phone, with other people or just otherwise doing their business. I find it incredibly distracting. Sure I can put headphones on and try and blot it out, but depending on my mental state or particular task, music can be distracting too. Be it Metal or Minimalism music isn't always the answer to getting the best mental state for your work. Also having the music cranked means I can't hear the phone when I'm getting a call. I can't even imagine working in a larger room packed with dozens more people.
I'd love to be in a properly lit and laid out office or cubical.
The only reason private companies can go to space is because its easy. We still need gov't programs to do the really hard work, like building roads.
The next giant leap will for SpaceHypedCoX LLC.
To balance this discussion, my friend recently interviewed with SpaceX. He said longer hours were commonplace and expected. He decided against working there for that reason.
Would you rather spend your time designing and building a spaceship or sitting in endless meetings at some Center for Excellence negotiating over a spaceship that might be designed and built decades later, if at all? If you're a good engineer, chances are you want to get to the bit where you're designing cool things that blast off into outer space, with as few bureaucratic obstacles as is practical.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
and see if our heroine in this article is or has been joining in protests complaining about lack of retirement options or lack of union representation leading to exploitative conditions or where workers are "realigned" whenever the corporate heads choose.
At the cost it takes to put anything in space, it strikes me odd that the engineer in the article thought that 2-3 things actually making in space in a 3 year period was low. I mean this engineer is just out of school. I'm not saying that newbies can't come up with good ideas as they sure can, but expecting to be able to out that much is unrealistic.
The Flight of Gifted Engineers From NASA...
...ended with a bang because they mixed up centimetres and inches.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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i personally think, that nasa is better than spacex, because nasa is government funded entity and as such, MORE RELIABLE.
this opinion springs from blatant racism, race in-equality and overall ignorance
also, putin is bad.
How'ya fill out the form with no pencil?
*ducks*
It was lack of the political will to allow spacefarers to undertake hazardous missions. Because private space ventures are not subject to political pressure (except when they contract with NASA!) the flat-earth lobby can't touch them.
While your general theme is correct, you missed this:
After the Challenger exploded in 1986, President Reagan ordered the construction of a replacement orbiter (which was indeed built from the structural spares that were available from the initial production run). Sadly, NASA opted not two buy two at a steep discount - which the manufacturer offered. The replacement orbiter, which you appear to be unaware of, is named Endeavour. She first flew in 1992 and she is now on display in a museum in Los Angeles.
In general, however, I believe we should have started the design and production of a second-generation shuttle during the Bush41 administration to take advantage of all the lessons learned from the first decade of operations and the Challenger loss, and by the time Bush43 was in office we should have been designing and testing a third-gen fully-reusable system. On THAT timeline, routine airliner-like access to space would have been here in a few years and the manufacturers would have been in a position to manufacture and sell spaceplanes to commercial operators much like airliners are done
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Someone saw an open office where every nosy asshole can breathe over your shoulder and ask what you're doing on the computer, where you can hear that cock at the next desk chewing with his mouth open all day, and where the noise of the stupid bitch's iPhone who texts all day long goes ding ... ding ... ding ... ding. Someone saw this and thought, "screw the privacy of an office, this is for me"? WTF is wrong with people?
Bullshit
SpaceX has a large number of young (inexperienced) engineers. Originally, SpaceX was dominated by very skilled people "the top 1 or 2 percent of talent" to paraphrase Elon Musk. The Falcon 1, Merlin 1a, and Merlin 1c were developed by 2008, when SpaceX only employed a few hundred people. The Merlin 1a, in turn, was derived from the partially completed 'fastrack' rocket engine, that NASA started in 1996, to be a low cost rocket engine. I think those few thousand, young, inexperienced people are minions of the top few hundred.
Quite frankly, I think the SpaceX hype is disingenuous. America really has a military space program, and the military demands reliability, not low cost. SpaceX's customers are for cheap comsats, and food to the ISS. Elon Musk goes and talks about ULA and SpaceX rockets being equivalent, but they are not, and the stupid media just follows Elon around. SpaceX redesigned the Falcon 9 a little while ago. ULA has 70!!! consecutive successful launches. The media does not notice this, but the Air Force does.
