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Comment by OnACoffeeBreak | Hacker News Reader

> Andrea is fond of pointing out that one of the reasons for her success has been this tight and rapid loop between the needs of the astronomers and the engineers who respond to the challenge.

As an engineer I always had this fantasy that it would be super cool to do engineering at a place like this or (specific to my fantasy) CERN. As a product engineer I would like to think that making something one-of--engineering for engineers and scientists-- would allow me to focus on just getting the thing to work in one specific setting. No dealing with longevity or RMA or other similar constraints.

I guess it's a fantasy about practicing "pure" engineering and design.

I call it a fantasy because I'm not convinced that that is how it would play out in the real world. I would love to hear from anyone familiar with this field.

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I work for Keck as a software engineer. What do you want to know? It's not all upside, working for pure science like this. We like to "fly the prototype", so to speak. Despite the challenges of it being a 25 year old pair of telescopes that are constantly climbing the far wall of the bathtub curve, it's a damn cool place to work at.

What do I way to know, eh? I guess the real thing I would like to know is how your job is different from product development for the public. I very much realize that it's an open ended question and is not answerable unless you've had experience doing what I do.

That said, here are some concrete questions. Do your projects get cancelled regularly for reasons other than engineering merrit? Do you get into a mode where you have to maintain projects that are "past their prime"? This one might be weird, but do you feel needed, as in do you feel like your contribution matters?

While I am asking these I realize that my fantasy bubble is busting and that maybe project requirements and management might not be that much different in our worlds, but I'd rather hear from someone in that world.

OK that's a good set of questions.

1) Is our job different from product development in the real world? Yes. I have worked for big business, I've done startups. It's categorically different here. We are responsible to maintain a set of telescopes and do science every night, that's our priority. Development of new capabilities is important but comes second after getting the "production" systems ready every day for observing.

2) Do projects get cancelled? Not from my perspective, things slow down sometimes and business priorities shift. We have new capabilities that come online over time and we spend development effort to get that integrated into the facility. It has a schedule and we spend our allocated time towards that.

3) Projects past their prime: yes, some things get really old and are built from unobtanium. Ever hear of a transputer? We make heroic efforts to keep that old stuff running and for the most part we get it done.

4) Does our contribution matter? Absolutely. Everyone is on task and really does a good job of keeping things running smoothly. I've been in industry for 25 years and I can see our team is on point and we are all doing a great job keeping it going. There is an enthusiasm I've not seen in other industries here. That's not to say it's all roses. We have shitty nights where everything seems to go wrong. That said we get it fixed the next day or so and keep on truckin'.

Don't take it for a fantasy, but it's a pretty neat situation we have here. If you are a software engineer we have a few openings. Working in Hawaii has it's peculiar challenges and it's not for everyone. Apply! You never know what could happen once you throw your hat in!

I'd love to hear a short description of the old stuff. Why isn't it replaced? Is it very hard to replace?

Replacing old stuff is a challenge. What is the effort to spin up a whole new widget that does the task, and how do we test it sufficiently to prove it has the same results as the old one? Do you need to run it on sky? If so, can you switch it on/off quickly so we can run the old stuff for science and run the new stuff on an engineering night to prove equivalency? It's difficult to replace but not impossible.

The best outcome you can hope for is some new instrument with better capabilities comes online before the old one dies horribly. For computing systems, we have projects to replace the old stuff with new machines and new OS's and take the time to work out the kinks and bits of tribal knowledge we realize all too late that we lost when so-and-so retired. This is not atypical in the computing industry.

In summary: yeah, things can be hard to replace. There's inertia associated with old systems you have to balance the thought to "string it along, ebay/graymarket a replacement" versus reinventing it.

I have done instrumentation work in US HEP. It is fun to do stuff nobody else (or very few) people are doing, in labs with very cool stuff, working with extremely smart people.

However there will be a few extremely smart jerks, and leadership seems to spend a lot of time applying/fighting for funding. I definitely got the sense that there was a pecking order. The PhDs are at the top, engineers and technicians don't get as much respect. Also in these days I hear that US national labs are moving to a more "flexible" model. In days past an engineer might be assigned to an experiment for the duration, but now leadership wants to be able to assign resources on a more fine-grained basis. (Though I think this is becoming more the case in industry too.)

All that said, if I was in a position to not mind a pay cut, I'd definitely consider going back to pure research.

I'm acquainted with someone that has a job that sounds like what you want. He's at a smaller university, runs a small machine shop, and mostly spends his time trying to creatively fab together whatever the science departments want constructed.

I’m a neuroscience PhD and this is the majority of what I end up working on. Large one-off systems engineering projects to enable new instrumentation for performing new types of experiments. It’s good fun, but there’s always a tension between doing something fast or right, and tape somehow always sneaks into the final product.

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