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4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program

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Re: 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program

#761

Post by supplied_demand »

nomel wrote: post #759
supplied_demand wrote: post #740

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He worked there starting in 1982. When do you think the dot-com era started?

He started in a greenfield industry , the immediate pre-requisite for dot com era, then through the dot com era. There was no institutional knowledge when he started, and a good portion of it would be irrelevant when he quit. It was all new.

When he started at DEC in 1982, they had 67,000 employees and almost $4 billion in revenue. It seems like that type of success and size would imply some institutional knowledge. Their revenue, income, and employee count started stagnating in 1989. He worked there until 1998.

No need to keep going back and forth on this as you seem to have dug in your heels.

https://sutherla.tripod.com/infsoc/computers/dec_pl.html

Re: 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program

#762

Post by nomel »

supplied_demand wrote: post #761
nomel wrote: post #759

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He started in a greenfield industry , the immediate pre-requisite for dot com era, then through the dot com era. There was no institutional knowledge when he started, and a good portion of it would be irrelevant when he quit. It was all new.

When he started at DEC in 1982, they had 67,000 employees and almost $4 billion in revenue. It seems like that type of success and size would imply some institutional knowledge. Their revenue, income, and employee count started stagnating in 1989. He worked there until 1998. No need to keep going back and forth on this as you seem to have dug in your heels. https://sutherla.tripod.com/infsoc/computers/dec_pl.html

It's not back a fourth as much as you think I've stated some hard black and white rule, without exceptions. I think it's generally true. In this case, is the exception DEC or Jim Keller? Would he agree? I don't know. Some large orgs run like a collection of startups, internally.

But, I don't think DEC, a company working through the beginning of computer through peak dot com era, where every aspect was doubling or completely changing every year, is a context where holding onto ideas formed in an old context was viable or possible. You would, necessarily, have to temporarily suspend your trust in the institutional knowledge, with every new problem, since the whole compute world that the institutional knowledge was built on would have shifted under you.

Re: 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program

#763

Post by godelski »

mlyle wrote: post #749
csa wrote: post #724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a note you may find helpful. > I feel your post is too long It’s about 700 words. It’s thought through, well-written, neatly organized, and it’s a fine set up for further discussion. If that’s too long for you on this forum , then I’d probably take a look in the mirror and ask some tough questions.

The tricky thing is, long posts like this tend to provoke responses selectively nitpicking about one thing, and then either going way down into the definitional weeds or galloping to the next nitpick without acknowledging any error. I think the long content is fine as it stands, but it isn't necessarily a good seed for discussion in a comment thread (as opposed to an underlying article).

  > provoke responses selectively nitpicking about one thing
I'd say that's where the community is made. Either the community supports this type of behavior or not.

I'll at least say I sometimes downvote opinions I agree with and upvote opinions I disagree with. That's because I don't see the upvote and downvote as a signal of my personal feeling about the comment but rather about how I feel the comment should be placed in ordering. Sometimes I downvote a comment I agree with because it is a bad argument and I want to discourage that behavior. Or because it is just signaling or ignores the parent. Sometimes I upvote bad comments because there's a conversation I want highlighted. Sometimes because despite it being bad I think they bring up good points others are ignoring.

But I think we can have more in depth conversations on HN. That comment was much longer than I usually write (and I'm wordy) but I think it is a matter of what we want as a community. For example, I always downvote oneliners, memes, or when someone is just trying to dunk on the other person.

What does the community want?

Re: 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program

#764

Post by nomel »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #715
nomel wrote: post #712

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In my eyes, they already traversed it and can explain why it's very similar to an old idea. This was precisely my point in [1]. It's fundamentally the same: a pruning of the solution space without re-traversal. > why it's very similar to an old idea. And, with diligence, you verify that the new context is exactly the same as the old. You do this by knowing that it might not be , in other words, you temporarily susp…

>It's fundamentally the same It's a thin line of wisdom and conservatism, but an important distinction. People in these positions work on billion dollar software, so they can't just try out every idea that comes to mind in prod. But that's exactly what tends to be proposed: big multi month initiatives, not some prototype to test over a sprint. The important question I learned to ask was "what problem am I trying to s…

> People in these positions work on billion dollar software, so they can't just try out every idea that comes to mind in prod.

