Comment by airejtlij

I was a NASA federal employee in 2017 at Johnson Space Center and I saw this exactly. There were people like me who joined to be a part of a particular project and who maybe would follow that project when it got separated and sold off to some contractor, and there were the die-hard NASA fanboys (and girls) who just wanted to "be a part of NASA" and who maybe spent years singularly focused on getting hired and displayed little concern about which role they inhabited. Project-level managers up through department heads appeared to be people who started in the first group and slowly transitioned to the second group.