Hacker News Reader

Comment by sailfast | Hacker News Reader

They had these kinds of programs for a long time, but many of the engineers were vilified and the programs disbanded as soon as this administration took office. I'm not sure why someone would sign up to work for a government that has no respect for its employees (or a company for that matter) if they already have gainful employment.

In fact, a bunch of NASA labs were recently closed where folks with this exact skillset could do these exact jobs. Why re-post under a different skin and expect a different result?

View on HN

Well... the TSA was a jobs program for people who couldn't or didn't want to get jobs as cops. Stennis (Space Flight Center) is a jobs program for Aero Engineering grads to keep them from going to work in Europe or India. Who knows... we might need them to design newer expensive missile systems sometime.

There are all these 30-60 year old engineers who look like they should be good hires on paper, but the tech economy has been pooping out bullshit products (and jobs) for the last 20 years. The last "real" job I had... my official role was to sit at a desk and "coordinate" development. While no one was looking, I wrote code and passed it off to a dev in India to check in (US engineers weren't allowed to check in code.) My job at Amazon was similar... the higher up the food chain you went, the less management understood what engineers did (modulo a few notable exceptions -- the guy who ran Route 53 when it launched was amazingly tech saavy for a VP level manager.)

There's only so much idiocy you can expect the tech industry to digest. It's time to send engineers to the government so they can write documents about how we should evaluate the requirements for evaluation criteria.

> I wrote code and passed it off to a dev in India to check in (US engineers weren't allowed to check in code.)

...usually it's the other way around.

May I ask what the situation was? Reverse-outsourcing by the Indian central government?

Not OP. Sounds like he was considered to be a manager and wasn't allowed to get into the weeds. So instead of just managing the off shore team, he wrote some of the code for them and then let them take credit for it.

Which also means that he wasn't doing his job (management) and instead micromanaging his staff by doing their job.

This is such a common problem with highly technical managers because they can't seem to understand how to change focus or scope and do their jobs better. Instead they fall back on trying to ship features thinking that this is productive and to pat themselves on the back for staying technical.

I was not a manager. I was hired as a software engineer.

Yes and No. My job title was "Software Engineer," though my management chain told me my role was "Product Owner." Agile was fine at the beginning when it was a few people who knew what they were doing, but it's become a load of horse-shit.

The issue was that my management chain was concerned that my time was too valuable to be spent writing code. And there's a yes-and-no in this one. I was a reasonably well paid US-based software engineer, so yes, my time was valuable. And yes, some of the non-coding tasks I performed were probably more impactful than writing code. But... code + machine parsable specifications + docs + tests are very good ways of communicating exactly what you want.

I'm just sort of laughing thinking about what my old management chain would think if they knew our India based devs and I were using TLA+ as the core of our specification / documentation. Actually, I doubt they would understand it.

We did nothing and it’s not getting better. Do nothing harder.

If you go in expecting you can do nothing and you can’t change the world around you then congrats, you will succeed in all you do.

We had a working system. It was the current administration that slashed NASA's budget and castrated the JPL aerospace employment pipeline. NASA's talent shortage is a self-inflicted wound.

Panic-firing and panic-reemploying your workforce every <4 years is not a sustainable rate of attrition for professional, research-oriented culture.

It's funny to me how much this administration gets the blame for everything. NASA would had been widely regarded as schlerotic and archaic before these most recent budget cuts. Filled with beaurocrats who didn't even know what their job was. But, the budget gets cut under Trump and now the rot in the organization is forgotten.

I don't think they should have their budget cut but they weren't a great agency before and were still declining.

A program like this, targeting younger people for short stints sense like a great way to bring in some new blood and ideas. Hopefully they can do something innovative that gets people thinking that investing in NASA is worth it.

It's funny to me how quickly people leap in front of the train to pretend like this fixes everything. NASA still has an anemic culture, and opening the door to interns is not a replacement for their failing talent acquisition. Budget cuts, revoked contracts and fired personnel will not stimulate positive change either.

> they weren't a great agency before and were still declining.

"Were"? They are. You're again giving premature credit to a policy that hasn't worked yet and ostensibly throttled NASA's capabilities. This is this administration's problem as much as it was Biden's, Trump 1's, and Obama's. You don't have to come in here with a chip on your shoulder just because I'm blaming the current iteration of the disaster.

> "Were"? They are. You're again giving premature credit to a policy that hasn't worked yet and ostensibly throttled NASA's capabilities.

I didn't assert otherwise. In fact, I clearly stayed that I _hoped_ this move would help. The status quo certainly wasn't working and I could see a way for this move to be helpful.

I'm not saying it's a great idea and it'll for sure work but, I guess, fuck me for trying to be optimistic about a decision made by this administration...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com