Career Development Guide for Job Seekers

Context October 2025: With the government shut down and NASA JPL business in apparent terminal decline, I have received numerous inbounds from former colleagues and friends asking for advice in post-NASA career development. At the same time, in my day job running Terraform Industries, I get to interview thousands of hopeful engineers, hire a few of them, then help them learn to make the most of their opportunities. To the extent this is a numbers game, I have some insights here, which I will share. 

Obviously, YMMV. Every company does recruitment differently and you should solicit a range of opinions.

For additional context, here are some previous posts on this subject.

Post on JPL and NASA’s lack of preparedness for changes in the space industry (2021).
Post on existential challenges to NASA and the new Moon race (2025).
Post on my various professional failures (I’ve been there!). 
Maximizing Resume Signal Noise Ratio.
The Well Rounded Engineer.
Stuff You Should Have Learned By Now, But Probably Haven’t.
How To Escape Academia (a bit dated now).
Mr Beast Memo.

First, the good news. If you’re coming out of NASA and have found your way to this blog, there is a 99% chance that you were grievously under-utilized in your previous job. There has never been a better time to explore your potential, deliver value to millions of people, and make really good money. We’re in the middle of the fastest period of techno-capital acceleration ever. Entire new career tracks are being invented every year. There is an incredible wave of economic growth and wealth creation swelling beneath us. We’re in the best place on Earth at the best time in history. There are a million opportunities where someone with your knowledge, skills, and brilliance can really make a big difference. With the right attitude, you can attain almost infinite market pricing power for your skills.

Now, the bad news. Working at NASA (or any other company that’s big or old enough to have recursive process control meta-documents) has institutionalized you. If you insist on only working at companies with processes compatible to the very peculiar way things were done at JPL, you are cutting yourself off from 99.999% of the opportunity described in the previous paragraph. Therefore, to have the best chance of turning your career around in a productive way, you need to recognize this fact and take active measures to de-institutionalize yourself with maximum urgency and maximum effort. 

In private industry, you need to constantly create legible, actionable value. Former government employees have a well-earned reputation for being stodgy, slow, and more concerned with process than outcomes. In the sorts of companies where you want to build your career and differentiate yourself, where your tremendous capacities will be developed and utilized, and where promotion can actually be an outcome of merit and effort, no-one cares about “work about work”, only work. They care about unreasonably rapid progress towards tangible short term goals every single day. 

Resumes

The job you want will not be obtained by throwing a resume over a wall into the AI-mediated abyss of recruiting companies and Big Co onboarding. It will be obtained by efficient networking. 

You must produce a good resume. You may be shocked to learn but of the ~100 people who have solicited me for career advice in the last year or so, fewer than 20 did more than one rev on resume feedback, which is step one. If I’m working with a job seeker and they can’t motivate themselves to get their own resume right, I cease to be surprised that they’re on the job market. Don’t be the person who makes a hiring manager think “Can’t they even find someone to proofread the first line of their resume?” or, in this day and age, “Why haven’t they run this through an LLM?”

Notes on your resume.

