Quitting my Dream Job
Two years ago I posted that I was leaving the heavy industrial industry and taking a job in aerospace. I was going to design and build a spaceship! It's my ultimate dream job. I'm crazy about space. The Apollo team, astronaut, engineers, everybody, they've always been my biggest heros.
Well, I guess this falls under the umbrella of "never meet your heros." It's an absolute shitshow. I got disillusioned within six months, but I stuck around for two years hoping it would turn around. It never did. I just quit.
The American aerospace industry is not in a good place. Half the people are old-school Boeing crowd who want 37 safety reviews before they sign off on the simplest of designs. Want to test a mechanism to see if it works or if it needs redesign? Good fucking luck. You need 42 safety reviews and six signatures to run a test. Just analyze it! Oh, but the analysis department needs six months to run their model. And they'll probably give you incorrect results at the end. Analyze it yourself? Oh honey, you can't do that! You don't have "stress analyst" in your job title! Leave it to the experts. Even if they're useless.
The other half of the people are the new-school Spacex crowd. Hard workers, real go-getters. They work 100-hour weeks and chug energy drinks like it's water. They've never set foot inside a machine shop or torqued a bolt in their life, so they constantly churn out designs that can't actually be built or assembled. But don't tell them that, or you better buckle up for a cocaine-fueled rant about how dare you question their superior intellect. If you don't work 100-hour weeks then you're a lazy bastard and not worth listening to. Test their designs to see if they work? We don't need to do that, dumbass, I've accounted for every contingency already.
Everyone in the building is a genius, and is accustomed to being the smartest person in the room. The screaming matches when one ego goes up against another ego are frequent and explosive...and could be easily prevented if we had managers who actually cared about anything. But they don't. Management doesn't actually care about building or launching a spaceship. They care about investor cash. As long as the design looks flashy enough to coax another hundred million out of the government of Switzerland or Uganda or Saudi Arabia or someplace, they're happy. But every new investor comes with caveats and design requests, most of which are incompatible with each other. So we keep having to scrap everything and start over from scratch.
They started designing this spaceship in 2020. It's six years later and they haven't even locked the requirements yet. Six years of nothing but design, restart, design, restart, design, restart. It would be funny if it wasn't so demoralizing.
That's two years of my life down the drain, with nothing to show for it. Thousands of hours of work on designs that will never see the light of day, and a spaceship that will never get off the launchpad.
Maybe some other aerospace companies are doing it right. I don't know. Maybe we will get a bunch of private space stations in orbit by 2035 and NASA will get us to the moon by 2032 and it will all be okay. But if this is the best that America has to offer...our space industry is absolutely fucked. We might as well just sit back and let China take the lead, because we're going nowhere.
Yeah, that sucks.
Maybe you can get a job somewhere else? It might be just as bad - or even worse. But it might be worth trying, and maybe even easier to get hired now that you have a couple years' experience.
Unfortunately I've got too many years of experience outside aerospace, so I command too high a salary for someone with only two years of experience in aerospace itself. From a hiring manager's point of view I'm the worst of both worlds. I've actually spent the last four months looking around for other jobs while biding my time at the hellhole - most of the other employees were in similar boats.
So I'm back to heavy industry; I'm gonna build some nuclear reactors instead.
That sounds absolutely insane! Glad you got out instead of suffering any longer.
I've had a much different experience in the industry. I'm not an engineer, so that might be why, but there are good companies out there.
I also have not worked for one of the big OEMs, we made components like lighting, cables/trays, harnessing, IFE, haptic buttons, etc.
Yeah, I'm really hoping that this was just a bad apple of a company. A lot of the new space startups look like they're on the right track, from the outside at least.
I do know the FAA audits can be a bitch, which is why the need for the paper trail and sign offs.
The company I'm currently at works with some of the newer startups and I would agree that they are disruptors. Part of the problem is the size of these OEMs. They have been consolidating all the small companies into these huge juggernauts that only end up impeding themselves. They lose the small company agility and innovation.
