Sure. And yet Thomas Edison intentionally nodded off with a handful of ball bearings (to wake him up just as he nodded off) to help solve problems. Diffuse mo

Sure. And yet Thomas Edison intentionally nodded off with a handful of ball bearings (to wake him up just as he nodded off) to help solve problems. Diffuse mode learning, aka putting things on the back-burner can be very useful for solving complex problems. As any number of articles posted here can attest, there's more than one way to skin that particular cat. A lot of those programs probably are due to fold. At the end of the day that's up to the customer. As I said, we have competitors willing to snap up business on fairly short notice. Quite often the contracts are structured so that the customer can cancel them at will, no lock-in. Saying everyone involved should be fired is a carpet-bomb solution that risks punishing good talent. Sometimes the program you work on ends, or you want a career change, and take what looks like a good opportunity but turns out to be shit. Sometimes a change in leadership turns a good program bad and there are no good transfer opportunities. There are no glassdoor.com reviews for internal company programs, if you're lucky you get hearsay, and I've known many good engineers that were stuck on bad programs for some time before being able to transfer off. Fire the offenders sure, but it's not black and white. I wouldn't brush any of the criticism off, actually. I'm well aware of my company's institutional flaws, many of us gripe about them on a daily basis. But I think you'd be surprised how many of us bag lunch and work unpaid overtime when deadlines are near. I'm not defending my company, but I am defending most the engineers I've met there. A lot of us are actually hoping for some extra competition to shake up upper management. Hell we had no less than two dozen people, including a low-level manager watching the SpaceX live-stream when they landed the first Falcon 9, and we were as excited as anyone. We'd universally love to work on something like that, but we don't get to pitch contracts or control the money. I can't speak for the entire company, or even a substantial fraction of it, but that's my neck of the woods. The picture is not as black and white as you think. Don't let your passion or prior suffering blind your attention to detail. Yeah, my company sucks when it comes to vision (and some other things). Here's hoping SpaceX eventually makes us better in that regard. Not that my program's in danger anytime soon, we're not in SpaceX's direct line of business. I'm in my late 20s BTW.