1. Your resume must aggressively counter-signal that you’re aware of the usual limitations of former NASA employees (e.g. skills decay, allergy to responsibility, obsession with process that doesn’t add value, etc) and that you don’t have that problem.
2. Formatting. Don’t be too fancy. Content is more important than format. No need to include a headshot unless you’re applying for an acting job. @hotmail and @yahoo addresses are borderline unprofessional, as are edgy nicknames and too many numbers. Home address unnecessary, just list location by city if it’s salient – and make it clear if you’re open to relocation if your prospective job is not local. Most serious employers are in person only. Arial font, size 12. Focus your attention on the stuff that matters. 
3. Spelling and grammar. One spelling mistake = into the trash. Professionals are capable of writing a single page of text with zero errors. If you can’t get this right I’m not going to let you work on my project. End of story.
4. Get to the point quickly. Particularly for former academics and government folk, whose former production function may have conflated obscurity and length with value. The opposite is the case in companies you want to work for. Time is valuable. If you’re an ex-JPL genius, you should damn well be able to infer what information your interlocutor is looking for and give it to them in the format they want. 
5. No more than 300 words. A two page resume is a sign of immaturity and lack of experience. The more experienced and competent a candidate is, the tighter their resume. They may have done 30 amazing things, but they can make their case with just the most recent two. Less is more. Show, don’t tell. 
6. Delete anything that degrades signal-to-noise ratio. Every additional word must strengthen your case. It is highly unlikely that a 300 word resume is 0.3% stronger than a 299 word resume. Brevity is the soul of wit. Get to the point!
7. Don’t use any jargon. The person reading your resume is assessing it for evidence you are able to communicate to a generic audience. Any word that wouldn’t appear in the New York Times halves your odds of getting hired. It’s not dumbing down, it’s communicating, and it’s part of the job. I have never heard of a former JPLer or academic bouncing out of the hiring process because they were too stupid, but many cases where they were simply incomprehensible to the point of liability. 
8. Skip the papers and talks, h-index and other academic attributes. If you must, give a simple link that connects to a personal webpage which has your full bibliography, site map, essays, talks, papers, podcasts, etc. Unless you’re one of the top 100 earners on Substack and you’re applying for a writing job, it is irrelevant.  
9. Focus more on recent achievements. Each job should be Title, Company, Dates, followed by one or two sentences that describe precisely your personal responsibilities and contributions. “I did preposterously absurd thing X which saved the company $Ym.” “Responsible for successful delivery of key component Z ahead of A month schedule and under $Bm budget, saving $Cm.” 
10. Each sentence must honestly signal that you were entrusted with real authority and responsibility, and that you are self aware enough to understand exactly how your work contributes to the bottom line. This may sound mercenary, but it’s actually liberating. 
11. In accordance with Point 6, don’t waste valuable space with irrelevant information, such as unrelated jobs, early jobs, hobbies, or virtue signaling. The only exception is if the hobby reveals an attribute that is positive and complimentary for the job, such as professional level sports achievement (dedication and pain tolerance) or impressive personal projects (obsession with your craft, ability to do everything).
12. Gumming up the resume with useless weasel words is instant death. Strategy, foster, enable, stakeholders, etc are euphemisms for low contributor or unable to do real work. Yes, I know you can do real work. Yes, I know you recognize that people unable to not pollute their stream of consciousness with these words cannot. Yes, I know you know that putting them in your resume is roughly equivalent to writing up top “Do not hire me.” So just be specific and concise about what exactly you did. 

Become an expert on the use of AI

If at any point in the hiring process you ask a question that could have been answered by an LLM, you have just talked yourself out of the tier of job you want – a job with ambitious capable people who don’t waste your time with questions they could Google. 

Good hires are proactive about improving their productivity with a rigorous program of self study.

In 2025, that includes knowing exactly how to use the LLMs (Gemini, GPT, Grok, or Claude, they are all pretty similar for now) to assist on any task that is bottlenecked by time. This includes coding, research, analysis, critical appraisal, writing, data reduction, scripting, learning, commentary, etc etc. 

You must obtain a subscription to at least one top-of-the-line model and use it a lot. If you don’t hit usage limits you’re not using them enough. Your initial goal should be at least 100 separate conversations, with multiple follow ups. 

In addition to the LLMs, you should become deeply familiar with at least one other AI tool, such as an image model, a video model, or something else. You could make your own. You’re smart enough to understand how they work and how they are trained. Your interviewer finding that you’re up-to-date is a great signal that you didn’t eject your brain when you were hired by the government 20 years ago. 

You can point LLMs at websites, such as the posts I linked at the top. They will “read” them all for you and then you can ask (with speech or typing) follow up questions. Find other posts on related topics by other authors. Investigate inconsistencies. Ask the model to assume my mentality then mercilessly critique a resume you found (your own – avoid the model trying to flatter you). You can practice interviewing. Investigate new industries. Research prospective companies and their org charts. 

It is not beneath you to do this – you are running a race against people who already do this every day. 

