- This seems like a clever way of getting talent involved during a budget squeeze, presumably with the hope that some of those they attract will still be around after this congress and the agency can stabilize once again. I guess it's also a neat kind of try-before-you-buy for both sides. NASA is prestigious and one of the very few places one could do purely science-focused aerospace engineering, but it's still a government job under all the gold leaf and atomic robots.
EDIT: Good Lord, I get the cynicism but at least someone at NASA HR is trying new things to keep the lights on.
They had these kinds of programs for a long time, but many of the engineers were vilified and the programs disbanded as soon as this administration took office. I'm not sure why someone would sign up to work for a government that has no respect for its employees (or a company for that matter) if they already have gainful employment.
In fact, a bunch of NASA labs were recently closed where folks with this exact skillset could do these exact jobs. Why re-post under a different skin and expect a different result?
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.
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.
Which also means that he wasn't doing his job (management) and instead micromanaging his staff by doing their job.
This is such a common problem with highly technical managers because they can't seem to understand how to change focus or scope and do their jobs better. Instead they fall back on trying to ship features thinking that this is productive and to pat themselves on the back for staying technical.
Yes and No. My job title was "Software Engineer," though my management chain told me my role was "Product Owner." Agile was fine at the beginning when it was a few people who knew what they were doing, but it's become a load of horse-shit.
The issue was that my management chain was concerned that my time was too valuable to be spent writing code. And there's a yes-and-no in this one. I was a reasonably well paid US-based software engineer, so yes, my time was valuable. And yes, some of the non-coding tasks I performed were probably more impactful than writing code. But... code + machine parsable specifications + docs + tests are very good ways of communicating exactly what you want.
I'm just sort of laughing thinking about what my old management chain would think if they knew our India based devs and I were using TLA+ as the core of our specification / documentation. Actually, I doubt they would understand it.
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.
It's funny to me how much this administration gets the blame for everything. NASA would had been widely regarded as schlerotic and archaic before these most recent budget cuts. Filled with beaurocrats who didn't even know what their job was. But, the budget gets cut under Trump and now the rot in the organization is forgotten.
I don't think they should have their budget cut but they weren't a great agency before and were still declining.
A program like this, targeting younger people for short stints sense like a great way to bring in some new blood and ideas. Hopefully they can do something innovative that gets people thinking that investing in NASA is worth it.
It's funny to me how quickly people leap in front of the train to pretend like this fixes everything. NASA still has an anemic culture, and opening the door to interns is not a replacement for their failing talent acquisition. Budget cuts, revoked contracts and fired personnel will not stimulate positive change either.
> they weren't a great agency before and were still declining.
"Were"? They are. You're again giving premature credit to a policy that hasn't worked yet and ostensibly throttled NASA's capabilities. This is this administration's problem as much as it was Biden's, Trump 1's, and Obama's. You don't have to come in here with a chip on your shoulder just because I'm blaming the current iteration of the disaster.
> "Were"? They are. You're again giving premature credit to a policy that hasn't worked yet and ostensibly throttled NASA's capabilities.
I didn't assert otherwise. In fact, I clearly stayed that I _hoped_ this move would help. The status quo certainly wasn't working and I could see a way for this move to be helpful.
I'm not saying it's a great idea and it'll for sure work but, I guess, fuck me for trying to be optimistic about a decision made by this administration...
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
"Build a website - it's almost like you got the job done already" - Someone in the White House OEOB
The new National Design Studio that replaced the USDS does not seem to be capable of building a website that is accessible, performant, and not overly bombastic / hyperbolic.
Completely unreadable. Animation fails at the top, on a decently provisioned Mac laptop with 16GB of RAM.
Either way - it's unfortunate that the Technology Fellows, GSA, and other programs that brought folks into industry for roles exactly like this were unceremoniously destroyed in quite cruel and silly ways. Why would I apply for this? Fool me once...
Why is this called Nasa Force when the linked job is for an Areospace Engineer? The usa.jobs site only shows 15 open reqs for Nasa, and they are almost all engineering roles, save a few accounting/finance ones.
Does that mean there are legitimately no other jobs open for tech-related folks? What is the point of the fancy landing page (that provides zero actual info) if that's the case? No Data Science or developer openings for tech folk that don't have Abet certified engineering degrees?
I'd love to work for Nasa, but I live in Portland, OR. Does this geo basically disqualify me from ever joining Nasa?
And the pay range for the aerospace engineer is okayish, but it's not really out-competiting more senior tech folks in any capacity.
NASA "Force?" It sounds very similar to Space Force and Air Force and adds a militaristic tone to NASA. Maybe that is the intent. I know that NASA and the military are closely linked but the general brand of NASA is a the science-focused civilian side while something like Space Force would be the military side.
An exploding job-recruitment offer might not attract the kind of folks we want designing a system that absolutely must work after a decade in space.
I've worked with NASA and ESA employees/contractors who've made technical miracles happen in space. I don't think any of them would be drawn to this style of recruitment.
