Comment by dmonagha | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmonagha | Hacker News Reader

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I worked at a similar large aerospace contractor just in the past couple years. I can attest 100% to what you've said.

They estimated they would need to replace 40% of their workforce within the next 10 years just to stay afloat. Recently at my old site they hired 1000 people. Within a year, 800 had quit. These are software engineers, mechanical engineers, etc. I watched people just play on their phones, keep their feet up, basically do nothing at all.

One guy showed up to work on the first day and was told by his manager : "I don't have an office, so you'll have to sit here for now". The manager then flew back to another state, and the guy did not see him ever again. For a year this guy played Candy Crush on an iPad and did nothing because no one else knew who he was or who he worked for. Eventually he got a new manager and his job was then unboxing computers...for a year...When I started working with him, he would go into a large empty lab and just lay down behind some boxes and nap for 2hrs a day.

He was hired to be some sort of cost accountant.

This was not uncommon, it was rampant. I still cannot believe workplaces like that exist.

Here's a story that I received secondhand, so I cannot verify its authenticity.

A man exited the Navy, and got a new job with a private Navy-supporting contractor. He reports for work, and his manager tells him what he'll be working on. So he gets right to it, sets up a cot, and hammers away for a few days, until the problem is completely fixed. As one does when trained by the Navy.

He then tells his manager that he's finished. Manager just goes berserk, and tells him to not show his face at the worksite again; just fill out the time card remotely, until instructed otherwise. So he toddles off, to go SCUBA diving every day, for about six months, until the work hours allocated to the project were finally used up. After that, he played the game correctly.

This story aligns perfectly with my anecdotal experience, though it is not uniform across all contractor companies, or even across different work groups within the same company. Even the estimates for the work required to pad the estimates are padded.

I understand why people laugh at the stories I tell from there, I laugh at it now that my time is over. But when you're in it, it's just disheartening. No one wants to tell their grandkids "I was in a lot of meetings, and I was the best at looking busy".

This is kind of why SpaceX is so efficient. That kind of dead wood doesn't really exist there, plus their actual aerospace/mechanical engineers are cream of the crop from the best universities.

I think it's that as well as the fact that they are a private company and don't do as much "contracting" in a sense. They aren't handed a gigantic set of legaleze requirements from the customer (the government).

Unless they do- I don't work there but it seems like they build their product, make sure it can lift X mass to orbit well, and if anyone needs shit lifted into orbit they just goto SpaceX. Far less bloat.

They also have a mission (Mars) that transcends everything.

Wait, the forgotten employee from Dilbert [0] is real? Learn something new every day...

[0] https://dilbert.com/strip/1992-05-05

Don't forget to charge all that labor to the program (taxpayers).

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