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Comment by hellojesus | Hacker News Reader

Why is this called Nasa Force when the linked job is for an Areospace Engineer? The usa.jobs site only shows 15 open reqs for Nasa, and they are almost all engineering roles, save a few accounting/finance ones.

Does that mean there are legitimately no other jobs open for tech-related folks? What is the point of the fancy landing page (that provides zero actual info) if that's the case? No Data Science or developer openings for tech folk that don't have Abet certified engineering degrees?

I'd love to work for Nasa, but I live in Portland, OR. Does this geo basically disqualify me from ever joining Nasa?

And the pay range for the aerospace engineer is okayish, but it's not really out-competiting more senior tech folks in any capacity.

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> Highly skilled early- to mid- career engineers, technologists, and innovators join NASA for focused term appointments, typically 1–2 years with the possibility of extension, to solve complex...

is somewhere in that word salad. I think it's an internship?

Maybe a visiting scholar kind of thing.

I guess what they want is a short term resource which would typically be a contractor or consultant but maybe they have to hire an FTE. So they're saying it's going to get real boring after year 2 so we expect you to leave. Sounds like a good deal for a new grad, bottom bullet on the resume would be a year or two at NASA.

Yeah, there definitely needs to be more transparency about the whole initiative.

Either it's "We're hiring ~1000 IT/Engineering specialists across multiple domains" or it's "Hey, just apply on USAJobs for the open positions".

Otherwise it just feels like throwing an application into the black hole of some kafkaesque talent management system.

You'll have better luck visiting the various center's websites.

I think it's called NASA Force to screw with the search results for Space Force, similar to Boris Johnson saying his hobby was building toy buses, in order to try and reduce the relevancy of the Brexit bus.

Why would the president that created space force want to screw with it? Was there some recent bad blood or something else I missed?

I doubt the president of the united states is personally reviewing the wording of low level job postings.

GP was discussing the overall name “nasa force”, not the wording of the job postings

The name of the job posting is part of the wording of the job posting, and very likely not reviewed by the president.

I'm saying people at NASA may want to skew the results for Space Force, not Trump.

15 open roles for nasa is disturbing. I’m sure every post has 3000 applicants.

Open roles != open positions. NASA probably has use for more than one aerospace engineer.

I'm sure they do, but do they have the budget for more than one aerospace engineer?

> I'd love to work for NASA

i doubt it's that great, NASA is a huge government organization. There may be a handful of people/teams doing cool things but I suspect much of it is infuriating slow and bureaucratic. However, it's probably a good place to retire from if you're willing to put in the 30-40 years.

I have a buddy at JPL who loves it. It's a reasonably fast paced atmosphere where you can have a lot of responsibility relatively early in your career. Unfortunately everything is mission centric so there's pretty much always a Sword of Damocles hanging over you if the mission gets axed due to budget cuts. Good place to work on cool stuff, bad place for job security.

> I'd love to work for Nasa, but I live in Portland, OR. Does this geo basically disqualify me from ever joining Nasa

Yes. And it always did since the 1950s unless you were interested in relocating.

Ffs aerospace engineering cannot be done remotely, and that too in a city with a nonexistent aerospace industry.

> Does that mean there are legitimately no other jobs open for tech-related folks? What is the point of the fancy landing page (that provides zero actual info) if that's the case? No Data Science or developer openings for tech folk that don't have Abet certified engineering degrees

Not all industries need SWEs who are CRUD monkeys. And your assumption deeply underestimates how most Aerospace and Mechanical Engineers know how to develop at a CS level now as well - most MechE and Aerospace undergrad programs now see their students double major or minor in CompE or CS.

Thanks. I was dual questioning people that likely knew the answer and lamenting my life's decisions.

I have no doubt that modern engineering students have CS know-how. It's almost a requirement for the modern world. But I was curious if there were roles for things like simulation, embedded software, etc. or even general scientists that may not fall under traditional engineering. This was mainly conditional on the website's approach to vaguity.

Simulation is largely what traditional engineers do - I mean how many classes have you taken on finite element methods, discretizing PDEs, etc.? It's not web dev.

Fair. I think this is about the extent of my training, which was as an Applied Mathematics and Econ undergrad about 15 years ago: Partial differential equations : an introduction / Walter A. Strauss > https://libcat.canterbury.ac.nz/Record/1093497/TOC

Maybe my idea of NASA was too encompassing. I figured that, apart from the engineering work, general sim would require optimizations and productionalization similar to how we have AI Engineers focused on the practical implementation of ML systems apart from the core model R&D.

I got a bit hooked on Econ for awhile which held my attention through an MS, which is when I learned about computers and then applied that into DS and development.

Most of my simulation experience is in stochastic systems and modern digital twins where agents sometimes have asymmetric information. I can see how I'm of no practical use to NASA now, but it still stings. What a bummer existing and not doing anything cool with life. A warning to youth!

I think you are underestimating your ability to contribute and also putting NASA on too much of a pedestal.

I'd argue your background is extremely valuable, but not easily traversible to NASA at the moment.

If you are deeply interested in the space, working with the newer startups in geospatial/hyperspectral imaging (be it climate or defense usecases) or CV space.

In a lot of cases, NASA is basically just acting as a coordinator between multiple vendors who are doing "the cool stuff" with less bureaucratic minutiae and stress from what's going on in DC.

Lots of interesting players in the ClimateTech and DefenseTech space who would like your background, and indirectly or directly they all work with NASA anyhow.

Thanks. I did find a space jobs site last week, and some jobs looked like they aligned closely. That's probably why I was surprised the nasa reqs weren't as broad.

I wasn't really looking for a change; I have 1 and 3 year olds and am fully remote, and the flexibility with sicknesses is really a benefit. I think it was mostly a shock to my system that I may never do anything "cool" with my life.

One way of viewing this is that to a moderate degree, NASA has largely been outsourced to SpaceX.

Were you in an Econ program that required tons of Matlab, SAS, R?

Not in undergrad (a single upper division class), but yes in grad school. I did a lot of applied mathematics in undergrad and only took the min required upper division probability/stats class. I didn't find it interesting at the time. But when I got to Econ grad school there was a massive focus on econometrics, and I learned it from first principals.

For languages: SAS in undergrad econ/Matlab for math classes, STATA primarily in grad school, and I pivoted to R and then python when I hit industry.

> simulation

That's largely a Mechanical Engineering, Applied Math, and Applied Physics subfield now, not computer science. Most CS majors don't even know what an IVP is, let alone PDEs, nonlinear simulation, etc.

Most CS programs no longer require numerical methods and analysis classes which are critical for this as well as other adjacent subfields like AI/ML theory.

> embedded software

That's a computer engineering and MechE subfield now. Most CS programs don't require OS classes anymore let alone embedded programming.

> even general scientists that may not fall under traditional engineering

The job posting on USAJobs is clear. And most people who are serious about working in the space also know how federal hiring works.

> embedded software

> That's a computer engineering and MechE subfield now.

Do you mean EE subfield? I don't know many ME's working on embedded software.

Back in my college days, embedded control was required for both ECSE and mech. E.

Aerospace isn't a sacred discipline either, and education in CS has very little to do with writing practical software or conducting business.

I think you're about to find out in the next few years how much work it takes to develop a moon base and that dismissing those people as "monkeys" is absurd.

> Ffs aerospace engineering cannot be done remotely, and that too in a city with a nonexistent aerospace industry.

Aerospace can be done remotely. I was working remotely as an aerospace engineer before the pandemic.

Portland has a 1 million sq ft Boeing factory and dozens of other aerospace companies.

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