The top of the page says "For a few days only" and a little later on it says something like "Early to mid career engineers with terms of 1-2 years"
So what is the time limited part? The application window? Also, how is this different from the regular government hiring process? NASA already posts job openings and takes applications for open positions. I'm pretty sure they aren't actually getting around the federal rule of "to hire someone you must have an open billet to put them in." So what is the NASA Force and what is different? It takes weeks to months to finalize the paperwork and make someone a federal employee. So we're making the application window open for a limited time for what reason?
The website is cool but I'm not really sure what the program is. They've already been able to hire eager people willing to take a mediocre salary compared to the rest of the space industry.
Experience necessary. From Assessment 1, which you only get to after spending $16 ordering your college transcript...
> I have 1 year of directly related specialized experience equivalent to at least the GS-13 level in the Federal service that included: Performing program/project management of space, aeronautical flight systems or experimental aircraft/aircraft systems that involve planning, researching, designing, developing, testing and evaluating, or completing cost analyses; Analyzing, designing, or operating space flight systems, aeronautical flight systems, experimental aircraft/aircraft systems, or structures operating throughout the earth's atmosphere; Developing requirements and integrating aerospace or flight/ground systems (e.g., payloads, hardware/software, scientific instruments, communication equipment, cargo, or any other specialized equipment).
Another barely usable website from the "National Design Studio." I wish they'd take a cue from gov.uk (or even the US Digital Service and 18F, which they gutted) and build clean, functional, and accessible sites... but the crew of web developers who are willing to work for this administration seem way too obsessed with this defense-tech startup landing page aesthetic to care about usability.
The developer of this scroll-smoothing JS library [1] has a lot to answer for.
Would anyone like to do some citizen journalism and see if the Constant Contact data handling is done above-board. I've done some Claude research -- enough to make me suspicious -- but I Am Not A Lawyer.
These job postings opened today on April 17 and close in four days (on April 21). This is highly compressed and highly unusual.
Being no fan of the current administration and its hangers-on, my brain quickly jumps to less flattering reasons for these short time windows. A four day application window favors people they want to select. They may well have told certain people in advance to be ready. I don't have direct "proof" of this, and I'm open to learning more, but the current administration has beyond exhausted any presumption of fair dealing.
I encourage anyone and everyone interested to apply and report back. NASA has a good mission and its needs people with a moral backbone and intrinsic pro-science drive.
Charitably they're moving fast, but without already having people in mind for the roles or having created the hiring pipeline, how do you reach a sufficiently large audience. Is there an explanation I'm missing? Was this announced a while ago?
Makes it feel like they already know who they want for the roles/preferential selection. On a longer or recurring timescale, seems like a cool way to reach out to potential hires.
Guys, I figured it out. This isn't just a 4-day window for an Aerospace Engineer position, that's just the beta test. They're preparing for calling up a wave of volunteer civilians who want to spend a few months on Mars (and maybe even come back).
I would love to work for NASA so much even at a significant pay cut, but almost everything I've read in the past was they still do drug screenings for a lot of positions I was interested in. Maybe someday they will pull their heads out of the dark ages.
I envisioned a tactical unit like For All Mankind. I can’t imagine that China would allow the US to colonize the moon. It’s effectively an infinite nuke factory. Any Heinlein fan would recognize that.
Did anyone scroll down far enough to see the "automate air traffic controllers"? I guess technically it's aeronautics but I didn't know that was part of NASA
312 comments
- I like the rolling Moon animation very much.
- This seems like a clever way of getting talent involved during a budget squeeze, presumably with the hope that some of those they attract will still be around after this congress and the agency can stabilize once again. I guess it's also a neat kind of try-before-you-buy for both sides. NASA is prestigious and one of the very few places one could do purely science-focused aerospace engineering, but it's still a government job under all the gold leaf and atomic robots.
EDIT: Good Lord, I get the cynicism but at least someone at NASA HR is trying new things to keep the lights on.
In fact, a bunch of NASA labs were recently closed where folks with this exact skillset could do these exact jobs. Why re-post under a different skin and expect a different result?
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.
> 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?
This is such a common problem with highly technical managers because they can't seem to understand how to change focus or scope and do their jobs better. Instead they fall back on trying to ship features thinking that this is productive and to pat themselves on the back for staying technical.
The issue was that my management chain was concerned that my time was too valuable to be spent writing code. And there's a yes-and-no in this one. I was a reasonably well paid US-based software engineer, so yes, my time was valuable. And yes, some of the non-coding tasks I performed were probably more impactful than writing code. But... code + machine parsable specifications + docs + tests are very good ways of communicating exactly what you want.
I'm just sort of laughing thinking about what my old management chain would think if they knew our India based devs and I were using TLA+ as the core of our specification / documentation. Actually, I doubt they would understand it.
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.
Panic-firing and panic-reemploying your workforce every <4 years is not a sustainable rate of attrition for professional, research-oriented culture.
I don't think they should have their budget cut but they weren't a great agency before and were still declining.
A program like this, targeting younger people for short stints sense like a great way to bring in some new blood and ideas. Hopefully they can do something innovative that gets people thinking that investing in NASA is worth it.
> they weren't a great agency before and were still declining.
