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Comment by glimshe | Hacker News Reader

I would go further... This project gives a rare opportunity for a young engineer to learn to build truly mission critical, resilient software while requiring complete, top to bottom understanding of the software and hardware stack.

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I am no longer a junior, but would have been upset to be tasked with refreshing the old historical obsolete laundry (no matter how sacred or distinguished), expecially when I already had experience delivering safety critical products packing much more modern technologies.

The opportunity they would be offering is not rare at all! The opportunity to research and design something truly new on the other way is very scarce.

What have you worked on that is as cool as a space probe that's cruising in interstellar space and still collecting valuable data?

There are a lot of things as cool as, done by people I know, such as the gyros on the Webb telescope, the APU in the F-35, or a small rack-mountable Cesium reference clock, but there aren't many opportunities like that.

That's the thing. You only have the cool factor, but that wears off very quickly when you are maintaining legacy code and tools and then your collegues are playing with the new hot and shiny toys.

I won't write about the projects I've been involved with for privacy, but to give you an idea some of my old team members were involved in ams-02 for example.

You would be able to go to your grave saying "I worked on the Voyager project." That will never not be interesting, or memorable.

Is that because juniors want to leave their name on something? I ask honestly since I shared a lot of the same sentiment as you, and never quite got an understanding as to why working on the cool new thing was "more fun" even if a lot of the projects under-the-hood were recycled.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

> We’re programmers.

> Programmers are, in their hearts, architects, and the first thing they want to do when they get to a site is to bulldoze the place flat and build something grand.

> We’re not excited by incremental renovation: tinkering, improving, planting flower beds.

He's very wrong.

Also, many decisions taken Probably can be traced to limitations / idiosincracies of the era

And you're left with a codebase that has been in hands of 6 Decades of probably great engineers that have already done a lot, plus any of the arcane cruft of such a long lived and esoteric project

It's a great CV highlight, but I don't know if it's the best learning opportunity

>> The opportunity they would be offering is not rare at all!

The opportunity to maintain software running on a spacecraft is not rare? I don't think so. And those two particular spacecrafts? I'd take that job in a flash.

Even all that to the side, it lets you say you worked on the Voyager project!

If I'm reviewing CVs and I see that you worked at NASA on the Voyager code, you're getting an interview just so I can ask about it.

I wouldn't normally approve of CV driven development, but for this?!

I agree, and I would think the same, but I also feel like many things I've been sold as "door openers" for interviews unfortunately tend to ultimately be things that no one cares about.

I think people tend to squander door openers with bad layouts or information density. Most CVs are essentially the same as each other, just a bullet point list of jira ticket titles.

Do I care if someone has won the world championship for ping-pong 3 years in a row? Not particularly. Does it make them stand out against a sea of slop? Only if I actually see that info when skimming! But if I do see it, I'm probably going to stop and re-read the whole thing, which is a tactical advantage.

So you're giving me an idea for my midlife career change CV. Lead with the cool and interesting fact above all else, then have the normal CV menu fare at the end.

Hmm this is also drumming up the hard question of: What have I actually done which is ACTUALLY an attention-grabber...

You could work on the Voyager project.

But would you give them a job? Would they even match the requirements?

I would assume they have built some key problem-solving skills that can be valuable. Training in tooling is much easier than building the right mindset.

But the required midset today is "move fast and break things"...

> But would you give them a job?

That's what the interview is to find out, isn't it?

> Would they even match the requirements?

I would assume if they got a job at NASA working on mission critical systems, they probably exceed the requirements of my startup

There are a whole lot of people in this thread who would rather tell their grandkids that they worked on web apps and sold ads.

It's a tragedy some of our best minds are dedicated to that, and digital surveillance so their corporate masters can sell better targeted ads with a higher click-thru rate.

I really think it's overly generous to throw people who do not understand the importance of extending Voyager's scientific mission into the "our best minds" category. I guess I agree with the larger point.

Well… some of the best minds are doing actual useful stuff. Sadly, most aren’t.

Q: What was the hardest debugging problem you had?

A: I had a very slow network connection to the computer, and it was 23 light-hours away from me.

It also gives a rare opportunity to fuck things up and fail a mission that nobody else fucked up in ~50 years.

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