Kevin Willoughby wrote:

In article .com,
says...


Yes, get rid of the do-nothing management types,



As much as this engineer hates to admit it, for large, complex projects,
good management is more important than good engineering.

That's why the "do-nothing" qualifier.


(Personally,
I'm working in a company with less than 20 people for just this reason.)




There is a LOT of tribal knowledge in this field.



If so, the engineers aren't doing their job correctly.

Meh. A lot of these jobs *suck.* Thus, I know of a guy who is the Local
Expert ona particualr, very important topic. He's a single point
failure mode. He dies, quits, retires... there'll be trouble. To rectify
this, he has trained a number of new guys to do his job. They have all,
to a man, decided they'd rather be elsewhere doing something else for
the next thirty years.

DL The Shuttle program, compared to a rational program, is overmanned by at *least* an order
DL of magnitude.
Lobotomizing your industry
is not a good idea if you want the capability to continue, much less
improve.



If the existing industry has a track record of wildly overspending and
under-delivering, not really achieving any useful results (has ISS
achieved anything that Skylab and MIR didn't already demonstrate?), why
would we want that capability to continue?


Because it's not the fault of the bulk of those in the industry. A lot
of NASA programs have been ruined for *political* reasons. Pork-barrel
projects the pols don;t actually have any desire to see finished. But
even within those whirlpools of doom, the people slaving away often show
great skill and creativity and talent. Give them something *proper* to
do. When NASA finally is in the business of doing more than going in
circles fulfillign State Department diplomacy missions, then you'll see
progress. But *not* if you've ****canned the talent first.



--
"The only thing that galls me about someone burning the American flag is how unoriginal it is. I mean if you're going to pull the Freedom-of-speech card, don't be a hack, come up with something interesting. Fashion Old Glory into a wisecracking puppet and blister the system with a scathing ventriloquism act, or better yet, drape the flag over your head and desecrate it with a large caliber bullet hole." Dennis Miller