5 ms·

Circa Apollo 11 the average age of a NASA engineer was 28. In 2009 it was 47. There is this constant infantilization of people where once you’re an adult you

Circa Apollo 11 the average age of a NASA engineer was 28. In 2009 it was 47. There is this constant infantilization of people where once you’re an adult you don’t think anyone younger than you is capable of anything. It’s a big problem that this has been creeping into how we treat people like children at continually older ages. Nobody knows how to do things when they start doing them, and they won’t until they do start. Delaying this to an older age makes this harder not easier.

i_love_cookies 4y ago
The education hurdle and objective goals of nasa also changed a lot
bobkazamakis 4y ago
>It’s a big problem that this has been creeping into how we treat people like children at continually older ages. Isn't this a bit flimsy? Eventually, we'll treat all people younger as those who have room to grow -- isn't that to be expected? "like children" is relative.
brazzy 4y ago
GP was criticizing having entire teams including team leads who are too young to have much experience, when there are people around who do have that experience. How do you get from that to "Delaying this to an older age"? > Circa Apollo 11 the average age of a NASA engineer was 28. In 2009 it was 47. That has absolutely nothing to do with "treating people like children at continually older ages" Circa Apollo 11, the average age of the American population was 29. Today it is 38. In addition to that, NASA had its budget increase over 1000% between 1960 and 1965, so it had to hire a lot of new people for doing something nobody had done before. That is a very different situation than in 2009, when its (inflation adjusted) budget was around half the peak and had been slowly declining for almost 20 years. You don't hire a lot of people in that situation, so your workforce automatically ages.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  In 1965 Margaret Hamilton was in charge of all of the Command Module software for Apollo at the age of 29. It wasn’t just young underlings led by experienced engineers.
  - mixmastamyk 4y ago
    You two are arguing extremes. Nothing remarkable with a 29-year-old engineer leading a team of a few other engineers. (29 is a lot different than ~23) Head of huge mission-critical project? Retired at forty? Nope.
kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
There were a lot of WW2 and Korea draftees in the workforce during the 50s and 60s. Their early adult life experiences were significantly different from that of today's Americans.
- edgyquant 4y ago
  irrelevant.
ssivark 4y ago
> constant infantilization of people So the solution to avoid infantilizing them is to organize through scrum, standups and sprints? :P (which is where the discussion started) That said, it's fair to say that a lot of young people are capable of far more than contemporary culture (or management) recognizes.
- pas 4y ago
  do you have a very loosely defined goal in an uncertain environment? then, yes, try to adopt an iterative workflow.
  - zasdffaa 4y ago
    This has never happened to me or anywhere I've worked (except see below) because we always had reasonably defined goals, maybe at the high-level only, but they were clear and we could work on them. Except for research projects you should have a pretty clear understanding of what's needed because business is a pretty dull, straightforward thing. Okay, the exceptions: management failures. When them who should be doing their job are too fucking incompetent to pull their finger out of their arses. Years ago I worked at one place where they had 3 home-made frameworks floating around the company. A framework was clearly needed, management just dithered, so 3 different programmers just got on with it and did the necessary creation. Triple the work done, and an inevitable political war was brewing over which one would be used. And this was a medium sized company producing accounting software, not some inexperienced startup. Oh yes, I do have other stories like this... Crap management is a curse. It's always management IME. Fuckers seem to breed like rabbits too. Yes I am bitter.
- coryfklein 4y ago
  If you read the OP, the word "sprint" is used in its less formal definition of "working long hours for an extended period of time", not in the formal description of an AGILE time-boxed work period.
titzer 4y ago
> Circa Apollo 11 the average age of a NASA engineer was 28. In 2009 it was 47. I find this highly dubious because circa Apollo 11 the space program employed its largest workforce ever, including bazillions of mechanical engineers making nuts and bolts. A more meaningful comparison would be what the average age of the managers and leadership are/were.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  Mechanical engineers are not machinists. They help but don't actually do the production work.
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  It kind of makes sense. Space program was in its infancy, so I would also expect the workforce knowledgeable about space to be in its infancy, because it's not like there were experienced people putting satellites in orbit in the '20s, let alone an education pipeline for it. And those were back in the days when people got pensions and had loyalty to companies and whatnot. By 2009 the industry was old enough to have people close to retirement age who had studied it in college.
1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
"Circa Apollo 11 the average age of a NASA engineer was 28. In 2009 it was 47." That data point is from a 2006/2008 report^1; that data refers not only to NASA "engineers" but to all NASA "civil servants". It probably does not include the JPL as that is a NASA contractor, managed by Caltech. JPL employees are not civil servants. After reading the 2006 report, as updated in 2008, I am having difficulty understanding how this single data point from 2006 is evidence of the "constant infantilization of people". Some further "evidence" would be appreciated to help me understand. Below is how the report explains the age distribution of civil servants at NASA in 2006/2008. (This does not tell us what is the age distribution at NASA today. To get an idea of just how dated is this report, check out the quote the author pulls from the Strauss and Howe (2000) book titled Millennials Rising.^2) "Even today, NASA has an extremely low attrition rate. With an average rate of 4.6% per year, the NASA workforce does not turn over very quickly.11 This rate is below NASAs own historical rate, far below the private sector rates, and even below those rates of other Federal Agencies.12 Most attrition comes from retirement-eligible employees. The attrition rate among Boomers in their forties is extremely low, about 1% per year and members of Generation X have about a 4% attrition rate. The Generation X attrition rate at NASA is lower than the Generation X attrition rate at all other Federal Agencies. To fill critical positions, there has been a low level of full-time, permanent hiring at all times.13 Importantly, the demographics of this hiring have changed over time. Priority was given to fill critical positions to minimize gaps in core competencies, so the trend in hiring has been to hire older, more experienced workers who could best fill those gaps. This has meant that in 1993, NASA was hiring primarily members of the Boomer generation and in 2005 is still primarily hiring members of the Boomer generation. 1. http://web.archive.org/web/20091211095752if_/http://www.opennasa.com:80/wp-content/documents/NexGenExplorers.pdf http://web.archive.org/web/20091211095752if_/http://www.open... 2. "In obvious contrast, members of the Millennial generation tend to have starkly different views of employment and government. Entry-level youths will be attracted to solid companies with career ladders and standardized pay and benefits. They will be less attracted to consulting, contracting, temping, freelancing, or new business startups. Millennials will be less inclined than Xers were at like age to take big career risks or turn their personal lives inside out to make more money.5"
aboodman 4y ago
I don’t understand how this comment relates to my tweet. I agree with you that nobody knows how to do anything and won’t until they start. That’s why you really want to spend some time working with highly experienced people, in whatever career you choose. I’m not talking about some vague concept of “leadership”. Most of the experienced engineers I worked with on Chrome weren’t even officially “leads”. They were individual contributors just like me. I’m talking about the nitty gritty day to day details of writing robust reliable software. Class or function here? How should I test this? How should we detangle this spaghetti code? What order should we conquer this bug list in? If you want to make a good software product it’s best to have people on your team who have made many software products before successfully.

