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It sounds like he was/is a personable engineering manager that paid attention to detail. Making sure parts match the drawings, bringing in outsiders to have a s

It sounds like he was/is a personable engineering manager that paid attention to detail. Making sure parts match the drawings, bringing in outsiders to have a second look at things, etc.

bryananderson 3y ago
Basically this, and it’s a bigger deal than it may sound. Competent technical management is a scarce commodity worth its weight in gold around NASA Goddard. A lot of (both frontline and upper) management has no technical background and it shows. JWST was a shambles when I interned there in 2014. Eternally delayed and broken due to nonsensical decisions by management with absolutely zero engineering knowledge. Sometime in the 90s they had decided to save money on devs by “auto-generating” the code from UML diagrams using this thing called Rational Rose. In the mid-2010s they were still trying to fix the code. I never quite figured out if it was an urban legend, but there was also a story around Goddard that when JSWT did its acoustic testing (to simulate launch conditions), a bunch of screws fell off—and when they put them back, they were left with several extra screws that nobody ever figured out the place for. So that’s the state the program was in. Greg Robinson seems to be an engineering manager who’s actually highly competent at both the engineering and the management, and that’s exactly what the program needed to turn around. Honestly, when I was there I thought there was very little chance this thing would actually work, if it ever launched at all, so major props to him and the team. I saw this in way more programs than just JWST. Word would get around among us contractors that X program had real technical management and Y didn’t, and we’d all try to get onto X. If you got stuck on Y, you’d spend most of your time doing paperwork and PowerPoint instead of coding. It happened in the civil service too. Most of the branches in the software division had non-technical leadership and seemed to do little of note, but the few with technical leaders did incredible work. I remember one time a previously-good branch had its head depart (promoted?) and the new head wasn’t technical at all, and over a few months most of the good civil servants transferred somewhere else. At one point it seemed like most of the progress in the software division was being driven by one rather obscure-sounding branch, simply because that was the one with sound technical leadership and thus all the good engineers.
- wil421 3y ago
  Why are there so many non technical managers/directors in charge of engineering or IT in Government type jobs? My wife sells to state and local governments. 90% of the time the people in charge have no idea about IT, SecOps, Software Development etc. Their only qualification is they have engineering or security in their title.
  - otteromkram 3y ago
    Gatekeeping, probably. (Only half joking; the cult of personality in IT can be pretty toxic.) Plus, most people in tech got into their field because they like tech. Managing people isn't nearly as fun or rewarding to them.
  - BurningFrog 3y ago
    There is less pressure to perform well in government, so it becomes less prioritized than in organizations that may cease to exist if they perform badly.
  - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
    It's not just government jobs.
    - borg16 3y ago
      amen.
  - borg16 3y ago
    > Why are there so many non technical managers/directors in charge of engineering or IT in Government type jobs? due to product/program/project managers making a case for themselves to lead these teams. it might work in most of the cases, but clearly does not in engineering intensive projects - because the lens required to look at and deliver these projects is more than input/output, deadlines/deliverables. understanding the subject is necessary to make smart tradeoffs (common scenario in projects that are as large scale as this one), but few of these folks do. engineering enterprises that have often become successful owe it in their early days to majority of management having technical expertise. this is not a need once the companies become large, but such attitude does show up as inefficiency holes, if one knows where to look.

It sounds like he was/is a personable engineering manager that paid attention to detail. Making sure parts match the drawings, bringing in outsiders to have a second look at things, etc.

bryananderson 3y ago

Basically this, and it’s a bigger deal than it may sound. Competent technical management is a scarce commodity worth its weight in gold around NASA Goddard. A lot of (both frontline and upper) management has no technical background and it shows. JWST was a shambles when I interned there in 2014. Eternally delayed and broken due to nonsensical decisions by management with absolutely zero engineering knowledge. Sometime in the 90s they had decided to save money on devs by “auto-generating” the code from UML diagrams using this thing called Rational Rose. In the mid-2010s they were still trying to fix the code. I never quite figured out if it was an urban legend, but there was also a story around Goddard that when JSWT did its acoustic testing (to simulate launch conditions), a bunch of screws fell off—and when they put them back, they were left with several extra screws that nobody ever figured out the place for. So that’s the state the program was in. Greg Robinson seems to be an engineering manager who’s actually highly competent at both the engineering and the management, and that’s exactly what the program needed to turn around. Honestly, when I was there I thought there was very little chance this thing would actually work, if it ever launched at all, so major props to him and the team. I saw this in way more programs than just JWST. Word would get around among us contractors that X program had real technical management and Y didn’t, and we’d all try to get onto X. If you got stuck on Y, you’d spend most of your time doing paperwork and PowerPoint instead of coding. It happened in the civil service too. Most of the branches in the software division had non-technical leadership and seemed to do little of note, but the few with technical leaders did incredible work. I remember one time a previously-good branch had its head depart (promoted?) and the new head wasn’t technical at all, and over a few months most of the good civil servants transferred somewhere else. At one point it seemed like most of the progress in the software division was being driven by one rather obscure-sounding branch, simply because that was the one with sound technical leadership and thus all the good engineers.

wil421 3y ago
Why are there so many non technical managers/directors in charge of engineering or IT in Government type jobs? My wife sells to state and local governments. 90% of the time the people in charge have no idea about IT, SecOps, Software Development etc. Their only qualification is they have engineering or security in their title.
- otteromkram 3y ago
  Gatekeeping, probably. (Only half joking; the cult of personality in IT can be pretty toxic.) Plus, most people in tech got into their field because they like tech. Managing people isn't nearly as fun or rewarding to them.
- BurningFrog 3y ago
  There is less pressure to perform well in government, so it becomes less prioritized than in organizations that may cease to exist if they perform badly.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
  It's not just government jobs.
  - borg16 3y ago
    amen.
- borg16 3y ago
  > Why are there so many non technical managers/directors in charge of engineering or IT in Government type jobs? due to product/program/project managers making a case for themselves to lead these teams. it might work in most of the cases, but clearly does not in engineering intensive projects - because the lens required to look at and deliver these projects is more than input/output, deadlines/deliverables. understanding the subject is necessary to make smart tradeoffs (common scenario in projects that are as large scale as this one), but few of these folks do. engineering enterprises that have often become successful owe it in their early days to majority of management having technical expertise. this is not a need once the companies become large, but such attitude does show up as inefficiency holes, if one knows where to look.