What really took me by surprise was the consolidation in machine shops over the last ten years. You used to be able to farm work out to shops, and some would have better quality than others, but it was an agile marketplace that would quickly shape bad actors into compliance just through market forces. Today they've all been gobbled up by umbrella groups like Xometry that dictate compliance from a faceless HQ. There's no more market, there's only the megacorp, and you'd better hope that your quality requirements match up to what the megacorp offers.
I think unfortunately, this is the reality in many industries these days. You could have been describing the creative industry I left 4 years ago (except for the safety reviews part... people were much more careless, but we also weren't hoping to launch people into space).
Working for clients is a nightmare because they think they always know best, while also never being able to make up their minds about what they want.
People at the top of their field will always think they're smarter and their opinions hold more weight than anyone else, regardless of how logical your argument may be.
Companies care more about profit and/or funding than what they're doing or the well-being of their employees.
I've honestly wondered if it would be better at this point to just be a night janitor somewhere - quietly mopping floors in peace.
I'm sorry your dream job ended up being a nightmare, I hope you find something else soon.
We are so fucked. My uncle went from working in Huntsville AL to Lockheed Martin here in GA. It's def not better in defense contract plane world.
I don't think you have nothing to show for it, though. This has been a valuable experience and life lesson. You now know stuff most of us have no idea about. But the business of the industry has gone like every other business in the US, so until that course corrects... I'm sorry for you though.
Oof, I've heard some hilarious stories out of Lockheed as well. Like how it takes five people to install a bolt: the torque wrench operator, the backup torque wrench operator, two checkers to verify, and one non-Lockheed employee checker to third-party verify. And if any of them get distracted or aren't looking, they have to take the bolt out and do it again. It's like, no wonder the F-35 costs billions per plane.
My uncle's a bit OCD, so I bet he loved it. He retired, but would come in as a contractor until it was too annoying (I don't really understand all the details)
We are talking about Boeing, right?
Sounds contradictory, doesn't it?
Boeing's strategy is to have so many reviews and check so many goddamn checkboxes to prove to all the lawyers and all the judges that "we really care about safety, we swear" that by the time a mechanism actually progresses from concept to design to being built and tested, the person who designed it has already left the company. Nobody remembers why X part is in Y location, and everybody's afraid to change the design. So even if it fails in testing, their "risk calculation" says that it's a bigger safety risk to change the design without the original engineer there than it is to fix the known safety problem that's obvious to everybody.
It's a system that cares so much about safety it ensures an unsafe product at the end. Also, it ensures that projects take ten years to go from concept to launch and go billions over budget.
It no longer sounds contradictory 😅
Yup. it's not the 1960's anymore.
I'd suggest the wind turbine industry. But the Chinese are dumping their products at below cost to force their competitors out of business right now.
Sorry dude, we are a country in decline.
Part of the problem is that most of the industries that are actually hiring are ethically dubious. Like, I could always go back to oil & gas, if I wanted to feed my family without regard for the consequences towards other people. Lots and lots of startups in the defense world as well - designing drones to kill people is a really hot industry right now.
I ended up in nuclear power. Nuke plants are having a bit of a renaissance right now, thanks to the demand for electrical power from the AI bubble; hopefully we can get some plants constructed before the bubble pops.
I use to be a health physicist for 30 year. We always said the radiation industry is where dreams go to die.
Pays well. Intellectually simulating. But not anyone’s dream job.
Edit: I feel compelled to point out that rad expose mutated my bone marrow and now it makes deformed red blood cells. So best stay away from the hot zones.
Oh dear. I'm sorry that happened to you.
Looks like what I'll be working on will be designed to keep humans as far away from the hot areas as possible (hallelujah for modern robotics), in order that that never happens to anybody else in the future.
Good. But fyi, if it’s cheaper to send a person, management will.