i_love_cookies 4y ago

The education hurdle and objective goals of nasa also changed a lot

bobkazamakis 4y ago

>It’s a big problem that this has been creeping into how we treat people like children at continually older ages. Isn't this a bit flimsy? Eventually, we'll treat all people younger as those who have room to grow -- isn't that to be expected? "like children" is relative.

brazzy 4y ago

GP was criticizing having entire teams including team leads who are too young to have much experience, when there are people around who do have that experience. How do you get from that to "Delaying this to an older age"? > Circa Apollo 11 the average age of a NASA engineer was 28. In 2009 it was 47. That has absolutely nothing to do with "treating people like children at continually older ages" Circa Apollo 11, the average age of the American population was 29. Today it is 38. In addition to that, NASA had its budget increase over 1000% between 1960 and 1965, so it had to hire a lot of new people for doing something nobody had done before. That is a very different situation than in 2009, when its (inflation adjusted) budget was around half the peak and had been slowly declining for almost 20 years. You don't hire a lot of people in that situation, so your workforce automatically ages.

colechristensen 4y ago
In 1965 Margaret Hamilton was in charge of all of the Command Module software for Apollo at the age of 29. It wasn’t just young underlings led by experienced engineers.
- mixmastamyk 4y ago
  You two are arguing extremes. Nothing remarkable with a 29-year-old engineer leading a team of a few other engineers. (29 is a lot different than ~23) Head of huge mission-critical project? Retired at forty? Nope.

kevin_thibedeau 4y ago

There were a lot of WW2 and Korea draftees in the workforce during the 50s and 60s. Their early adult life experiences were significantly different from that of today's Americans.

edgyquant 4y ago
irrelevant.

ssivark 4y ago

> constant infantilization of people So the solution to avoid infantilizing them is to organize through scrum, standups and sprints? :P (which is where the discussion started) That said, it's fair to say that a lot of young people are capable of far more than contemporary culture (or management) recognizes.

