Ask HN: Has anyone worked at the US National Labs before?
Briefly worked at Johns Hopkins APL.- PHd professors were basically seen as demi-gods. It was their way of the highway, down to the micromanagement level, and they make terrible managers- Worked seemed pointless. "Here is some money to look into this, this will likely never get implemented"- Implicit push for producing positive results rather than saying this won't work.- Just dreary environment overall.Also worked at NavAir at Paux River.- salary was absolute shit for the amount of technical knowledge/work required. I feel like setting up the instrumentation (hardware/software) for an experiment in a wind tunnel is orders of magnitudes harder than writing a web service, but maybe thats just me.- Got to work on some cool things, but gov culture and nepotism is too much. People with military experience automatically put ahead career wise above those without. No thanks.>but nowadays I find their performance-review and promotion obsessed cultures to be really draining. Worse, those negative feelings seem to be leaking into my personal life and slowly alienating friends and family.As someone that has worked for FAANG for 6+ years, this isn't an issue with FAANG but an issue with you. Its fairly easy to move around FAANG (although probably not right now) to find a niche job where you can cruise control on your salary without anyone bothering you too much.