[damoncali]

How long have you been there? I've been gone for over a decade, so I'm curious if you can confirm a suspicion I've had recently - that NASA has a bit of Silicon Valley envy and are trying to emulate the tech startup world in ways that may or may not be appropriate to their mission. When I worked there during the .com bubble, nobody cared about Silicon Valley at all - it very much had a military industrial complex feel to it.

[thearn4]

I would say that depends largely on the project. Some projects are purposefully trying to appropriate ideas from the tech world (development lifecycle practices, etc.) but others are pretty firm in holding on to more traditional gov't ways of operating. Flight projects in particular have not changed very dramatically, and that is probably not a bad thing.

My least favorite part about the traditional ways are that they tend to be very poor at estimating FTE/WYE needs for a body of work, and will more often than not err towards over-estimation. This ends up necessitating the creating of busy-work to make use of all assigned personnel. Mostly by adding extra checks and documentation that many would agree are not very beneficial.

It's hard to be lean when you're given 15 more people than you actually need, basically.

[damoncali]

I left because of all the down time. It was crushing. They didn't even try to make busy work - they just pretended everything was fine.