Once upon a time, being an FAA engineer was a prestigious career move. As government work has become more and more stigmatized, so too has the brain drain from the public to private sectors been more and more pronounced.
I used to work in airworthiness and I met some really outstanding people working for the federal government, but they were dwarfed in number by the teeming masses of crayon eaters. Sadly, it's quite hard to get fired from the public sector, for a litany of reasons beyond the scope of this bitter internet comment.
I never worked for Boeing or GE but I'm not at all surprised to read those allegations. The ODA program was designed for the same type of world as FTP. To wit: the world was a different, less adversarial place back then.
I couldn't help but laugh out loud at the crayon eater comment. Hilarious and I'm sure in many cases it's not inaccurate.
That said, I personally question whether all gigs have to be prestigious and cutting edge and super interesting. I think there should be plenty of room in government and elsewhere for qualified people who do do a good job, but might not be the 20 something work 80 hour per week and rise fast type.
I wish more organizations openly admitted to and positioned themselves that way - like, hey, are you good at your job but don't really want to work super super hard all the time and rise to the top of your organization, or feel like you always have to work on the most prestigious, most cutting edge projects? Then we're the place for you!
I’ve been in a similar boat to the grandparent. The issue with the government (and more broadly government workers) isn’t that the work isn’t “exciting” or some such.
It’s a cultural and institutional resistance to change or improvement and the rewarding of toadyism and punishment of innovation.
I firmly believe the government would be “better” in some ways if it was forced into transparency by managers being allowed to fire for abusive reasons, rather than the psychological torture they regularly inflict on high-quality employees that don’t tow the line. Instead you either leave of your own volition or you are cowed into silence, becoming complicit in a general miasma of less-than mediocrity.
Brain drain is a natural conclusion, but only helps people who are both smart and motivated. Folks who are motivated and not smart get crushed and folks who are smart and not motivated get pushed intentionally into irrelevance.
The federal government is the most toxic employer there is, and they gaslight you about their toxicity by being so willing to assign you to BFE and let you languish rather than firing you, as if firing is the worst thing that can happen. Amazon is a well known toxic environment for tech workers and is a massively better work environment for an engineer than the federal government.
How much aeronautics/airworthiness/safety R/D is actually conducted by the FAA? My understanding is that they used to do a lot more cutting edge research, the kind that would attract engineering talent.
Looking at the 2022 FAA budget[1], they asked for $159M for "Engineering, Development, Test and Evaluation" out of a total budget ask of $18B+. That's less than 1% of the total budget.
It's not about prestige as much as budgets and "public/private collaboration", ie prior to Reagan and the "small government movements" most regulatory bodies had well funded labs and engineering teams capable and authorized to do independent research in order to validate claims made by industry.
post Reagan when the government budgets were cut and organisation asked to streamline/"rationalize" outsource and cut down on fluff the first thing cut were those labs as the new way of thinking was that they should let the regulated do their own safety research and that the government should merely check that the resulting documentation was conforming to formatting standards rather then validating the results.
This causes situations where large companies basically gets to be both accused and judge in cases where the safety of their products are in question, as they are the only one who can realistically produce and present studies to the regulators on the safety of their products. And it's not limited to the Boeing, nor to government as the same ideas of "rationalization" is prevalent in the management textbooks most enterprise managers are trained from.
Part of the problem with government work prestige is that for every FAA engineer, for every NTSB investigator, you get three or four - for the lack of a better word - political commissars these days, whose job is to blindly carry whatever the higher-ups deem "important" at the time down the ranks. Something about rotten apples spoiling the bunch.
> As government work has become more and more stigmatized ...
> Sadly, it's quite hard to get fired from the public sector ...
Aren't you stigmatizing it?
IME, it's quite hard to get fired from large corporations or any large institution, except for management adjusting 'human resources' counts in order to cut costs, or if you do something politically 'wrong'. One person I know left a Fortune 100 engineering job - a manufacturer you've certainly have heard of - in frustration over that issue. They simply did not show up for their job and it took ~3 months to lose it, IIRC.
The civil service is designed to our government from political maniuplation and firing. IME, the standards of professionalism are very high, higher than businesses.
Here's the thing, the FAA is no longer a new prestigious institution that is growing. All the ingredients for smart and talented people to succeed and rise to the top. The FAA was founded in 1958. It's now an ossified institution with middle managers, bean counters, process and a litany of other bullshit that talented people shouldn't tolerate and that mediocre people can hide behind.
Process is all about risk mitigation. You add process to mitigate the damage that can be done by a single individual. Sadly though when you can't have process that only neuters the liabilities. Processes also neuter your assets.
The only attractive thing about government jobs these days is the guaranteed pension. The guaranteed pension is also the exact kind of thing that causes many people to be overly zealous about not rocking the boat. It becomes all about staying in your job at all costs until you've put in your time and can retire worry free.
>I assumed people just preferred getting paid more and possible working at interesting companies.
There's that too, but at least in my circles there's very much the attitude of "oh you're in the public sector because you couldn't hack in in the private sector where you have to perform".
Whether that's a merited attitude to hold is a separate conversation, but the sentiment definitely exists.
I used to work in airworthiness and I met some really outstanding people working for the federal government, but they were dwarfed in number by the teeming masses of crayon eaters. Sadly, it's quite hard to get fired from the public sector, for a litany of reasons beyond the scope of this bitter internet comment.
I never worked for Boeing or GE but I'm not at all surprised to read those allegations. The ODA program was designed for the same type of world as FTP. To wit: the world was a different, less adversarial place back then.