You should definitely type your own name and ask the LLM to say what it knows about you. Do this once in non-browsing mode to find out how much of your stuff has made it into the base model. If you don’t have a wikipedia page about you, probably there won’t be much, but there might be something. Increasing this is a good idea, so …

Create a paper trail of deep expertise and thoughtfulness

You’ve spent your career becoming a world expert on some topic(s) you’ve obsessed over for many years. You’ve written papers in paywalled peer-reviewed journals. But I’ve never heard of you and nor have the LLMs. This is a dangerous position to be in.

Register an account at Substack or WordPress and start writing for the general public. It doesn’t matter what the topic is, provided you write from the heart, you evince thoughtfulness and obsessive knowledge. Your first few posts will be crap. You don’t have to go back far in my archive to find reams of mediocrity. But I’m 550 posts in now and occasionally I write a good one. It just takes practice. You can always go back and edit them if you want. 

Write ten. 

This single action will increase your luck stat enormously. It creates an indexed proof of work for every person and AI on Earth now, and for eternity. You can use AI to critique and edit but the words must be your own – attempting to pass off AI slop as your own work is instant banishment to the frigid wastes of unproductive employment.

People ask me for blogging advice quite frequently. I say the same thing as Mr Beast about videos. Make ten, then we’ll have a perspective from which to talk. Make a hundred and we’re really getting somewhere.

But first, make ten. 

Attitude

This post isn’t the best place for 5000 words on interview technique, but I will say a few words and then tie it into a comment about mindset. 

During the hiring process, the hiring manager will be attempting to size you up and retire major risks. Roughly, they’ll be looking for evidence of ambition, self awareness, curiosity, and a track record of success with a steady progression of responsibility and authority. There’s much more about this in the post on stuff you should have learned in college.

They may ask about the worst day in your previous job, but they don’t want to hear about the cafeteria running out of cookies. They want to hear you speak honestly, concisely, pragmatically, from the heart, in a considered way, about things you screwed up, why you screwed up, and what you learned from that. Top performers have experienced a litany of failure. That’s okay, provided that they are productive failures and evidence of ambition and growth rather than stupidity. 

Which brings me back to my point about attitude. There is a notion particularly prevalent in government jobs, union jobs, and unionized government jobs, that the employee’s responsibilities end when they sign the job offer. From that moment on, the employer owes them their (usually meager, static) salary and their job amounts to showing up on time and avoiding conflict. Is this the sort of job you want? 

California is an “at will” state, meaning that employers can fire employees any time for any (or no) reason. Hiring is expensive enough (roughly half a year’s salary) that no-one wants to fire people for no reason, though! But at the same time, no-one is getting free money and your 20 years of experience at JPL does not entitle you to screw around, slow everyone down, and add no value. 

This is not hypothetical – I know a good number of JPLers who were recruited outside the lab and who failed to thrive in industry specifically for this reason. They’re not stupid. You can’t fix stupid. They just have the wrong attitude, and essentially paid a steep price for being unable to look themselves in the mirror every morning and deciding that they owed it to themselves to find a way to win, no matter what. If that means radically shifting perspective regarding the nature of your relationship to your work and your employer, so be it. No-one is going to burst through the floor to save your career on your behalf – you are the main character in your own life. 

It is essential that you start each day looking to grow your skills and deliver value. Don’t be a boring mid-career fuddy duddy. Show up with energy, ambition, drive, determination, and a sprinkling of eccentricity. The eccentricity might help avoid being pigeon holed with other former government engineers who are less adaptable and much harder to onboard. 

Next steps

Admiral Hyman Rickover used to conclude meetings with a consensus review on Who was doing What by When?

• Your job is to write (and rewrite) a banger <300 word resume.
• Your job is to publish ten original blogs on any subject you’re passionate about.
• Your job is to understand exactly how to use LLM AIs.

Ask your hiring manager friends. Solicit feedback during interviews. If you haven’t taken these three easy steps, it will be quite obvious to any hiring manager, and they will wonder why you’re not taking basic steps to help yourself.