TBH, I'd really like to work for the FCC doing this stuff. I know it's grunt work, but it would be such a great end-of-career job to scrutinize hardware to the nth degree, and just have to worry about doing a precise job, not a fast one.
Seeing the kibble balance that is now the primary standard for mass measurement was particularly great!
And the work going into putting primary standards into the hands of thousands of people through the Nist-On-A-Chip project is absolutely amazing.
- They tell the most amazing stories of things they've seen come through the lab
- Their "projects" are basically maintaining and honing their (astonishing) test systems and building out their test capabilities
- Clients (we, at least) pay them by the day and often do a lot of the setup (for debug sessions, at least), leaving them to just facilitate
- They get to enjoy someone else's tension and release when a pesky prototype just barely passes a scan (with no stakes to them)