[rbanffy]

> 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]

I 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.

[anthonj]

I 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.

[joseda-hg]

Also, many decisions taken Probably can be traced to limitations / idiosincracies of the era

And you're left with a codebase that has been in hands of 6 Decades of probably great engineers that have already done a lot, plus any of the arcane cruft of such a long lived and esoteric project

It's a great CV highlight, but I don't know if it's the best learning opportunity

[rbanffy]

What 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]

That'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]

You would be able to go to your grave saying "I worked on the Voyager project." That will never not be interesting, or memorable.

[butlike]

Is 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.

[matheusmoreira]

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

> We’re programmers.

> Programmers are, in their hearts, architects, and the first thing they want to do when they get to a site is to bulldoze the place flat and build something grand.

> We’re not excited by incremental renovation: tinkering, improving, planting flower beds.

[rbanffy]

He's very wrong.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> The opportunity they would be offering is not rare at all!

The opportunity to maintain software running on a spacecraft is not rare? I don't think so. And those two particular spacecrafts? I'd take that job in a flash.

[bombcar]

Even all that to the side, it lets you say you worked on the Voyager project!

[lexicality]

If 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]

I 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]

I 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]

So 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...

[PurpleRamen]

But would you give them a job? Would they even match the requirements?

[lexicality]

> 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

[rbanffy]

I 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]

But the required midset today is "move fast and break things"...

[bigfatkitten]

There 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]

It'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]

I 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]

Well… some of the best minds are doing actual useful stuff. Sadly, most aren’t.

[rbanffy]

Q: 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]

It also gives a rare opportunity to fuck things up and fail a mission that nobody else fucked up in ~50 years.

[PurpleRamen]

> 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]

You 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.

[PurpleRamen]

> 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.

[aworks]

It 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.

[SoftTalker]

Understanding assembly language (any architecture) give insights into how computers work that are still valuable and relevant today. Almost nobody still writes code in assembly, but understanding it at least conceptually is still worth something.

If I were hiring, I would almost always prefer a candidate who had some experience at machine/assembly programming to one that didn't, all else being roughly equal.

[sumeno]

I've been a developer for 20 years, I do some reverse engineering stuff on the side using assembly.

There hasn't been a single time in 20 years that it was actually relevant for real work in any way.

Unless you are doing very specific work knowing assembly is about as useful as knowing COBOL (which is also useful for a very specific kind of work that most devs will never do)

[rbanffy]

Learning new and weird things builds brain elasticity and vocabulary for you to express new ideas. I always recommend people to learn FORTH, or Lisp, or APL. Learn to think with different paradigms.

[sumeno]

As an extracurricular activity sure, but if your resume just has FORTH on it recruiters are going to throw it in the garbage because there's no evidence you can work in a modern development environment

[butlike]

You don't need to push the needle as a junior though. It's a "completed project" where one can glean many insights. And the matter of transferrable skills is simply a matter of being able to say how what you learned applies in a different context. A useful skill in-and-of-itself

[PurpleRamen]

> You don't need to push the needle as a junior though.

Doesn't matter. Many young people have strong motivations to shine and push, especially when they are in high profile-jobs. Legacy-projects are simply not alluring enough for this.

[justin66]

> Voyager is in maintenance, there is no big innovation or big progress to be made there.

This is just so blatantly ignorant. As if you believe there's some other space agency taking scientific measurements out past the heliopause.

[PurpleRamen]

> As if you believe there's some other space agency taking scientific measurements out past the heliopause.

We are talking about the maintenance, not the research. Nobody has doubts about the scientific value of the collected data.

[tamimio]

Because 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.

[ourmandave]

Still paid for the code you wrote while working there sounds like a consultant with a hell of a contract, not an employee.

[mschuster91]

Or 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.

[tamimio]

Employees, auto industry, although it was in Europe not US.

[philipallstar]

Rose-tinted glasses, eh? They ain't what they used to be.

[sublinear]

> none of this existed like the cult it is now

So you'd prefer for all this project management drama and power struggle to be invisible?

All this scaffolding is not a cult. It exists to democratize the process. Your personal comfort is irrelevant to the results.

[hilariously]

Unfortunately in many places it is indeed a cult and serves to ossify management decisions. We ARE doing Agile, what do you mean? No this person is the scrum master and they tell us what Agile is and then we do it, see?

I have worked at 8 different software places and none of them implemented things in a way I would call "genuinely agile" and most of them were just bad waterfall with more meetings and telling the engineers they are accountable for the bad ideas that are now their job.

CI/CD? How about make that only "Devops" job and then make the exact same undemocratized system before with gatekeepers who spend a significant amount of time blocking your work because they are afraid of things changing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

[sublinear]

My point is you would never even have a clue that there is dysfunction at all without these methodologies. These days you at least have some idea in your head how it should be vs how it is.

I think there's something critical being lost in younger people who have never been exposed to the bad old ways and only understand their current situation through memes. We need to get a grip here.

[hilariously]

That's somewhat fair, though I dont think you need to know about the beforetimes to understand that the current times get nowhere fast with all their talk of velocity.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

I worked in a mainframe team at a major financial network (very explicitly not a bank) and we were agile. The entire company was agile. The company was so agile that when we moved to our new building we did hot-desking where no team had a fixed location and every worker had a little safe where they could put their valuables and leave it in modular lockers throughout the building, so that anyone could sit anywhere there was space to sit on that day.

I mean of course it didn't exactly work like that in practice because directors had to have the corners and they wanted their teams close to them, so that, e.g. our team of 15 mainframe engineers could file in to a 5 x 5 meter cubicle and one-by-one give a report on what they had done the previous day a.k.a. The Scrum. We had a certified Scrum Master.

The one time I tried to sit in a different team's space I got yelled at by their director and had to go back. I had moved in his team's space out of protest because the only space left for me to be near my team was right in front of the gents and it smelled a bit funny. I was supposed to be sitting next to my (official) Mentor but I was studying part-time for a MSc and so was not there in the mornings and another engineer would always take my place next to the Mentor, who was the most experienced Cobol programmer in the team. He always looked at me with a wry smile whenever I came in to the office and found him sitting at ... well, it wasn't really my place so I couldn't really say anything. But then the only place for me to sit was in front of the loos. So I tried to go and sit somewhere else, farther away, in protest. And then I got yelled at.

But in principle we had hot-desking and we could sit anywhere throughout the building while communicating remotely with our colleagues.

We were very agile.

Our certified Scrum Master moved on before I did.

[FpUser]

>"So you'd prefer for all this project management drama and power struggle to be invisible?"

Well project managers can have their dramas. Just do not involve developers. Or what is even better - get the fuck out and leave it to people who can do things without drama.

>"All this scaffolding is not a cult. It exists to democratize the process. Your personal comfort is irrelevant to the results."

Pile of BS. It exists to feed whole layer of self serving people who contribute very little and grow like a cancer.

In my career I was lucky. I am an independent software developer. Designed and developed many products for various clients (including some of my own ventures) and have managed without Agile, Scrum and the likes. My largest products - I had teams of up to 35 people under me and somehow we've survived.

On few occasions I had pleasure to be on some of those meetings as a visitor - felt nothing but disgust. Again luckily I was spared from direct participation

[FpUser]

>"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.