Yah, I'm not sure the assembly is the hard part (I know a couple engineers in their 20's that do just fine with assembly), or for that matter layering fortran on said engineers. The problem is that none of them will likely be interested in working on a piece of hardware for 10 years that effectively is a dead end. Its the same decision that I looked a couple years ago with regard to mainframe development. Its a dead end and the longer you stay there the less employable you will be for your next job.
AKA, if whoever gets the job at NASA is younger than the 50 Y/O's they are looking at, it should come with a pension, because getting the next job will be hard.
> Its a dead end and the longer you stay there the less employable you will be for your next job.
I don't understand why people have this mentality, because it's so wrong. We live in an era were kids can get jobs fresh out of high school after taking an eight-week crash course in programming an no other experience. Certainly a person capable of building robust software for NASA is capable of learning whatever platforms exist in 10 years.
I've never had two jobs with an overlap in work. I've done everything from embedded development to data science and analytics. Being an expert in many fields demonstrates that know how to become an expert.
Who the fuck is going to look at a resume with "last 10 years at NASA building shit for a MOTHERFUCKING DEEP SPACE PROBE" and go... nah, dude(tte) doesn't have node.js on his resume... NEXT!
Honestly, I have spoken to and worked with some of these engineers, and if they've been ten years deep on software that has no capacity for errors at all, they can be a bit difficult. Not just "I can't use that tool, it has a garbage collector", but when they are put in front of a frontend, they end up re-inventing basic things constantly, because they have absolutely no context.
Honestly, going from that kind of development to web development, "last 10 years" doesn't mean much -- they are essentially junior programmers again. Expect them to break things because they self-closed a script tag. Except them to break things because they forgot to set the button type to button and so some browsers POST. Heaven forbid you use tech where it doesn't default HTML and SQL escape. It's very very easy to forget the amount of extremely specific domain knowledge we all have that keeps things from imploding, and if they don't have it, their code doesn't hit production without a senior dev looking over it.
You hire an extremely smart, talented individual with some ramp up time, or pass on them for someone less talented (and less smart?) with less ramp up time.
I can't speak to your current needs when hiring someone, but you're mistaken if you think I was assuming they can pick up web dev with no mistakes made.
Someone who wants to hire a node.js programmer and doesn't want to overpay for expertise they can't use.
An engineer who spent the last decade working on motherfucking space probes for NASA but can't hit the ground running with javascript today is going to be passed over for the kid right out of high school who can, in that case.
That said, if you worked for the last decade on space probes for NASA, you're probably smart enough to avoid web development altogether.
lol the arrogance of a lot of people here is astonishing. The programmers I do know in the aerospace industry like dicking around with all kinds of stuff. I'm pretty sure any of the ones I'm thinking of could pick up node.js in a heartbeat if they had a reason to. :)
Usually, those things are seen as tools you use to solve problems. And the fun is in solving problems. Seriously the people getting all wrapped up in the node.js are just as bad as the stereotypical veterans that spent 30 years wrangling fortran on a PDP that haven't learned anything else.
Probably most nowadays, because IT is no longer primarily made of geeks, but out of sales and marketing people who think their next ad-exchange SaaS platform for 3D-printed kitten cloud computing solutions is The Best Thing, and space probes? "Space? Yeah, there's something like that, they put it in movies sometimes, but who really cares about it?"
Possibly true if you're trying to get a job for an ad-exchange SaaS platform like you mention. But is that really where you'd go next after significant experience doing low-level, high-assurance programming at NASA? There are plenty of other parts of the tech industry whose hiring managers would appreciate that experience a lot more. For example, any kind of embedded-systems job, or even most "regular" programming jobs in more engineering-oriented industries like energy and aerospace.
I ported the Fortran and assembly code to 'C' for computing stress on orbiter (aka the space shuttle) based on winds aloft data. We received the data from a weather balloon sent up on launch day.
We even rolled our own work balancing and coordination system based on NQS. The UNIX code was far faster due to hardware speedups and parallelizing the code but it was much more resilient as well due to our putting in checkpointing and restart and recovery logic into the work manager and code.
The project won a Silver Snoopy because we retired a Honeywell mainframe that was costing NASA $5 MM/yr in maintenance fees. I assume there was a guy or team of guys prepared to fabricate any component required at that price. :-)
Because I was a contractor working for a contractor I did not receive a Silver Snoopy. Trust me, I regularly look for those little guys on ebay because I'd love to have one. I'm still cheesed about it twenty years later.
Although it's a fun anecdote (and admittedly not nearly as cool as your example) I don't think it's garnered much more than a "that's cool" reaction from people. Probably too many other people running around Houston who've done similar things. If it would get me a job at Google I'd jump, but in a town full of ex-NASA employees it's nothing remarkable.
AKA, if whoever gets the job at NASA is younger than the 50 Y/O's they are looking at, it should come with a pension, because getting the next job will be hard.