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Comment by xqcgrek2 | Hacker News Reader

Different NASA centers have very different cultures, with their pros and cons. JPL is known to have a tendency to overpromise and underdeliver.

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This is kind of a weird take. I used to work at JPL but I didn't stay due to it not being the right cultural fit for me.

With that said, my perspective as a former NASA insider is that JPL is known for the exact opposite, underperforming and overdelivering.

I mean, they have a nearly perfect track record of mission success (sorry Beagle) and when the missions do succeed they often persist for many times over the original lifetime requirement.

Additionally, and yes this is a vast oversimplification, if you just look generally at space exploration missions, they are far more prolific than any other NASA center.

> This is kind of a weird take. I used to work at JPL but I didn't stay due to it not being the right cultural fit for me.

Any war stories you want to share?

Nothing particularly interesting. I was very junior during my time there, working modeling and simulation tools for spacecraft that had already been up for over a decade.

I did get to be present and watch the telemetry stream cut out as Cassini (purposely) crashed into the Saturnian atmosphere and was obliterated. Lots of people had spent two decades of their lives with that spacecraft. Many cheered and many cried.

> I did get to be present and watch the telemetry stream cut out as Cassini (purposely) crashed into the Saturnian atmosphere and was obliterated. Lots of people had spent two decades of their lives with that spacecraft. Many cheered and many cried.

I remember this well, I saw the footage of the footage they shot during the event on the lawn at CalTech as it happened in a presentation I attended with one of the members of the program at CU Boulder a few days/weeks after the 'end of mission.'

It looked incredibly emotive, did you decide to leave JPL for private Industry?

I can't imagine you wanted to stay in the public sector (NASA) if that is how you felt about it; I say that despite having conflicting views from two who worked at the AIMS program: Josiah Zayner (Biohacker) was disgruntled, whereas Shannon Rupert (Director of MDRS) has continued her work with both Mars Society and NASA.

I answered more in depth about why I left above, but basically the work environment felt a little too academic and a little too static for my liking Aerospace is my passion, so I’m still in that world. But just somewhere in private industry where things change a little more rapidly.

What about the culture made it not a good fit?

This is all my personal experience working there for two years as an extremely junior engineer more than five years ago, so take with a grain of salt.

JPL’s culture is very academic in nature. I mean JPL is literally an arm of Caltech that contracts exclusively to NASA and a limited set of other federal bodies. My experience was that there wasn’t a huge focus there on career growth. Many people there seemed to be happy to spend decades doing basically the same job. And don’t get me wrong, it’s a great place to work. A lot of incredible technical talent and extremely interesting people work there just because it’s JPL. The campus is gorgeous, Pasadena is an insanely nice place to live. Downside is JPL salaries are on the low end even for aerospace and Pasadena is expensive.

Personally I just wanted a more dynamic work environment.

I used to work at JPL and I have been a vocal critic of theirs at times but I think you are completely off the mark here. Most of the time JPL delivers. (It's actually pretty amazing when you have seen how the sausage gets made.)

Can you give any insight on how Psyche failed? I mean we have the report but I still don't understand how any of that could happen.

Sorry, no, I have been gone from there for many years. All I know about what goes on there nowadays is what I read in the papers.

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