Exactly, the ability to innovate ceases. Risk is most easily avoided by leaning on the existing institutional knowledge to direct new decisions even though they may be in new contexts.

> you may not in fact be iterating, but experimenting.

By definition, iteration is not innovation. Innovation is new ideas. New ideas aren't possible without experimentation, otherwise they would be known ideas.

Most large companies move from innovation to acquisition for a reason: the risk of innovation is too great for a large company to stomach.

Re: 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program

#765

Post by ItsHarper »

mmmlinux wrote: post #631
jrflowers wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they launch most of NASA's science missions, which counts Exactly. Like if I am an uber driver and I bring a surgeon to a hospital, it counts as me doing surgery since the most important part of surgery is the process of driving to the place where it happens

so ambulances do nothing, got it.

They do, but it's not surgery.

Re: 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program

#766

Post by me-vs-cat »

goku12 wrote: post #755
me-vs-cat wrote: post #737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, there is no general entitlement to severance beyond a specific employer's policies, a worker's or union's contract (if any) with that employer, or any one-time offer (usually called a voluntary layoff or voluntary resignation) from that employer.

I'm not familiar with the US laws. But I have seen a few cases where the terminated employee sued their former employer for not giving them the severance pay they were owed. That's why I made that (possibly wrong) assumption. So, how does that work?

If you mean how does that lawsuit work, the only way the employee wins is if there's some type of agreement that says they should get paid. That agreement could be employer's written policy, an individual or union contract, an email from someone with authority, or so on.

(Or the lawsuit could be a hail-mary on its merits, hoping the employer will settle rather than air dirty laundry in court.)

There may be state-specific laws (in a small number of states for limited circumstances) and there is the WARN Act (but any court payout there would be a penalty on the employer and much delayed for the workers, while it only requires advance notice rather than being like severance -- and also limited by more conditions), but still "no general entitlement to severance" for the vast majority of workers no matter the reason for their separation.

Re: 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program

#767

Post by nradov »

LtWorf wrote: post #512
nradov wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

1. They don't just kill people you don't like, they kill randos with bombs 2. People you don't like don't deserve mass murder anyway 3. Killing communists is what nazis do. In fact they're so good at killing they killed much more people than any communist ever did. If your morals align with the nazi party, you're probably a nazi and you should REALLY REALLY REALLY do some serious thinking.

There you go again, lying and trying to put words in my mouth. Opposing communism does not equate to supporting Nazism (or any other "ism"). Nazis and communists are roughly equivalent from a moral perspective in that they both represent existential threats to humanity, and both groups should be eliminated.

Re: 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program

#768

Post by ineedasername »

TechDebtDevin wrote: post #691
ineedasername wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no strategist at the top thinking about where this talent is best positioned to do good work.

[flagged]

I guess I was thinking more the larger DOGE project, because this isn't just NASA as such, this is the model it followed across the board-- State department, Nuclear safety, lots more, and someone else in these threads pointed out that tons of the people whose programs were cut were working on programs no private sector player will care about-- too niche, too pure research.

Re: 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program

#769

Post by DSingularity »

ceejayoz wrote: post #335
DSingularity wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> I won’t cry if it is dismantled. You will if the private replacement is much worse.

I don’t know that. I do know that this one was terrible though.

Re: 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program

#770

Post by fnordpiglet »

somenameforme wrote: post #696
fnordpiglet wrote: post #654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specifically NASA is an exploration and science mission while SpaceX is a lift and transit provider for organizations like NASA. Historically NASA did their own lift and transit because no one else could and they seeded and researched the capabilities that SpaceX and other private ventures do today. This is a fine arrangement because commoditizing delta V is not exploration and science, it’s the means to it. I’d note…

SpaceX's entire mission is to get people to Mars en masse. They revolutionized spaceflight precisely as a part of that mission, not as an ends in and of itself. For instance the Polaris Dawn mission [1] sent humans further into space than we've been since the Apollo Program, intentionally traversed the Van Allen radiation belt, and carried out the first commercial spacewalk, executed experiments and so forth. And all…

That’s Elon Musks goal, but it’s not what they do. They lift and transport. Even the goal of lifting and transporting to mars is lift and transport. You could argue it’s all means to and end, but they’ve not done the end and they have only ever done the means and will continue to do so - making it a lift and transport company :-)
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