Comment by designtofly | Hacker News Reader

Comment by designtofly | Hacker News Reader

This slide is taken out of context to support the author's own ideology. First off, this slide describes only one of 13 criteria used when deciding on alternatives. This is certainly not the focus of the presentation. This presentation is showing the multitude of objectives that NASA decision makers must take into account when deciding on the future of their program. This is strictly an exercise in Multi Attribute Decision Making [1]. In general, with MADM techniques, you frame the objective as a weighted combination of criteria that you meet with appropriate weightings. We have no idea what "weights" (i.e. importance) were put to this criterion of maintaining workforce.

What is wrong with framing _this particular issue_ in this way? Why would any organization, especially one heavily based on knowledge gathering, prioritize a reduction in workforce. Anyone who understands the issues of the aerospace workforce knows that knowledge retention is one of the most important issues facing the industry right now. All of the smart people that got us to the moon and created all of the other aerospace accomplishments of the last 50 years are either retired or very close to retiring. Y'all should understand that people are assets.

As an aside, the reason that NASA is so expensive is because it is risk averse. It is risk averse because the public (and Congress) cannot tolerate any failures. They are reacting to public sentiments any time something goes wrong. They have some of the best risk and reliability assessments of any industry (even though they are not perfect). The ONLY way private companies can do better is if they accept more risk. As soon as NASA tried to accept more risk, they were blamed incessantly for having a "management driven culture." What do you think a private company is going to do?

[1] http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=multi+attribute+dec...

I agree that the article sensationalizes the point somewhat. But at the same time, your dismissal of the concern because of the need retain knowledge, and hence the people having that knowledge, misses an important aspect as well.

The table shown in the article is tuned not only to weigh against losing people. It also -- and this is the really telling part -- is tuned to give preference to anything that increases the workforce.

Surely preserving the existing set of experts is not fostered by hiring on additional ones. That sounds to me like nothing more than empire-building. And I think that in the big picture, accounting for the possibility of future lean times, making NASA more dependent on personnel expenses must increase the possibility of having to let go some of the pile of experts that these preferences are amassing.

Not that anything can be decided based on this amount of knowledge, but isn't it also possible that they want to increase their workforce so that the remaining experts can pass on their knowledge while they are still there?

True, that's one possible explanation -- but it seems a stretch to me.

On the other hand, if the actual goal is not to increase the workforce size as such, why not just set up the criteria to reflect what your actual goal are?

That is, if your goal is to prevent "brain drain", why not specifically state the criteria in terms of loss of personnel possessing unique expertise. The criteria as stated would let us be perfectly willing to throw one Feynman under the train in order to save two cafeteria dishwashers.

That's a good point.

One could argue they might have just made a bad powerpoint, but that sounds really weak.

Yes, you are right, this is just one criteria out of 13 but it still boggles my mind that this criteria is even present in the list. Can you imagine a for profit corporation evaluating project based on such a criteria?

Even if I were to accept your point that it's important to retain existing people for the knowledge they have, it still doesn't explain why your project would get 2 points if you increase the workforce by more than 10%.

Why yes, I can imagine that. Companies generally don't much like firing people. They quite reasonably prefer making better use of the people they've got.

Now, I doubt that any commercial enterprise would use the exact same criterion as (if we take this one out-of-context slide at face value) NASA is using here. So what we have is some evidence that one thing NASA tries to do is to provide jobs. Which is not remotely the same thing as "NASA is a jobs program", which is the idiotic claim being made by the originally cited blog entry.

"Companies generally don't much like firing people."

Perhaps not, but obviously many of them get over it. And if you think they don't like firing, they really don't like hiring.

The companies I've worked for have generally done considerably more hiring than firing, and the people involved have seemed to enjoy the hiring much more. Perhaps I've just been lucky.

Why should NASA try to provide jobs? They are funded by taxpayer money (i.e. our money) and we have given them money to do research not to provide jobs.

Even if I were to believe that providing jobs is a worthy goal , there are cheaper ways for government to provide jobs than for NASA to create these jobs out of thin air.

And could you care to explain why you take offense about the 'out of context slide'? What's the missing context which will justify this slide's contents?

Why should NASA try to provide jobs? They are funded by taxpayer money (i.e. our money) and we have given them money to do research not to provide jobs.

They try to provide jobs because they are funded by taxpayer money. Their primary stakeholder is the American public; it is their job to benefit their stakeholders. Employment is a benefit, in the eyes of the great majority of people.

Secondly, this is hardly "out of thin air." Assessing the manpower needs of a project proposal and selecting for the ones that rank higher on the scale is very different than the government going "Break some rocks, collect a paycheck lol."

They try to provide jobs because they are funded by taxpayer money. Their primary stakeholder is the American public; it is their job to benefit their stakeholders

Let me get this straight. You want government to take money from people (by taxing them), creating organizations like NASA and give money to people (by providing jobs). My questions to you is, why go through all the trouble? Why not reduce taxes and let people keep their money thereby eliminating waste.

