upvote
Well... the TSA was a jobs program for people who couldn't or didn't want to get jobs as cops. Stennis (Space Flight Center) is a jobs program for Aero Engineering grads to keep them from going to work in Europe or India. Who knows... we might need them to design newer expensive missile systems sometime.

There are all these 30-60 year old engineers who look like they should be good hires on paper, but the tech economy has been pooping out bullshit products (and jobs) for the last 20 years. The last "real" job I had... my official role was to sit at a desk and "coordinate" development. While no one was looking, I wrote code and passed it off to a dev in India to check in (US engineers weren't allowed to check in code.) My job at Amazon was similar... the higher up the food chain you went, the less management understood what engineers did (modulo a few notable exceptions -- the guy who ran Route 53 when it launched was amazingly tech saavy for a VP level manager.)

There's only so much idiocy you can expect the tech industry to digest. It's time to send engineers to the government so they can write documents about how we should evaluate the requirements for evaluation criteria.

reply
> I wrote code and passed it off to a dev in India to check in (US engineers weren't allowed to check in code.)

...usually it's the other way around.

May I ask what the situation was? Reverse-outsourcing by the Indian central government?

reply
Not OP. Sounds like he was considered to be a manager and wasn't allowed to get into the weeds. So instead of just managing the off shore team, he wrote some of the code for them and then let them take credit for it.
reply
We did nothing and it’s not getting better. Do nothing harder.

If you go in expecting you can do nothing and you can’t change the world around you then congrats, you will succeed in all you do.

reply
We had a working system. It was the current administration that slashed NASA's budget and castrated the JPL aerospace employment pipeline. NASA's talent shortage is a self-inflicted wound.

Panic-firing and panic-reemploying your workforce every <4 years is not a sustainable rate of attrition for professional, research-oriented culture.

reply
[flagged]
reply
That’s not what it was, and you have to have been exclusivity ingesting only the most biased media to believe that it was ‘fat-trimming’. It was muscle-trimming. Then again, why would I expect anyone working in tech to understand how an organisation is meant to function. Maybe the government should’ve just had another funding round instead?
reply
Genuinely sorry he let you down and you're left holding the bag dude. But please understand people aren't going to accept your weak rationalizations anymore.
reply
They fired talented engineers and technologists because they were trans.

It's not a meritocracy right now. Good people were fired based on their identity alone.

reply
This is the problem. It's as if everything has to crash and burn for people like the person you responded to finally get some sense. By that point, it will be too late to catch up to our competitors overseas. The race will be over. I honestly don't know how to reconcile this seemingly unsolvable problem. They have no perspective whatsoever of the kinds of people that are real innovators in engineering & tech. This field is super open to alternative lifestyles because that's where a lot of out of the box thinking happens. They just don't get it. In the past, it seemed easy to just ignore them. They could live their lives. But now they're running the ship and its sinking.
reply
The entire DOGE program was an exercise in vilifiaction.
reply
> they may have trimmed some fat, which is normal and necessary, but it's disingenuous to say that "engineers were vilified"

You can always tell when someone is embarrassed to defend something (especially hurting people), when they have to mask it in ambiguous, impassive terms and stale euphemisms.

He didn't fire thousands of good people, human beings who have to worry about putting food on the table now, for purely ideological reasons, while vilifying them as "woke", unqualified, doing work not worth doing (only to open the same positions back up now, because it turns out it was). No, he just "trimmed the fat".

Oh, did people get hurt? Did we waste money and lose expertise for nothing? No, we just "trimmed the fat". Gotta "trim the fat", right? "Trimming the fat" is normal and necessary, and if I say something is just "trimming the fat", that's all it is.

reply