Russia can make it look easy, because they launched over a thousand payloads on Soyuz during the Cold War. Many of those Soviet era workers, still work for the Space companies in Russia, and Russia's wages are lower than America's.
Otherwise, NASA is toast.
As long as NASA is a ring on the President Finger, NASA will suffer.
President, "You WILL suffer with ME."
The only real solution is to evaporate the Bureaucracy, i.e. humans in D.C. and its crony companies in California and elsewhere, through nuclear holocaust.
I worked for (several) government agencies. One was a spook house, and things moved reasonably fast. The other was a municipal agency: very. very. very. slow. Very little development. Massive amounts of bureaucracy (the apex of 3 unions, and 3 levels of management). More fun: I experienced the ideal form of micro-management... one person directly in charge of one other person. My boss was team leader, and I was the team. At one point, he spent 6 weeks locked in his office, coming up with a 3 line mission statement. Go go SpaceX. Expect to be challenged. Expect to make a difference. Expect to excel in your career. You won't ever have to attend a bored meeting (I didn't make a mistake: I meant to spell bored, not board). You might lose your job if things go very badly for the company, but you might be laid off from the government job too, having never had the chance to show what you can do.
Eventually commercial companies will end up like Siemens. Decisions will gradually take longer and longer, causing more and more engineers to be needed. This means that more bad engineers enter the company so more rules need to be set in place so those won't mess up to much. This will make the good engineers frustrated so they leave.
What you end up with is a company where your good engineers constantly evaporate, and you end up paying ridiculous amounts of money just to keep the rest. Those people will then feel like they actually know something since there are no better people to learn left in that company and they are paid huge amounts of money. This enforces their Krüger-Dunning-Effect and makes them toxic.
They don't understand how things work and therefore believe their ridiculous ideas are actually good. Those ideas cause more work and more frustration for the few good people who drift into the company.
In the end you'll end up with a huge amount of highly paid idiots bringing out inferior products. Since there rarely is competition in the real world, the company will stay in business. Should the company be in competition it is, by that point, already to big to fail and therefore will be saved by the government.
Yes, sounds like someone has tickets on themselves. Even if she is bone fide and got top marks at college, does that really mean she will be top of her field?
I disagree as to the cause. NASA's issue is NOT pay, NASA's issue is that it's been caught by the bureaucracy, and I know because I saw it firsthand.
Back in the day, NASA projects were urgent, so the rules were suspended. You could order parts and get them without going through government regs.These days it's months and months as it goes through channels.
Then there's the obsession with safety. "Failure is not an option" is killing NASA. I worked on a test satellite for them. The flight team came in at the end and said we couldn't fly it. We asked why, and they said some of the components in the satellite hadn't flown before. I exploded! If we can't fly new components on a test satellite, when could we ever fly them?! Things are somewhat better now, but that was the way it was when I was there.
And then there was the HR lady who came in and told us that all us white male engineers would never get a promotion until we got to a gender and racial balanced department. Like that would every happen. I left soon after that.
These days, being an engineer at NASA is little more than being a glorified project manager. It's the contractors at JPL and the like that get to do real engineering and that's because they don't have all the government red tape tying the employees' hands. Don't get me wrong, there's still more red tape dealing with the government than IBM, but contractors don't get all the crap that government employees get stuck with.
Maybe the Chinese will allow NASA astronauts to hitch a ride on their Mars expeditions
NASA does hire the gifted! None of my co-workers believed that these idiots at NASA and their hair-brain claims could have come from the gifted as it is surely politically incorrect to insult the gifted like this.
Amazing point! And further, work done by NASA is public domain, but work done by hired contractors is generally proprietary. I spoke with someone at NASA at an SSI conference who said NASA had a difficult time making realistic simulations of things like the space shuttle or space station because the contracts specified they would receive blueprints, not CAD files, and the contractors would not release the CAD files, so NASA had to reverse engineer them from blueprints. That is one story that inspired me to write essays like these on why government funded and charitably funded works (even in part) need to be released under free licenses: ..."
