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> younger engineers often have the capability but not the inclination Kids these days... Why would someone in their right mind think working on the Voyager pro
by rbanffy 6mo ago
> younger engineers often have the capability but not the inclination
Kids these days... Why would someone in their right mind think working on the Voyager project could damage their careers? You can work on new and fancy tools all you want to improve supporting tools, and it's still one of the coolest space missions active. Plus, it has a real end - at some point, support will be further reduced and the person will move on to another space exploration job, with the extra golden star of having been on the Voyager.
- glimshe 6mo agoI would go further... This project gives a rare opportunity for a young engineer to learn to build truly mission critical, resilient software while requiring complete, top to bottom understanding of the software and hardware stack.
- bombcar 6mo agoEven all that to the side, it lets you say you worked on the Voyager project!
- lexicality 6mo agoIf I'm reviewing CVs and I see that you worked at NASA on the Voyager code, you're getting an interview just so I can ask about it. I wouldn't normally approve of CV driven development, but for this?!
- xingped 6mo agoI agree, and I would think the same, but I also feel like many things I've been sold as "door openers" for interviews unfortunately tend to ultimately be things that no one cares about.
- lexicality 6mo agoI think people tend to squander door openers with bad layouts or information density. Most CVs are essentially the same as each other, just a bullet point list of jira ticket titles. Do I care if someone has won the world championship for ping-pong 3 years in a row? Not particularly. Does it make them stand out against a sea of slop? Only if I actually see that info when skimming! But if I do see it, I'm probably going to stop and re-read the whole thing, which is a tactical advantage.
- butlike 6mo agoSo you're giving me an idea for my midlife career change CV. Lead with the cool and interesting fact above all else, then have the normal CV menu fare at the end. Hmm this is also drumming up the hard question of: What have I actually done which is ACTUALLY an attention-grabber...
- rbanffy 6mo agoYou could work on the Voyager project.
- PurpleRamen 6mo agoBut would you give them a job? Would they even match the requirements?
- rbanffy 6mo agoI would assume they have built some key problem-solving skills that can be valuable. Training in tooling is much easier than building the right mindset.
- M95D 6mo agoBut the required midset today is "move fast and break things"...
- lexicality 6mo ago> But would you give them a job? That's what the interview is to find out, isn't it? > Would they even match the requirements? I would assume if they got a job at NASA working on mission critical systems, they probably exceed the requirements of my startup
- bigfatkitten 6mo agoThere are a whole lot of people in this thread who would rather tell their grandkids that they worked on web apps and sold ads.
- rbanffy 6mo agoIt's a tragedy some of our best minds are dedicated to that, and digital surveillance so their corporate masters can sell better targeted ads with a higher click-thru rate.
- justin66 6mo agoI really think it's overly generous to throw people who do not understand the importance of extending Voyager's scientific mission into the "our best minds" category. I guess I agree with the larger point.
- rbanffy 6mo agoWell… some of the best minds are doing actual useful stuff. Sadly, most aren’t.
- anthonj 6mo agoI am no longer a junior, but would have been upset to be tasked with refreshing the old historical obsolete laundry (no matter how sacred or distinguished), expecially when I already had experience delivering safety critical products packing much more modern technologies. The opportunity they would be offering is not rare at all! The opportunity to research and design something truly new on the other way is very scarce.
- rbanffy 6mo agoWhat have you worked on that is as cool as a space probe that's cruising in interstellar space and still collecting valuable data? There are a lot of things as cool as, done by people I know, such as the gyros on the Webb telescope, the APU in the F-35, or a small rack-mountable Cesium reference clock, but there aren't many opportunities like that.
- anthonj 6mo agoThat's the thing. You only have the cool factor, but that wears off very quickly when you are maintaining legacy code and tools and then your collegues are playing with the new hot and shiny toys. I won't write about the projects I've been involved with for privacy, but to give you an idea some of my old team members were involved in ams-02 for example.
- SoftTalker 6mo agoYou would be able to go to your grave saying "I worked on the Voyager project." That will never not be interesting, or memorable.
