- cross-posted to:
- technology@hexbear.net
- cross-posted to:
- technology@hexbear.net
- I am directing most employees to work from home tomorrow, Wednesday, February 7, so everyone can be in a safe, comfortable environment on a stressful day. Most individuals will not be able to enter the Lab during this mandatory remote work day. A Lab access list has been created and those who will have access will be notified by email shortly. If you do not receive an email instructing you to be on Lab, please plan to work remotely, regardless of your telework agreement status. In addition, and to ensure we have everyone’s accurate contact information, I am also asking everyone to please review and update your personal email and phone number in Workday today.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a company or organization that had mandatory remote work day outside of really crazy weather during the peak of Covid. Perhaps it’s to protect the equipment from distraught or disgruntled employees?
Not germane to your points above but now that there are organizations other than NASA I am not actually sure that layoffs are detrimental (from a tech/development standpoint). Instead of layoffs resulting in the knowledge being lost people can just jump between JPL/SpaceX/Blue Origin and so on. This is one of the easier ways to get knowledge to distribute through the field since our economic system & IP laws discourage meaningful cooperation.
This is nice in theory, but isn’t how knowledge transfer of this variety tends to happen in the aerospace industry. Many of those laid off have very specific expertise in niche areas of mechanical and aerospace engineering. Some of that is transferrable, but a lot is specific to things like Mars rovers and planetary science. Tearing those people away from JPL will result in the loss of a ton of institutional knowledge and much of it will not be applicable to the private sector and might just be lost all together.