Going to disagree with you on some of this.

> Competent technical management is a scarce commodity worth its weight in gold around NASA Goddard. A lot of (both frontline and upper) management has no technical background and it shows.

Almost all management at GSFC is technical management - engineers, scientists, for the engineering, science, and flight project directorates, and other other directorates (codes) are led by management in their respective fields.

> JWST was a shambles when I interned there in 2014. Eternally delayed and broken due to nonsensical decisions by management with absolutely zero engineering knowledge. Sometime in the 90s they had decided to save money on devs by “auto-generating” the code from UML diagrams using this thing called Rational Rose.

Most NASA missions are actually shoestring operations in my opinion. I've seen really well funded things from NOAA (GOES-R for example, before their budget cuts to help out JPSS), and NASA's Human Space, but almost all NASA missions outside Human Space (HEO) are poorly funded. To quote someone, "Almost all US Space systems are sold to Congress at unrealistic budgets".

I'm familiar with some of these issues and attended some of the JWST design reviews. Most missions with novel sensors, or upsized sensors, or complex fabrications are regularly delayed for a number of reasons, one of which is actually technical complexity. Another is because NASA GSFC and NASA JPL are regularly forced to push fabrication of unique items to commercial industry even when commercial industry has no experience in creating that exotic widget type. This is regularly impacting NASA missions. I am amazed at how much GSFC is able to keep operational despite low OPEX budgets.

> Greg Robinson seems to be an engineering manager who’s actually highly competent at both the engineering and the management, and that’s exactly what the program needed to turn around. Honestly, when I was there I thought there was very little chance this thing would actually work, if it ever launched at all, so major props to him and the team.

Everyone at GSFC knew JWST would work, we just thought it would take awhile. I personally consider JWST much more successful than many other missions.

However, a single System Program Director is not the cause for success or failure of a mission. I did think he was more successful though around providing top cover for JWST downtown at SMD HQ and with NASA's overall mgmt.

> It happened in the civil service too. Most of the branches in the software division had non-technical leadership and seemed to do little of note, but the few with technical leaders did incredible work.

This is incorrect. Just because you don't see a person doing technical work doesn't mean they are not technical. Unfortunately, the demands of bureaucracy require EATD/Code 500, to be doing much leadership and not technical work.

> I remember one time a previously-good branch had its head depart (promoted?) and the new head wasn’t technical at all, and over a few months most of the good civil servants transferred somewhere else. At one point it seemed like most of the progress in the software division was being driven by one rather obscure-sounding branch, simply because that was the one with sound technical leadership and thus all the good engineers.

This does happen unfortunately, where a hero is replaced by a zero.