Dr. Ron back to NASA again?
My old NASA office-mate wrote me this week, lamenting the loss of talent in his discipline area: Lots of controls [work] coming along and not enoughThe guy is FAR from a "grunt." But you see what he means: as the workload shifts, people move to other areas, other companies. We find that the people sometimes have flowed away. This is a BIG problem for small organizations and companies, and though NASA is quite large, his group is just a group. He sees the same thing that entrepreneurs see.
competent folks to do it. [...] we are really down to just [two guys]. Makes me appear to others to be more valuable, but in reality I am less valuable as I am a follower, not a leader. Darn. I was always spread out too thin and never got to learn enough of the hands-on stuff. Need the experts [...] to figure everything out and the grunt like me to run the code and do all the paperwork and reporting of results and anomalies.
So I said I'd be glad to come out for a month this summer and try to bear some of the burden, and to train him (and hopefully others) as well. I can't offer more than that because I don't wanna jeopardize things with my present (generous) employer. But I think what's more likely to happen is that he'll be directed to contract out the work, and he'll have the (comparatively boring) responsibility of monitoring the contracts. And more talent slowly seeps away. I really don't have anything against NASA for operating that way: the contractor system was designed to compensate for changing demands on government engineers. The system works. But it's not designed to minimize regrets.
If the opportunity were there, it would be good to see the NASA meatball (above) again. Read here for more than you ever wanted to know about that. :-)
posted by Ron @ 8:38 PM
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