pas 4y ago
do you have a very loosely defined goal in an uncertain environment? then, yes, try to adopt an iterative workflow.
- zasdffaa 4y ago
  This has never happened to me or anywhere I've worked (except see below) because we always had reasonably defined goals, maybe at the high-level only, but they were clear and we could work on them. Except for research projects you should have a pretty clear understanding of what's needed because business is a pretty dull, straightforward thing. Okay, the exceptions: management failures. When them who should be doing their job are too fucking incompetent to pull their finger out of their arses. Years ago I worked at one place where they had 3 home-made frameworks floating around the company. A framework was clearly needed, management just dithered, so 3 different programmers just got on with it and did the necessary creation. Triple the work done, and an inevitable political war was brewing over which one would be used. And this was a medium sized company producing accounting software, not some inexperienced startup. Oh yes, I do have other stories like this... Crap management is a curse. It's always management IME. Fuckers seem to breed like rabbits too. Yes I am bitter.
coryfklein 4y ago
If you read the OP, the word "sprint" is used in its less formal definition of "working long hours for an extended period of time", not in the formal description of an AGILE time-boxed work period.

titzer 4y ago

> Circa Apollo 11 the average age of a NASA engineer was 28. In 2009 it was 47. I find this highly dubious because circa Apollo 11 the space program employed its largest workforce ever, including bazillions of mechanical engineers making nuts and bolts. A more meaningful comparison would be what the average age of the managers and leadership are/were.

colechristensen 4y ago
Mechanical engineers are not machinists. They help but don't actually do the production work.
bobthepanda 4y ago
It kind of makes sense. Space program was in its infancy, so I would also expect the workforce knowledgeable about space to be in its infancy, because it's not like there were experienced people putting satellites in orbit in the '20s, let alone an education pipeline for it. And those were back in the days when people got pensions and had loyalty to companies and whatnot. By 2009 the industry was old enough to have people close to retirement age who had studied it in college.

1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago

"Circa Apollo 11 the average age of a NASA engineer was 28. In 2009 it was 47." That data point is from a 2006/2008 report^1; that data refers not only to NASA "engineers" but to all NASA "civil servants". It probably does not include the JPL as that is a NASA contractor, managed by Caltech. JPL employees are not civil servants. After reading the 2006 report, as updated in 2008, I am having difficulty understanding how this single data point from 2006 is evidence of the "constant infantilization of people". Some further "evidence" would be appreciated to help me understand. Below is how the report explains the age distribution of civil servants at NASA in 2006/2008. (This does not tell us what is the age distribution at NASA today. To get an idea of just how dated is this report, check out the quote the author pulls from the Strauss and Howe (2000) book titled Millennials Rising.^2) "Even today, NASA has an extremely low attrition rate. With an average rate of 4.6% per year, the NASA workforce does not turn over very quickly.11 This rate is below NASAs own historical rate, far below the private sector rates, and even below those rates of other Federal Agencies.12 Most attrition comes from retirement-eligible employees. The attrition rate among Boomers in their forties is extremely low, about 1% per year and members of Generation X have about a 4% attrition rate. The Generation X attrition rate at NASA is lower than the Generation X attrition rate at all other Federal Agencies. To fill critical positions, there has been a low level of full-time, permanent hiring at all times.13 Importantly, the demographics of this hiring have changed over time. Priority was given to fill critical positions to minimize gaps in core competencies, so the trend in hiring has been to hire older, more experienced workers who could best fill those gaps. This has meant that in 1993, NASA was hiring primarily members of the Boomer generation and in 2005 is still primarily hiring members of the Boomer generation. 1. http://web.archive.org/web/20091211095752if_/http://www.opennasa.com:80/wp-content/documents/NexGenExplorers.pdf http://web.archive.org/web/20091211095752if_/http://www.open... 2. "In obvious contrast, members of the Millennial generation tend to have starkly different views of employment and government. Entry-level youths will be attracted to solid companies with career ladders and standardized pay and benefits. They will be less attracted to consulting, contracting, temping, freelancing, or new business startups. Millennials will be less inclined than Xers were at like age to take big career risks or turn their personal lives inside out to make more money.5"

aboodman 4y ago

I don’t understand how this comment relates to my tweet. I agree with you that nobody knows how to do anything and won’t until they start. That’s why you really want to spend some time working with highly experienced people, in whatever career you choose. I’m not talking about some vague concept of “leadership”. Most of the experienced engineers I worked with on Chrome weren’t even officially “leads”. They were individual contributors just like me. I’m talking about the nitty gritty day to day details of writing robust reliable software. Class or function here? How should I test this? How should we detangle this spaghetti code? What order should we conquer this bug list in? If you want to make a good software product it’s best to have people on your team who have made many software products before successfully.