- butlike 6mo agoIs that because juniors want to leave their name on something? I ask honestly since I shared a lot of the same sentiment as you, and never quite got an understanding as to why working on the cool new thing was "more fun" even if a lot of the projects under-the-hood were recycled.
- rbanffy 6mo agoQ: What was the hardest debugging problem you had? A: I had a very slow network connection to the computer, and it was 23 light-hours away from me.
- M95D 6mo agoIt also gives a rare opportunity to fuck things up and fail a mission that nobody else fucked up in ~50 years.
- tamimio 6mo agoBecause software development back in the day wasn’t like how it’s now now, the charade so called software development now is a clown show: scrum, daily stand ups, open office style, tickets, tons of ci/cd BS, and of course, the wrangler aka PM and all politics involved, none of this existed like the cult it is now, I only had one experience in such environment and despite the effort I had to ask for some common sense, it was like insulting someone’s religion, “how dare you challenge the sacred methods that the silicone valley companies are using?!!” Additionally, back in the day there was true ownership for the code you write, the code is owned by you not the company, and I know few old engineers that until now (they are retired) the companies still pay them for using their code they wrote while working there. That sense of ownership encourages you to tackle hard issues rather feeling like a machine spewing code for someone else’s business, I have seen some contracts too where the company will have ownership for anything you do while you are in the contract, including your personal projects on your own free time.
- philipallstar 6mo agoRose-tinted glasses, eh? They ain't what they used to be.
- ourmandave 6mo agoStill paid for the code you wrote while working there sounds like a consultant with a hell of a contract, not an employee.
- mschuster91 6mo agoOr like many a company that prefers to paper old hands with cash to keep an old system running until it is really, really no longer feasible. Banks and airlines are the most common example, many of them run on mainframe systems with code that's old enough for humans to go into retirement - and replacement projects usually tend to go into the billions of euros range with many of them failing catastrophically. Even paying some greybeard 500k a year to deal with that stuff despite him being retired is far more profitable in the short term. That's the problem with letting beancounters run the show because eventually, there will literally be barely anyone left alive who is capable - and even less who know all the "implicit knowledge" behind edge cases.
- PurpleRamen 6mo ago> Kids these days... Why would someone in their right mind think working on the Voyager project could damage their careers? It's an isolated legacy-project with no future. Mostly everything you learn for it will be only useful for this specific project, so all time to invest there is time to can't invest into something useful. Sure, there are probably some parts to learn from this too, but It's less than what your competitors will learn on their fancy modern projects. > You can work on new and fancy tools all you want to improve supporting tools Voyager is in maintenance, there is no big innovation or big progress to be made there. It's just work to hold the line as long as possible. And I guess nobody want's to be the one killing it because of a poor attempt to innovate something.
- quotemstr 6mo agoYou should hire for personality characteristics, not knowledge. I'll take anyone who's worked on a weird obscure system and figured it out from first principles over Front End React Dev #8482828 with Opinions on algebraic effects.
- aworks 6mo agoIt would also be an interesting job, even if off the beaten track. As a hiring manager, if I saw this on a resume interspersed with various web development work, I would be intrigued.
- PurpleRamen 6mo ago> You should hire for personality characteristics, not knowledge. I'm not sure what personality characteristic are supposed to be in this context. But if you mean skills, then you have a false assumption. NASA and the surrounding industry is not really the environment where they grow boring react devs. For every legacy project like voyager, they have a dozen frontier-projects and other weird obscure jobs where one can gain the same skills, but better, with more potential for further growing. And someone early in their career will naturally choose something with more potential for their future.
- SoftTalker 6mo ago
- FpUser 6mo ago>"Why would someone in their right mind think working on the Voyager project could damage their careers" Assembly? Understanding how things actually work? No Agile? No K8s? No Rust, No React? - death knell for someone's resume >"and the person will move on to another space exploration job, with the extra golden star of having been on the Voyager" this is the best case with the result of being tied to another single project for years and unemployable anywhere else. in more realistic case - warm goodbye in few years and start your life from scratch with no credits for the thins done.