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-f...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open...
"Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research.
Even in the 1980s, I met an ex-NASA person who was somewhat disgusted by the fact that when he worked at NASA, he wanted to design and build stuff, but ended up having to manage contractors instead (and said that was most of what people at NASA did). That is one reason working at NASA sounded like a not so good idea if you actually were interested in creating new technology for supporting human life in space.
I can still dream of working at NASA developing simulations of life in space and releasing all the code and content in the public domain. I talked with Al Globus at NASA about such ideas around 2000 (in relation to my OSCOMAK proposal and his own supervision of NASA's educational efforts related to a space settlement/habitat contest), and he had some good suggestions about game-like aspects for a simulation of living off the land in space, but the ideas went nowhere back then. But at least, a decade later, we now have the proprietary programs of Kerbal Space Program and Space Engineers (and to a lesser extent MineCraft/InfiniMiner). In some ways, those simulation programs may be doing more for the development of space in terms of inspiring the next generation and teaching skills of design and cooperation than the last couple decades of NASA efforts involving real hardware (as important as they may be)?
Still, NASA has supported some educational simulations, like MoonBase Alpha, but is seems proprietary?
http://www.nasa.gov/offices/ed...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
"Moonbase Alpha is a video game that provides a realistic simulation of life on a natural satellite based on potential moon base programs. It was made by the Army Game Studio, developers of America's Army, and Virtual Heroes, Inc. in conjunction with NASA Learning Technologies. The game was released on July 6, 2010, as a free download on Steam.[2] At the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference in 2010, the games won the top honors in the government category of the Serious Game Showcase & Challenge.[3]"
But it looks proprietary even though NASA funded it, because I don;t see a free license for the source and content, even if it is "free to play"?
Looks like NASA is supporting other stuff, but again, proprietary stuff developed outside of NASA itself by contractors?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
"Starlite (formerly associated with Astronaut: Moon, Mars and Beyond) is the title of a multiplayer online game which as of November 25, 2009, is being
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I don't agree looks like blogger is out of touchæ.some old thinkerædude grow upæ private sector double at entry level compared to NASA pathwaysæ
Ignorent typical non educated government basher..
Thanks for the amusingly accurate XKCD link and insightful game comparison! I agree. However, it can be tricky to get a good game balance and have a good "microworld" framework for open-ended exploration. KSP pulls it off, whereas, say, our FOSS garden simulator from around 1997 does not.
http://www.gardenwithinsight.c...
That gardening simulator was written in part as a first step towards a space habitat simulator -- since you need to grow food even in space. Unfortunately, funding it ourselves for years (much of the living expenses for that work funded crazily on credit cards which took many years of doing unrelated work afterwards to repay), we had to triage out many of the open-ended interesting parts of gardening to get the first version done. We emphasized scientific accuracy as far as we could, which probably was a mistake compared to starting with simpler models. My wife and I both had been in a graduate program in ecology an evolution, so we has an academic bias. After the first version, we did not have time and resources to revisit it. We had hopes and sketches back then for activities like canning your own food, "survival" gardening where you had to grow enough calories or starve, interactions with neighbors, a virtual computer in the simulation where you did garden planning and looked up gardening info, and so on. A few vestiges of those remain, like the simulation being able to provide a calorie count of what you harvest. The open ended parts like designing your own tools, soil amendments, and plants were not that engaging in how they were implemented. By contrast, the "Harvest Moon" video game series emphasized fun parts of gardening for most people (like interactions with neighbors), although they lacked the science. It can be hard to bring that all together.
Here was a related (unfunded) NSF pre-proposal from 1997 for a second version of the garden simulator (never made) emphasizing creating an open-ended FOSS modeling environment for gardening-related models, but even that probably would not have been that much fun for most people even if it might have transformed the field of agricultural simulation:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
"The usual outcome of an effort such as ours is a commercially distributed software product with proprietary source code. However, research continues on modeling of soil processes and plant growth, and this product will soon fall out of step. A proprietary program may be a bridge, but no one can walk across it. By making the model source code available, we will bring scientists out from their side of the bridge to interact with the models, while at the other end of the bridge the general public will step out by changing the models themselves."
