throwaway9982
- Developed the space lidar that will measure the polar ice cap melting
- Created a dashboard to monitor a spacecraft in deep space (and then ran ops for it)
- Developed learning models on a top500 supercomputer
- Optimization of 1000-GPU (yes) detailed simulation of the earth's magnetosphere
Yes, I knew that the industry will pay more, but honestly, I was young and just wanted to have a good time and stay around family in the area. The other jobs in the area didn't seem as exciting.
If you're a contractor, you can just quit and find another contracting position. When I worked as a contractor at NASA, I routinely quit (3 times) when the job turned undesirable and then found another contracting gig through networking in under a month.
>Unfortunately living in DC/VA/MD on that you are competing with private companies which pay more and thus housing and well just about everything is a bit hard to manage on that salary.
No, these places (NSA and NASA) are in the not-so-close suburbs. When I was working at NASA at $85K I bought a condo and biked to work.