I didn't comment on whether or not I approved of the reasoning, I just stated that I wouldn't be surprised if that is part of the reasoning. Whether I want it to be that way or not is immaterial.

As others have said: they should (or, rather, it's perfectly reasonable if they do) try to provide jobs because they are funded by taxpayer money. As someone who pays taxes, I am very happy for some of that money to be used to provide jobs. (Of course, jobs doing something; if you have evidence that NASA is in fact paying people to do nothing, or to do useless things, then please feel free to provide it.)

I didn't take offence about anything. I mentioned that the slide was taken out of context because, er, it was, and that might be relevant -- e.g., because there is a considerable difference between "we decide whether a project is worth while by looking at whether it will provide jobs" and "we decide whether a project is worth while by looking at a dozen things, one of which is whether it will provide jobs".

For instance: Suppose one of the other slides says that a criterion they use is some measure of efficiency: useful stuff achieved per unit money or time spent. Then what seems to me to be the only reason for objecting to "more jobs => better" largely goes away. (Let's have an even more specific, albeit rather artificial, example: suppose two of their metrics are "jobs provided" and "likely stuff achieved per job provided", and suppose the way they combine them is to multiply together. Then that is exactly equivalent to the single metric "likely stuff achieved", which I hope you would not object to.)

Can you imagine a for profit corporation evaluating project based on such a criteria? Yes. Did it for years. It's either that or fire the people who work for you.

it still doesn't explain why your project would get 2 points if you increase the workforce by more than 10% If you create a stable environment by not treating your workforce like rented mules you will not have significant turnover. The only way to bring in new capabilities is by increasing the head count.

Why would any organization, especially one heavily based on knowledge gathering, prioritize a reduction in workforce.

If someone is designing a car, and one of his criteria is that using more steel is better, is that a good thing? If someone is writing a novel, and wants to raise the word count, is that useful?

That's not a fair comparison. If you looked at one of the early slides in the presentation that the slide in question came from, you can see that NASA decision makers are trying to balance three conflicting objectives: 1) Budget realities, 2) risks, and 3) benefit to stakeholders. This is no different than any corporate board. The stakeholders of NASA are the American people. As such, NASA has a duty (implicit or otherwise) to bring as much benefit to the American people as possible. It does this through several avenues. One of the biggest, and one that is often overlooked is the amount of knowledge that NASA has generated. You show me one for-profit company that has been as open as NASA at making all of their information public and available. [1] Secondly, it would be naive to think that NASA does not have an obligation to provide benefit to their stakeholders by providing jobs.

With this framework in mind, what objective is the car designer trying to balance when deciding to use more steel? If the writer decides to use more words, what objective are the trying to meet? The first case you bring up is ridiculous and I'm not going to address any further. The second case is more fair. The novel writer does have to balance clarity of writing and the amount of pleasure they bring to the reader. Someone buying a 50 page book is going to feel pretty ripped off if they read it in 30 minutes. Why are the Harry Potter books so damn long? Because people love to read them. She could have just as easily written the same story in a lot shorter format if she had so decided.

[1] http://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp

Everyone's defense of NASA is that they have generated a lot of knowledge. The question no one is asking is that what's the cost for generating that knowledge? Wikipedia suggests that NASA has spent 418 billion dollars from 1958 to 2008. Do you really think we got our money's worth?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Budget

Could you name few inventions derived from NASA's knowledge which have helped us tremendously? Compare this to the research/inventions done by private corporations.

And as I pointed out in my other reply, why should Government take money from people, give it to NASA and NASA will return that money back to people by providing jobs? Why not reduce taxes so that we can eliminate waste by having NASA as the middleman?

Secondly, it would be naive to think that NASA does not have an obligation to provide benefit to their stakeholders by providing jobs.

Well, that's exactly the problem. The goal of any organization should be its mission. "Organize the world's information", "Dominate the operating system industry", or "Explore Space", etc. The problem with government organizations is that the employers can vote as a block. Thus over time the mission warps from "Exploring space" to "Provide jobs to NASA engineers"

Actually, if you look at the German car industry, you'll find more of a stake-holder driven culture rather than a share-holder driven culture as in the US.

I was just reading an economist piece on how the German people actually rate stake-holder interests above share-holder interests.

The benefit of having knowledge embodied in a person rather than a book is skills; and skills deteriorate if not used; stockpiling human resources is a waste of time and money.

As for risk; show me the armies of those fired after the shuttle accidents. Even after Feynman exposed the dishonesty of the official reliability estimates, not a single bureaucrat lost his job for lying to Congress or the public about the risks (since the engineers had a good idea of the real risks, the management at NASA either knowingly lied or were effectively sticking their collective fingers in their ears and refusing to hear what the engineers said).

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