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Comment by jcadam | Hacker News Reader

Just a bit of warning: Software Engineering in Aerospace is NOT fun. You're basically in a supporting role to the hardware and system engineers designing the spacecraft. It's pure drudgery... process to the point of absurdity, specs and tasks being spoon fed to you with little room for creativity and/or problem solving, etc.

The pay, benefits, and level of respect on the job reflect all of that.

If you really want to work in space, I'd go and get a MS (or higher) in aerospace engineering or space systems engineering and work at the systems level.

I got out of aerospace and am much happier for it.

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To be fair, the reason for this is that if you try to be creative and don't follow strict processes, things fail a million miles from Earth or blow up entirely.

Oh, I admit there are good reasons for it. And there are people who prefer such a rigid, structured, and slow-paced environment. I ran into plenty while I was stuck doing that sort of work.

Good for them. The world needs such people, probably in much greater numbers than it needs people like me -- if it needs people like me at all :)

Nothing wrong with that. But you should know what you are getting into.

You mean the strict processes that strictly demanded mixing imperial and SI units ?

The strict processes that got even more strict after they realized they weren't being strict enough when they mixed imperial and SI units.

> You mean the strict processes that strictly demanded mixing imperial and SI units ?

You're describing a mistake that happened literally 20 years ago. Don't you think they might have changed the processes in all that time?

I really like building software that's rock solid. I never did aerospace systems, but I'm sure I'd be happy in that space.

Sadly, no need to fly me to the hardware to apply patches... :-(

Agreed. I have talked to people at JPL and all their tools are completely outdated, they have no room for creativity and everything they do is constantly watched and reviewed. Unless you are way up in leadership this doesn’t seem much fun.

Maybe it works at a startup where they try do something completely new but as soon as your stuff gets close to production it won’t be much fun.

This is an over generalization.

There’s a big range of agility at JPL depending on how close your work is to spacecraft operations. Here are two current job openings placed by good groups at JPL that many people here would find challenging and innovative —

https://jpl.jobs/jobs/2018-9779-Senior-Software-Engineer-Aut... (group webpage: https://ai.jpl.nasa.gov/)

https://jpl.jobs/jobs/2019-10706-Big-Data-Analytics-Software...

I think what they build doesn’t run on any probe but on Earth so the world doesn’t go under if they make mistakes . It’s the same in medical. The closer you get to the patient the more regulation you get.

I agree with your medical analogy.

Like I said, there’s a range of work at JPL, and some of the autonomy work by the linked group most definitely has run on Mars and in Earth orbit.

I worked for that AI group for a little while 20 years ago. It was one of my favorite jobs, but did not pay competitively (maybe it would've if I'd had a degree) and you're right that my code never flew (though others had better luck there).

Oh, to continue the theme I also interviewed for a couple of startups spun off by JPL people. The one that got to an offer offered way less money than the big internet company I was also interviewing with then.

Thanks for your insight. I was actually eyeing the "space systems engineering" degrees. If I did ever make a move I'd probably want to transition from the individual contributor software engineer to something higher level (like you say, systems level). Space seems super interesting from the outside looking in, but I supposed there is a lot of careful work involved given the higher stakes, which makes the process much slower than most software companies.

Probably won't actually make the switch, but just interested in seeing what's out there I guess.

I have to agree with this. Tons of extremely smart people, but day to day was hell in the software side.

I had to agree. Never thought that web development would be more than aerospace software development. Hopefully, our project will change that part.

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