Some of my coworkers brought up the story of NASA's renegade "Pirate Paradigm" that upset the status quo and busted through bureaucratic barriers before Agile was in vogue. [0] It's a true story of a group of young engineers that created a new system for mission control that would enable missions for years to come, while the thought of it was lambasted by management.

But one quote that popped out to me was:

> By taking action that challenged the established culture of their organization, the Pirates innovated new mission control capabilities for NASA, resulting in the group’s first project, Real-Time Data Systems (RTDS), which took a year’s worth of off-hours time to create.

>>>>Which took a year's worth of off-hours time to create.

So the team performed this groundbreaking work with no extra pay, on top of their other duties. This was construed to be inspirational among my coworkers who brought it up. I can see it. It is really awesome, and I bet those engineers felt like they were on top of the world.

But to me, this is almost crazy to think that - in today's world - working for a large business the size of NASA that you wouldn't be fairly compensated while doing such immensely valuable work far above your personal scope of duty - even if you have the best coworkers or love your work. Sure, in several industries this happens all the time (especially startups, where founders perform immense amounts of work with no pay with the hope of hitting gold), but in the big corporate, government, and defense contracting worlds this is not only discouraged, but often disallowed.

[0] https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/how-a-group-of-nasa-rene...