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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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
The Flight of Gifted Engineers From NASA...
...ended with a bang because they mixed up centimetres and inches.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
NASA isn't hot because it hasn't done anything since they retired the Space Shuttle in 2011.
I would suggest that the current malaise at NASA extends through the Shuttle program. Operating a first generation prototype for over a quarter of a century? Hell, just flying the same five vehicles for a quarter of a century (not even replacing those that crashed) is hardly a sign of a place that will thrill an innovative young engineer. It's more like a railway museum than a space agency.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
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 [...] Endeavour
I was going to add a comment about that, but it seemed unnecessarily pedantic. My point was there was no ongoing manufacturing capacity. The same is true of ISS modules, and nearly every other program. Build one unit, stop, disband the team, destroy the manufacturing base, operate the unit for five to ten years and then ask "What next?", start a new system entirely from scratch. Pretend all the while that doing it this way saves money.
For example:
In general, however, I believe we should have started the design and production of a second-generation shuttle during the Bush41 administration
Waiting a decade to begin developing Shuttle Mk II is exactly why NASA sucks so hard. For starters, the first version should have been severely reduced from the ambitions of the actual STS, minimising the number of new technologies for the first generation. Building a 100 tonne space-plane in a single generation was completely nuts. The aim would be whatever you can build in five years, not one day more. Each subsequent generation starts the moment the last first flies. (With early design work starting even sooner.) So the second generation would have started somewhere around 1975, flying by 1980. Third generation flying in '85, fourth generation around '90... But I'm proposing increments that are probably a fraction of the ones you were picturing.
And just to be pedantic, NASA did start work on successors to the Shuttle in that period. So did the USAF. Giant SSTO spaceplanes, like NASP then VentureStar, which repeated every mistake from the STS program. Pushing the state of the art beyond reasonable limits, while insisting that there are "no show stoppers", under-bidding and over-promising, then blowing budgets and under-delivering. Then when you get cancelled, scream for years about funding and a "lack of leadership".
From the other AC:
What about MSL?
MSL went significantly overbudget and overschedule. (Only the gob-smacking failures of JWST makes MSL's budget look reasonable.) But nonetheless, when it landed, people were excited... because NASA had "actually done something". Which suggests that not only are people excited about space, but they are starved for something to be excited about. It's worth noting that, unlike MER, Viking, etc, they built a single version of MSL with no possibility of a backup. Mars 2020 will be based on the same design, but again, will be a single unit. This is a trend at NASA. Like the 8 years between MSL and Mars 2020. Just long enough to lose most of the team, forget most of the lessons learned.
Similarly, not only did MER and MSL not carry any follow-ups to the Viking life experiments, neither will Mars 2020 even though "search for signs of (fossil) life on Mars!" is the centre of the NASA PR for Mars 2020.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
As a beautiful picture of a distant galaxy shown to a hungry child is not going to help that child when he's hungry, instead he needs food on the table, so that's how you make decisions on how to prioritize and spend money when the money is tight.
Money represents time and our current society has excess beyond belief. Anything that someone does that isn't farming is excess time. Money is not an issue. You want to talk about feeding the poor? It's not a money issue. The poor don't need to be fed by others, they need be educated and given a safe and healthy environment. Sending them food actually create more problems than it solves. Corruption forms around the influx of food donations and exacerbates issues.
What people once thought to be wasted money in tech that no one will ever use is now the backbone of EVERYTHING.
In our current point in history, we have a lot of excess time. We should be spending it exploring new tech and getting off this fleeting planet. It won't be habitable forever. We're due for another mass extinction, we best get moving, not getting chained down worrying about starving children in civil war torn areas.
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.
I would suggest that the current malaise at NASA extends through the Shuttle program. Operating a first generation prototype for over a quarter of a century? Hell, just flying the same five vehicles for a quarter of a century (not even replacing those that crashed) is hardly a sign of a place that will thrill an innovative young engineer. It's more like a railway museum than a space agency.
Flying the same expensive equipment for 30 years and more is not unusual if it lasts that long. For instance, look up the timeframes for which military aircraft stay operational. Many from the 1970s are still around.
I agree with GP though that failing to build a replacement in time does not make NASA look good.
Yeah, the military (and even commercial airlines) routinely fly planes for 25yrs or more... look at the B-52. But they also are at least looking at the 'next generation' right after they've finished the current model. Then again, the military tends to redesign from scratch to a large degree - although for a reason, they're generally 'cutting edge' (early F117 stealth vs. later stealth was mainly due to computer tech of the times, etc). NASA tries to do the same, whereas I think they would be better off more like the commercial airline industry - less based on 'uber high tech' (although they do introduce new tech over time), more on better fuel efficiency (cost per flight) and 'incremental' change from the last model(s).
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.