The Meal wrote: ↑Sat May 01, 2021 2:25 pm
The Meal wrote: ↑Sat Mar 06, 2021 9:29 am
Would you be interested joining us at [Job Title +1] instead? We'd love to have you
I've been at the new place for a month. And as cool as the place looked from the outside, the view's even nicer from the inside... the founding principle for how employees are treated here is "respect."...
There's plenty to love, not the least of which is the manager I report to...
The six-month update is still pretty sweet. The company is still an independent operator with only the slightest hint of oversight from the big conglomerate. Somewhere down the line (beyond the end of 2021) the culture will shift, but that's still not yet upon us. As a company we design, manufacture, and if the customer wants, operate spacecraft for everything from outer planets to low-earth orbit. About 1/3rd of our customers are commercial, about 1/3rd military, and about 1/3rd NASA/academic. We are fully integrated in that we design and manufacture roughly 20 various different components (each of which comes in multiple flavors) which go into satellites for star tracking, orientating the S/C relative to the sun, GPS, antennae, batteries, solar arrays, etc. In addition to making our own, we also sell at the component level to other integrators. We have two sites, and I typically work at the lab that tests microsats (our other site tests cubesats). It's fair to think of what I do as testing something the size of a fridge, while the other site tests units which are on the order of oversized briefcases.
Both sites do lots of component level testing, but the exciting stuff is when a spacecraft comes into the lab. I operate a 2-ton crane on a gantry system in a room about the size of a racquetball court (the crane is overdesigned for the size of the things I test -- I'm not running mechanical simulations of rocket launches for 4,000 lb space vehicles!), so I joke that I'm First in Powered Flight for nearly all of our hardware (the crane being a powered device after all). My lab's the coolest stop on the frequent tours of the facility. I posted a six-minute CBS Morning News segment that briefly featured the lab 30 feet from where I sit in the "SPACE - random thread about space stuff" thread.
It's exhausting, physically and mentally. My test device is about the size of a VW bug, and I'm constantly crawling around on ladders and risers to access the device I'm working on. As one could imagine, ensuring things are appropriately mounted for test is 90% of the job (ensuring things are secure so they don't get overtested), which means lots of times with wrenches, torque-wrenches, various mounting fasteners, knowing the intricacies of each component type that gets tested, schlepping big fixtures (the biggest of which get the crane treatment), rotating my vibration shaker into the correct orientation, etc. Physically, it's a lot. Mentally, however, it's an entirely new world. There's no zoning out just going through the paces at any moment of any given day. If we're not feeling sharp on any given afternoon, we're encourage to just go home before we make the type of preventable mistake that costs the company hundreds of thousands of dollars. (That doesn't play well with the schedule pressures we face -- initially I thought I was working yesterday and today as we have a high-intensity program coming through that doesn't want to miss it's ride into space on an upcoming launch, so the test team is the last line of defense to try to bring things back on the target schedule). I'm good working under these circumstances, but I play a lot less poker with friends in the evenings and find myself nodding along when Stessier posts his sleep schedule. Alcohol consumption is relegated to those days which are not the day before going into work, and consumption of other mind altering substances is a thing of the past.
Then I got my own personal big curveball in early summer. The lab manager I spoke so highly of in my previous update managed to get himself burned out in the process of setting up the two labs and ended up moving back to his previous employer (not-so-coincidentally where his wife and daughter also work). That left us a significant void. Had I more experience testing these types of devices, I'd likely have been tagged for moving into his role, but thankfully we went forward with an external hire. It's been a bit of a mess, honestly. The new manager is a philosophic 180° from the previous and rather than testing in the most conservative fashion possible, this new guy is an absolute gunslinger in terms of how he runs things. It's a major whip-saw to those of us who've worked under both regimes. Sadly, my one other coworker comes from a background in mechanical assembly, so is unable to fairly judge the risk and appropriateness of the new manager, but fortunately for me, I *have* that background, and so finding myself in the middle of this churn at work has been pretty beneficial to me. Folks asking specific questions about our capabilities have been coming to me, and I've done very well in navigating upper management through these times of mystery and pseudo-crises. The new manager came in like Miley Cyrus on that wreckingball trying to change tools and processes without understanding the underlying fabric of how the job is done (honestly, he's trying to make things match his comfort level from his previous job despite how different the two roles are — his previous job was rather generalist and only dealt with external customers, while this job is particularly specialist and 75%+ of the time only works with internal stakeholders). I'm fully understanding of how this churn is going to play out, but my other coworker has really felt cut-out-of-the-loop in terms of these gigantic changes. I'm also a "glue guy" in terms of bridging the communications gaps between my coworker and our new boss (with personality issues hampering communication in both directions), so I'm absolutely coming up roses from management's perspective.
It's been good, but it's been stressful. I just checked my sleep statistics from my personal wearable and it... well let me just show you:
What happened 14 weeks ago? That's when my previous manager left.
I've had the opportunity to ply my wares at the local competition, but all along I said that I really enjoy working in this new industry I don't want to build a reputation as a job hopper. I wanted to give my currently employer a fair shake and wouldn't really entertain leaving within the first 12 months. Then the new manager came in and really made things topsy turvey, so I considered alternatives only to determine that living in the churn is actually a pretty comfortable spot for me right now. With the understanding that lots of things can (and likely will) change in the months ahead, I'm currently feeling pretty happy with things here on this precarious perch. Hopefully I can glue some cohesiveness into the team and get the three of us working together back like the well-oiled machine we were at the beginning of the summer. All the while I *am* building up that level of experience testing these units and have some very nice notches in my belt which are being recognized by current management. It hasn't been the smooth path I envisioned when I was originally presented with this new career opportunity, but a lot of the fun's been in the crookedness.
Self employment is definitely not in your future. 
If they're to be believed, companies are stampeding to implement AI for edge devices such as IoT, machine vision (esp. medical imaging), natural language processing, and similar compute-intensive applications.