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Comment by PurpleRamen | Hacker News Reader

> Kids these days... Why would someone in their right mind think working on the Voyager project could damage their careers?

It's an isolated legacy-project with no future. Mostly everything you learn for it will be only useful for this specific project, so all time to invest there is time to can't invest into something useful. Sure, there are probably some parts to learn from this too, but It's less than what your competitors will learn on their fancy modern projects.

> You can work on new and fancy tools all you want to improve supporting tools

Voyager is in maintenance, there is no big innovation or big progress to be made there. It's just work to hold the line as long as possible. And I guess nobody want's to be the one killing it because of a poor attempt to innovate something.

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You should hire for personality characteristics, not knowledge. I'll take anyone who's worked on a weird obscure system and figured it out from first principles over Front End React Dev #8482828 with Opinions on algebraic effects.

It would also be an interesting job, even if off the beaten track.

As a hiring manager, if I saw this on a resume interspersed with various web development work, I would be intrigued.

> You should hire for personality characteristics, not knowledge.

I'm not sure what personality characteristic are supposed to be in this context. But if you mean skills, then you have a false assumption. NASA and the surrounding industry is not really the environment where they grow boring react devs. For every legacy project like voyager, they have a dozen frontier-projects and other weird obscure jobs where one can gain the same skills, but better, with more potential for further growing. And someone early in their career will naturally choose something with more potential for their future.

Understanding assembly language (any architecture) give insights into how computers work that are still valuable and relevant today. Almost nobody still writes code in assembly, but understanding it at least conceptually is still worth something.

If I were hiring, I would almost always prefer a candidate who had some experience at machine/assembly programming to one that didn't, all else being roughly equal.

I've been a developer for 20 years, I do some reverse engineering stuff on the side using assembly.

There hasn't been a single time in 20 years that it was actually relevant for real work in any way.

Unless you are doing very specific work knowing assembly is about as useful as knowing COBOL (which is also useful for a very specific kind of work that most devs will never do)

Learning new and weird things builds brain elasticity and vocabulary for you to express new ideas. I always recommend people to learn FORTH, or Lisp, or APL. Learn to think with different paradigms.

As an extracurricular activity sure, but if your resume just has FORTH on it recruiters are going to throw it in the garbage because there's no evidence you can work in a modern development environment

You don't need to push the needle as a junior though. It's a "completed project" where one can glean many insights. And the matter of transferrable skills is simply a matter of being able to say how what you learned applies in a different context. A useful skill in-and-of-itself

> You don't need to push the needle as a junior though.

Doesn't matter. Many young people have strong motivations to shine and push, especially when they are in high profile-jobs. Legacy-projects are simply not alluring enough for this.

> Voyager is in maintenance, there is no big innovation or big progress to be made there.

This is just so blatantly ignorant. As if you believe there's some other space agency taking scientific measurements out past the heliopause.

> As if you believe there's some other space agency taking scientific measurements out past the heliopause.

We are talking about the maintenance, not the research. Nobody has doubts about the scientific value of the collected data.

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