They all really, really believe in the mission. Many are well into their 60s and are waiting for JWST to launch to finally retire. It was supposed to launch YEARS ago, so they are (as a group) getting antsy.
The project I worked one was migrating data from their in house ticket tracking system to Jira. I was importing tickets from 1985 into Jira which obviously didn't exist at that time.
I guess it IS very different to believe, for decades, in a mission that includes space telescopes than in the latest SaaS or productivity app or something more "mundane". Not that there's anything bad working on those kind of projects, but it sure has a different scope (no pun intended)
I just wanted to let you know that "mundane" is an excellent pun when talking about space projects, because it means "of this earthly world rather than a heavenly or spiritual one". The original word is "mundus", meaning "world" - "monde" in French today.
Not everybody is looking for that resume padding type of job where they bounce from job to job trying not to look stale. In the past, it used to look bad having such short stints on a your resume as it meant you weren't the most stable employee. Now, it's the opposite and your resume has to look like it has ADHD with any stint lasting longer than 18 months being a negative. (maybe a bit hyperbolic).
On a less sarcastic vein, some people find a job that they really like and enjoy. The pay may not be as much as somewhere else, but a satisfying job that is stable and provides for ones needs seems to be a concept lost in the tech (silicon valley) world. It's all about rocketships to the moon type of salary wants. If I found a gig like that sending manmade thing to another planet/moon that ultimately advanced human understanding, I'd definitely be willing to retire in that role. In today's world, there are plenty of other side hustles to help offset income needs. I'm a survey of 1 though.
> Now, it's the opposite and your resume has to look like it has ADHD with any stint lasting longer than 18 months being a negative. (maybe a bit hyperbolic).
As someone who hires people, lots of 18 month stints would certainly turn me off the candidate.
I mean at the age of 60… it’s gonna be hard to top a career that had you writing code sent to space.
That being said, I imagine it would be very hard to be a junior employee in such an environment. Fresh and green behind the ears, full of ideas and surrounded by people almost ready to retire and pretty set in their ways.
Who knows. Maybe these folks make an effort to stay current with progress in development tools and whatnot. But it is easy to imagine them being very stuck in their ways. Some for good reason but some because “that’s how we’ve always done it”.
I’d love to be told I was wrong and all their shop did a good job staying on top of industry wide progress.
> That being said, I imagine it would be very hard to be a junior employee in such an environment.
My father was a senior admin in the vendor that made the mirror, so I had summer jobs working on Hubble-adjacent projects. One summer my cubicle was next to the cubicle of a new engineer who worked on it.
They ground the mirror in one facility and then trucked it to another one, many miles away, for silvering. This new engineer was tasked with drawing up the protocol for loading it on the truck (it was driven down in the early morning on a Sunday to reduce problems with traffic).
He finishes the document draft and calls down the senior engineer for a look-over. They are discussing the part where the cranes (kind-of like fork lifts) lift the mirror. There are three cranes, and three places built into the mirror where they hook on.
"How do you know the cranes will take the load?"
"Here are the manufacturer's specifications, saying that each will take more than half the total weight. There are three cranes, so there is sufficient capacity even if one crane fails."
"How do you know the crane will take the specified weight?"
"They were vendor certified last week; I was there."
"That's not enough. The night before, you and another engineer will personally go down there and personally load the specified weight on each crane. Then you will each sign a paper. The mirror will not move without that paper, containing both your personal names."
In space projects there's no space for human error.
Reminds me of that one SpaceX mission failure, with F9 exploding shortly after launch. IIRC, it was quickly determined that the cause was a strut from a third-party vendor that wasn't up to declared spec.
Obviously working on such cool projects must be a major factor, but it's probably not the only one.