4 ms·

I spent 7 years at JPL, which is run mostly like a national lab, based on this comment [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34414812 https://news.ycombinator.c

I spent 7 years at JPL, which is run mostly like a national lab, based on this comment [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34414812 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34414812] Is it a change of pace? Yes, but not in workload. You can easily work yourself to death if you let yourself. And politics happens everywhere -- usually in the form of missing the good projects. But the promotion frenzy is minimized, there's a sense of greater purpose in all the projects that is impossible to replicate anywhere else, and the technologists run everything. Managers help connect, but they don't typically determine your day to day priorities. In that sense, you can continuously shop around for good projects and teams without any formal change of position.

oso2k 4y ago
I second this comment. I spent the first 8.5 years of my career at JPL as well. My first project out of college was writing testing support tools for the Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) Project. I sat 10 feet from a small window into the Spacecraft Assembly Facility (SAF Building 179). Got to watch the rovers take their first steps. Got to do a ton of interesting things, from Satellite Radio Software Stack Testing (QA), to Project Planning Systems, to first steps into Cloud Computing. Got to fill out forms that placed some of my work into the National Archives. Also don't forget there's other FFRDCs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federally_funded_research_and_development_centers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federally_funded_research_and_...) in the US.