zlacker

I have a good friend who is a super talented software engineer. She's at Google these days, but has been at a lot of cool startups. When I met her, she was working at NASA. A super brilliant person, who can basically solve any problem you throw at her. NASA had assigned her to be in charge of a pile of shitty LabView code used to run a massive "freezer" whose purpose is to be used on rare occasions to test hardware at temperatures simulating deep space. They gave her no other assignments or duties. She was left rotting at a desk with nothing to do for 90% of the time. This was not unique to her, and was something she saw a lot of with other co-workers. So no, I don't think NASA is efficient with money. If we had left it to them, we still wouldn't have sent people into space in the last decade. That was all courtesy of SpaceX going around the horrible incumbent contractors that NASA has allowed to dupe them for decades.

>>JPKab+(OP)
Mwell, that is reminiscent of my experience in $LARGE_CORP where I was hired with a few years experience as a soft. eng. and was given a completely nontechnical role (I was supposed to make wireframes in PowerPoint), while a new graduate who was hired at the same time as myself was put in a "hands on" coding position. That other hire was a guy. My explanation was that $LARGE_CORP simply thought that, hey, she's a chick, she doesn't want to code. Or something along those lines.

That was a private company, btw. I think large companies have problems with personel like that, whether public or private. They have problems, in that their understanding of the labour market has stayed in the 1930's. Anyway I think the same thing that happened with me happened to your friend in NASA.

>>YeGobl+wr
Large orgs are large orgs. I avoid them like the plague these days. But man do I miss the cushy benefits and not feeling guilty about taking vacations.... at a startup you just feel like you got the world on your shoulders.

Sucks that they did that to you. Utter garbage.... but yeah, waste is what big orgs do.

>>JPKab+qg1
Yeah, for me large orgs, never again...

... though I might change my mind if I'm 60 and one needs my COBOL SKILL$$ :P