Many projects have no impact on NASA. Bad co-workers cannot be fired. Better places exist to do something useful.
Pros
- there are some section of Ames that do excellent relevant work (e.g. the thermal protection group) - there are people who put up a valiant and often successful effort to impact NASA & space despite the challenges - if you manage to get on a useful project with motivated people, it's great - if you don't care about your efforts actually being useful, you can work on interesting 'problems' at an easy going pace for years and tell people you work at NASA
Cons
These are the cons if you were expecting to be on a hard working (or even average) team that gets something done for NASA, and you don't find one of the temporary islands of productivity: - your coworkers are civil servants who cannot be fired for not doing their jobs. 'Country club" as a friend called it. - there are projects with 10 people where 2 people end up doing all the work - you can get stuck working insane hours on a key project, unable to hire help, while tons of other folks are hardly doing anything because they're known to be not that good or not motivated - must learn to tell if you're on a project that helps NASA & space, or just gives civil servants something to do - some groups have been working in the same problem for 20 years without NASA actually using it - before taking a job, ask how their work has changed something at NASA, not just done make-work demos - folks there don't necessary know how to judge impact (e.g. we delivered something, but no one ever used it, or they stopped after 2 months) so you have to learn to do that yourself, if your efforts making a difference in the world is important. Think of the warehouse at the end of Indiana Jones - wastes money that could be going to helping NASA be successful and effective
