5 ms·

Yah, I'm not sure the assembly is the hard part (I know a couple engineers in their 20's that do just fine with assembly), or for that matter layering fortran o

Yah, I'm not sure the assembly is the hard part (I know a couple engineers in their 20's that do just fine with assembly), or for that matter layering fortran on said engineers. The problem is that none of them will likely be interested in working on a piece of hardware for 10 years that effectively is a dead end. Its the same decision that I looked a couple years ago with regard to mainframe development. Its a dead end and the longer you stay there the less employable you will be for your next job. AKA, if whoever gets the job at NASA is younger than the 50 Y/O's they are looking at, it should come with a pension, because getting the next job will be hard.

msh 11y ago
Well, I am not so sure. I think "wrote software for a space probe while at NASA" is going to look pretty eye-catching on a resume.
- technofiend 11y ago
  I ported the Fortran and assembly code to 'C' for computing stress on orbiter (aka the space shuttle) based on winds aloft data. We received the data from a weather balloon sent up on launch day. We even rolled our own work balancing and coordination system based on NQS. The UNIX code was far faster due to hardware speedups and parallelizing the code but it was much more resilient as well due to our putting in checkpointing and restart and recovery logic into the work manager and code. The project won a Silver Snoopy because we retired a Honeywell mainframe that was costing NASA $5 MM/yr in maintenance fees. I assume there was a guy or team of guys prepared to fabricate any component required at that price. :-) Because I was a contractor working for a contractor I did not receive a Silver Snoopy. Trust me, I regularly look for those little guys on ebay because I'd love to have one. I'm still cheesed about it twenty years later. Although it's a fun anecdote (and admittedly not nearly as cool as your example) I don't think it's garnered much more than a "that's cool" reaction from people. Probably too many other people running around Houston who've done similar things. If it would get me a job at Google I'd jump, but in a town full of ex-NASA employees it's nothing remarkable.
mywittyname 11y ago
> Its a dead end and the longer you stay there the less employable you will be for your next job. I don't understand why people have this mentality, because it's so wrong. We live in an era were kids can get jobs fresh out of high school after taking an eight-week crash course in programming an no other experience. Certainly a person capable of building robust software for NASA is capable of learning whatever platforms exist in 10 years. I've never had two jobs with an overlap in work. I've done everything from embedded development to data science and analytics. Being an expert in many fields demonstrates that know how to become an expert.
- ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
  That's an overly optimistic appraisal of the hiring process for tech-at least in 2015.
- walshemj 11y ago
  at my first job (after high shcool) I was told to get a FORTRAN IV book out of the company and learn it.
- mreiland 11y ago
  Seriously. Who the fuck is going to look at a resume with "last 10 years at NASA building shit for a MOTHERFUCKING DEEP SPACE PROBE" and go... nah, dude(tte) doesn't have node.js on his resume... NEXT!
  - netheril96 11y ago
    Automated resume scanner would do that.
  - hawkice 11y ago
    Honestly, I have spoken to and worked with some of these engineers, and if they've been ten years deep on software that has no capacity for errors at all, they can be a bit difficult. Not just "I can't use that tool, it has a garbage collector", but when they are put in front of a frontend, they end up re-inventing basic things constantly, because they have absolutely no context. Honestly, going from that kind of development to web development, "last 10 years" doesn't mean much -- they are essentially junior programmers again. Expect them to break things because they self-closed a script tag. Except them to break things because they forgot to set the button type to button and so some browsers POST. Heaven forbid you use tech where it doesn't default HTML and SQL escape. It's very very easy to forget the amount of extremely specific domain knowledge we all have that keeps things from imploding, and if they don't have it, their code doesn't hit production without a senior dev looking over it.

msh 11y ago

Well, I am not so sure. I think "wrote software for a space probe while at NASA" is going to look pretty eye-catching on a resume.

technofiend 11y ago
I ported the Fortran and assembly code to 'C' for computing stress on orbiter (aka the space shuttle) based on winds aloft data. We received the data from a weather balloon sent up on launch day. We even rolled our own work balancing and coordination system based on NQS. The UNIX code was far faster due to hardware speedups and parallelizing the code but it was much more resilient as well due to our putting in checkpointing and restart and recovery logic into the work manager and code. The project won a Silver Snoopy because we retired a Honeywell mainframe that was costing NASA $5 MM/yr in maintenance fees. I assume there was a guy or team of guys prepared to fabricate any component required at that price. :-) Because I was a contractor working for a contractor I did not receive a Silver Snoopy. Trust me, I regularly look for those little guys on ebay because I'd love to have one. I'm still cheesed about it twenty years later. Although it's a fun anecdote (and admittedly not nearly as cool as your example) I don't think it's garnered much more than a "that's cool" reaction from people. Probably too many other people running around Houston who've done similar things. If it would get me a job at Google I'd jump, but in a town full of ex-NASA employees it's nothing remarkable.

mywittyname 11y ago

> Its a dead end and the longer you stay there the less employable you will be for your next job. I don't understand why people have this mentality, because it's so wrong. We live in an era were kids can get jobs fresh out of high school after taking an eight-week crash course in programming an no other experience. Certainly a person capable of building robust software for NASA is capable of learning whatever platforms exist in 10 years. I've never had two jobs with an overlap in work. I've done everything from embedded development to data science and analytics. Being an expert in many fields demonstrates that know how to become an expert.

ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
That's an overly optimistic appraisal of the hiring process for tech-at least in 2015.
walshemj 11y ago
at my first job (after high shcool) I was told to get a FORTRAN IV book out of the company and learn it.
mreiland 11y ago
Seriously. Who the fuck is going to look at a resume with "last 10 years at NASA building shit for a MOTHERFUCKING DEEP SPACE PROBE" and go... nah, dude(tte) doesn't have node.js on his resume... NEXT!
- netheril96 11y ago
  Automated resume scanner would do that.
- hawkice 11y ago
  Honestly, I have spoken to and worked with some of these engineers, and if they've been ten years deep on software that has no capacity for errors at all, they can be a bit difficult. Not just "I can't use that tool, it has a garbage collector", but when they are put in front of a frontend, they end up re-inventing basic things constantly, because they have absolutely no context. Honestly, going from that kind of development to web development, "last 10 years" doesn't mean much -- they are essentially junior programmers again. Expect them to break things because they self-closed a script tag. Except them to break things because they forgot to set the button type to button and so some browsers POST. Heaven forbid you use tech where it doesn't default HTML and SQL escape. It's very very easy to forget the amount of extremely specific domain knowledge we all have that keeps things from imploding, and if they don't have it, their code doesn't hit production without a senior dev looking over it.