"Were"? They are. You're again giving premature credit to a policy that hasn't worked yet and ostensibly throttled NASA's capabilities. This is this administration's problem as much as it was Biden's, Trump 1's, and Obama's. You don't have to come in here with a chip on your shoulder just because I'm blaming the current iteration of the disaster.
> "Were"? They are. You're again giving premature credit to a policy that hasn't worked yet and ostensibly throttled NASA's capabilities.
I didn't assert otherwise. In fact, I clearly stayed that I _hoped_ this move would help. The status quo certainly wasn't working and I could see a way for this move to be helpful.
I'm not saying it's a great idea and it'll for sure work but, I guess, fuck me for trying to be optimistic about a decision made by this administration...
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.
It's not a meritocracy right now. Good people were fired based on their identity alone.
>> budget squeeze
>> will still be around after this congress and the agency can stabilize once again
2026 budget - 24.4 billion
2025 budget - 24.8 billion
2024 budget - 25.3 billion
2023 budget - 25.3 billion
2022 budget - 24.0 billion
2021 budget - 23.2 billion
2020 budget - 22.6 billion
2019 budget - 21.5 billion
2018 budget - 20.7 billion
2017 budget - 19.6 billion
2016 budget - 19.2 billion
What part of these numbers are you interpreting as some sort of insane budget restriction?
The new National Design Studio that replaced the USDS does not seem to be capable of building a website that is accessible, performant, and not overly bombastic / hyperbolic.
Completely unreadable. Animation fails at the top, on a decently provisioned Mac laptop with 16GB of RAM.
Either way - it's unfortunate that the Technology Fellows, GSA, and other programs that brought folks into industry for roles exactly like this were unceremoniously destroyed in quite cruel and silly ways. Why would I apply for this? Fool me once...
> NASA Force technologists inside the systems that power American spaceflight, aeronautics, and scientific discovery.
Am I an idiot or does their leading sentence make absolutely no sense?
Does that mean there are legitimately no other jobs open for tech-related folks? What is the point of the fancy landing page (that provides zero actual info) if that's the case? No Data Science or developer openings for tech folk that don't have Abet certified engineering degrees?
I'd love to work for Nasa, but I live in Portland, OR. Does this geo basically disqualify me from ever joining Nasa?
And the pay range for the aerospace engineer is okayish, but it's not really out-competiting more senior tech folks in any capacity.
This is so strange.. I'm still not even clear on what it's for..
An exploding job-recruitment offer might not attract the kind of folks we want designing a system that absolutely must work after a decade in space.
I've worked with NASA and ESA employees/contractors who've made technical miracles happen in space. I don't think any of them would be drawn to this style of recruitment.
So what is the time limited part? The application window? Also, how is this different from the regular government hiring process? NASA already posts job openings and takes applications for open positions. I'm pretty sure they aren't actually getting around the federal rule of "to hire someone you must have an open billet to put them in." So what is the NASA Force and what is different? It takes weeks to months to finalize the paperwork and make someone a federal employee. So we're making the application window open for a limited time for what reason?
The website is cool but I'm not really sure what the program is. They've already been able to hire eager people willing to take a mediocre salary compared to the rest of the space industry.
First hire should a verb.
> I have 1 year of directly related specialized experience equivalent to at least the GS-13 level in the Federal service that included: Performing program/project management of space, aeronautical flight systems or experimental aircraft/aircraft systems that involve planning, researching, designing, developing, testing and evaluating, or completing cost analyses; Analyzing, designing, or operating space flight systems, aeronautical flight systems, experimental aircraft/aircraft systems, or structures operating throughout the earth's atmosphere; Developing requirements and integrating aerospace or flight/ground systems (e.g., payloads, hardware/software, scientific instruments, communication equipment, cargo, or any other specialized equipment).
The developer of this scroll-smoothing JS library [1] has a lot to answer for.
[1]: https://www.lenis.dev/
> More opportunities will be posted here in the coming months. Click here to sign up for updates to stay informed when new roles open.
Which links to: https://lp.constantcontactpages.com/su/sKWkWfp
Would anyone like to do some citizen journalism and see if the Constant Contact data handling is done above-board. I've done some Claude research -- enough to make me suspicious -- but I Am Not A Lawyer.
Being no fan of the current administration and its hangers-on, my brain quickly jumps to less flattering reasons for these short time windows. A four day application window favors people they want to select. They may well have told certain people in advance to be ready. I don't have direct "proof" of this, and I'm open to learning more, but the current administration has beyond exhausted any presumption of fair dealing.
I encourage anyone and everyone interested to apply and report back. NASA has a good mission and its needs people with a moral backbone and intrinsic pro-science drive.
Charitably they're moving fast, but without already having people in mind for the roles or having created the hiring pipeline, how do you reach a sufficiently large audience. Is there an explanation I'm missing? Was this announced a while ago?
Makes it feel like they already know who they want for the roles/preferential selection. On a longer or recurring timescale, seems like a cool way to reach out to potential hires.
>> In-situ resource utilization (ISRU) plant development for a sustainable lunar outpost
The image is clearly Mars.
Wait till there’s a new administration. Vote for sanity first. Then let government stabilize. Then join. Not now.