It's a $10 billion piece of hardware parked 930,000 miles away.
> Reid said STScI does not yet have a specific plan to deal with JWST’s budget shortfalls, but it will almost certainly involve reducing staff.
> “It’s fewer people, really,” Neill Reid, multi-mission project scientist at STScI, told Astronomy. “[JWST has] got 17 different modes. Each of those modes needs people to support it, to calibrate it, to keep it going. So, if you cut the funding, you have fewer people. And you can’t ask people to do twice as much work. So what will happen is that there will be potentially fewer modes available. There will be less user support.”
That's an interesting question! Can you tell us what research you've done to try to answer it? It's public funds, so there's probably some documentation for what jobs were created to support the telescope.
The problem is most software engineers are disconnected from why their work even matters. It's hard to be motivated when you can't see the impact your work has on others and you don't get any recognition for it.
I just wrote a new book about how engineering leadership has to change and this is one of the key problems. https://productdriven.com/book
I, too, like them a lot, and I worry that eventually they're going to be "the internet" in the same way that Twitter became "the communication platform" or AWS became "the infrastructure".
We're going to see days when something goes wrong on Cloudflare's end and disrupts their whole CDN, and 2/3 the internet is going to break.
Still, at this point they're absolutely a net positive, and seem like a good steward. They even once replied to one of my e-mails saying "Based on what you've said about your use case, you should just use our free plan which you can sign up for on our website".
I think it comes down to ownership. Going forward it will be more important for engineers to show more product ownership of their domain. Product thinking is becoming more important.
That doesn't mean you are a salesperson. It means you are more connected to the users and their problems.
IF you are building software to build a product, and the company has put you on the product team in their organizational structure, you are on the product team, if they haven't you and they have a problem.
A great boon for people who enjoy a writing voice trained by Quora answers, corporate press releases and bone-dry academic journal articles. The bookshelves at Kindle Self Publish have never been fuller.
At least, that is what they did to me.
It's all a scam.