“It is the obvious which is so difficult to see most of the time. People say ‘It’s as plain as the nose on your face.’ But how much of the nose on your face can you see, unless someone holds a mirror up to you?” ― Isaac Asimov

The response that I got from my post on the Lab’s cultures was somewhat gratifying. It looked like it was interesting to many. At the same time, I received a rather startling brushback from a friend. I greatly appreciate engaging in a dialogue on things, and to say the least, my friend disagreed with some of the points that I made. Their specific complaint was about my take on Sandia. Because of this, I thought it was important to add a bit of texture and context to the post. Hopefully, it will benefit the overall discussion and thought about this. Nothing I said is set in stone or free of personal experience. I am the context and observer; my perspective is unique and personal.

Culture is an enormously sticky topic. It’s hard to define. The way I would define it organizationally or for societies is that culture is a bit of an operating system. It operates the society or the organization silently and behind the scenes. It provides norms and rules by which the culture is applied to actions. You see what is expected and allowed, plus what is rewarded and punished. I did not fit into Sandia’s culture at all. It was not a good place for me. That is, unless I was prepared to change a lot.

As I noted, it is very difficult to understand the bad parts of culture from the outside. This is true particularly today, where leadership and communication are so heavily scrutinized. Today, leaders are prone to spouting bullshit instead of truth. This is true for leaders across society, whether it’s organizations like the labs or our politicians, all the way up to the leader of the United States. The inability of these leaders to speak on truths is stunning and vast. Instead, we live in a time where everything a leader says in public is suspect. This is certainly what I witnessed recently at work.

I will note, as a comment on this, that we live in a time when trust is absolutely missing from most of what society does. Yet, in this period where trust is lacking, the leaders behave in even more untrustworthy ways. They bullshit about success and ignore failure. I think one of the things that gets under my skin is the inability to identify and work towards solving genuine problems. There are problems everywhere across society, definitely in the work of the labs and more generally in the world. I see myself as a problem solver, and ignoring problems is an affront to me.

To get to my friend’s comments, I think there was a proper noting of a certain bitterness in my attitude towards Sandia. This is something I cannot deny. I left under a cloud. I left seeing some significant faults in many of the people who were given responsibility for managing the organizations. I also witnessed a great deal of unethical behavior. As I noted, you can only see this if you’re on the inside. Very rarely do these things become obvious to the outsider. If they do, the organization is likely a complete shitshow (see Boeing, or the Executive Branch).

The same sorts of behaviors may be present at the other two labs. I certainly witnessed a little bit of it at Los Alamos 20 years ago, but not to the scale that I saw at Sandia in my time there. That is not to say that it could not be present in the current Los Alamos. The same for Livermore, and in all these cases, there is some evidence that such excesses do exist. All three labs exist within the same ecosystem of governance. They draw from similar funding sources with similar strings attached. Our government overseers are definitely not better or more competent.

By the same token, I do have some bitterness about how my career turned out at Sandia. I felt for the entirety of my stay there that my talents and abilities were generally not put to good purpose. I did not grow sufficiently as a scientist in my time. I was not challenged by technical work. The blog exists to some extent because of these things. The challenges I faced were far more cultural in nature and far less scientific. I was not in an environment that fed my passions.

Again, this could be a function of the time that we are in and simply an echo of the same kind of bullshit that we see from our leaders. Their seeming inability to tackle any genuine problem with vigor and truth. We are all passengers in whatever time and place we exist. I am no different. There are differences in the cultures of the three labs. They also exist in our current time. I am sure my view has a deep recentness bias.

I owe a great deal to the first decade I worked at Los Alamos. It shaped me more than any other experience, more than school. It set my expectations for what a Lab is supposed to be like. Perhaps, Sandia could not ever have met my expectations even under perfect circumstances. Today’s world is very far from perfect and much closer to the opposite of it. I am certain that a young me starting work today would not be offered a similarly good experience. I did have a job offer from Livermore in late 2003. I declined it because of cost-of-living issues. I do wonder what that path would have meant for me; I am sure my perspective would be different today.

So, in closing, take my assessment with a grain of salt. It is my perspective and experience. It is only a projection of reality as I experienced it.

“Some people see the glass half full. Others see it half empty. I see a glass that’s twice as big as it needs to be.” ― George Carlin