Why won’t the skillset be transferable to places like space x, Amazon kuiper, blue origin, or any of the big defense tech or start ups (eg anduril)?
Similar sentiment is felt about any other organization run by people who are seen as having had a hand in kneecapping NASA - working for their companies is not appealing. Perhaps her views will change after she's had more time to process the sting of the layoff notice.
And her prior work for the DoD left her with an extraordinarily bad impression of the culture. Admittedly she'd only worked at a single Navy Yard and different branches in different services can have different cultures, but nevertheless - the DoD is not appealing either. Depending on the results of her job search, that might change.
For Amazon Kuiper - no relevant roles are available in the region and, as far as what's listed on the website, there's no jobs that allow for working remotely outside of relevant travel.
Blue Origin...same issue as with Kuiper - remote work doesn't seem to be a thing and they've no local presence with relevant jobs available.
So....the same challenges that everyone working in the private sector has? What am I missing here?
Still - it appears to be a tremendously hurdle for her to find alternate employment with her skillset in parts engineering without physically relocating - which would necessitate selling her house and her husband finding employment at the new region as well.
What we do about it is educate the public and form institutions that are motivated to protect these people. We failed on the former and now it's disrupting the latter.
Deciding whether I should care about another group based on whether they care about my own predicament is a straight path to evil.
Great that you care? And what are you dong about it? Are you voluntarily paying more taxes to your local city/council/state?
In America we ostensibly participate in a representative democracy founded on the sentiment of no taxation without representation, and so our first duty is to be politically involved by educating ourselves holistically, voting appropriately for our local, state and federal representatives, participating in accompanying community building, wealth and knowledge dissemination in order to create and maintain the institutions which I mentioned in my previous comment.
Do doctors really belong on that list? In my personal experience-I’m not a doctor, but lots of people in my family are, including my mother and brother (and when she finishes med school, my sister too)-I really don’t get the impression doctors are poorly paid at all. If we talk about those with established careers (so not junior doctors), the poorly paid ones are still earning twice what the average person does, and the better paid ones are off the charts. On average, medicine pays better than software engineering.
Oh, and I’m in Australia-in the US, medical salaries are even better than they are in Australia. Like take what people get paid in Australia and add 50%. Yes, American doctors would owe more in student loans-but when you are on US$400K, and the average US medical school debt is under US$300K, how long is it going to take you to pay it off?
Someone ex-NASA may well have deep experience in certain specific areas which few other candidates could claim.
The thing about a voluntary "deferred resignation program" – the people most likely to take it are those who are confident they can find good opportunities somewhere else. If you didn't have that confidence, you'd be much less likely to sign on to it.
Those companies are transportation companies when it comes to space.