But that was before I understood "the Big Crunch" like Dr. David Goodstein talks about and how hard it was to get grant money of any sort: ... By now, in the 1990's, the situation has changed dramatically. With the Cold War over, National Security is rapidly losing its appeal as a means of generating support for scientific research. There are those who argue that research is essential for our economic future, but the managers of the economy know better. The great corporations have decided that central research laboratories were not such a good idea after all. Many of the national laboratories have lost their missions and have not found new ones. The economy has gradually transformed from manufacturing to service,
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...
"The period 1950-1970 was a true golden age for American science. Young Ph.D's could choose among excellent jobs, and anyone with a decent scientific idea could be sure of getting funds to pursue it. The impressive successes of scientific projects during the Second World War had paved the way for the federal government to assume responsibility for the support of basic research.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Great dynamic analysis of engineering social systems! For ways around this via skunkworks development, see William L. Livingston's writings, like "Have Fun At Work":
http://www.amazon.com/Have-Fun...
From a review: ... ...
http://infohost.nmt.edu/~shipm...
"It is dangerous, and often fruitless, to try and solve problems without considering the underlying social system.
This is the message of William L. Livingston, a mechanical engineer with over 100 patents and decades of industrial experience. Several books and a newsletter detail his disturbing but important worldview.
``Have Fun at Work'' (1988, ISBN 0-937063-05-3, $24.95) is the basic work.
The book sketches a different social structure that is better equipped to cope with complexity: the Skunkworks. The term comes from a legendary aircraft development shop that produced the U-2 and Blackbird aircraft. In general, a Skunkworks is a small (3--5) team of battle-hardened, generalist engineers equipped with the latest in software tools for simulating the behavior of all the involved systems (mechanical, electrical, software, and social).
On a purely practical level, this book is an excellent survival manual for results-oriented engineers who have developed attitude problems about the structural barriers to success in their work environments. Livingston discusses how to evaluate your social structure's potential for success, ways to get working projects out the door in spite of these barriers, and how to tell when you're wasting your time even working there.
Livingston's more recent work, ``Friends in High Places'' (1990, ISBN 0-937063-06-1, $28.50), spends less time discussing organizational pathologies and more time discussing the Skunkworks procedure. It is a somewhat more positive, less bitter work than ``Have Fun at Work.''"
I also think free and open source collaborations via "stigmergy" are another way around this, where people collaborate by adding to a shared digital artifact.
http://p2pfoundation.net/Stigm...
"3. Collaboration in small groups (roughly 2-25) relies upon social negotiation to evolve and guide its process and creative output.
4. Collaboration in large groups (roughly 25-n) is dependent upon stigmergy. "
Even at IBM Research, technologies like the Jikes Java compiler only got picked up by other groups because they were made open source. Otherwise the organizational barriers within a big organization like IBM would be too strong to use the tools. That was something mentioned somewhere by one of the authors as the biggest surprise of open sourcing Jikes, that other IBMers suddenly were using it.
http://jikes.sourceforge.net/
By contrast, back aound the same time Jikes went open source, I desperately wanted to try IBM's embedded Smalltalk (acquired from OTI) in a research project at IBM instead of using VxWorks for the portable IBM Personal Speech Assistant (a handheld speech recognizer and TTS system as a coprocesser to a Palm Pilot, a forerunner in a way to Siri and Google Voice). That other group said I would need to come up with about US$200,000+ worth of funding to their team before they would make their code available for use even just inside IBM, claiming they would have to dedicate a support person to it. Sadly, that was not feasible; I was only a contractor, and this was my own idea because I loved Smalltalk. So that technology did not get used at all in that project. Too bad for that group, because the then IBM chairman Lou Gerstner asked for one of the devices for his office to show people -- and wouldn't it have been nice for that IBM group if their technology had been used instead of or in addition to VxWorks?
If IBM/OTI Embedded Small
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.