Hughes Budget Cutoff
This is one of the other stories that was alluded to in the previous entry (NASA Program Language Requirements). Unfortunately, it’s even more wasteful than the previous entry was in terms of time and money. Back in 1995, I was working for Hughes Aircraft Company, Santa Barbara Research Center (SBRC) on a project called Wedge Imaging Spectrometer (WIS). WIS was a hyper-spectral sensor capable of up to 722 bands of data from UV through Thermal IR, depending on the instruments used for each mission. Putting 722 bands of data in perspective to a typical computer display of 3 bands (red, green blue) is a little interesting. One way to think of it is that any pixel on a typical computer screen is generated from 24 bits of color, WIS generated over 8,000 bits of color per pixel.
While working on this project, we had budgets within Hughes for projects, hardware, software, etc., each budget essentially a different bucket that could not be mixed together. Early into the year, our software budget was cut just as we had a purchase requisition in the pipeline for Research Systems’ ENVI (now part of ITT). This is a high end image processing and remote sensing package that is aimed straight at the type of data WIS produced, so it was a natural match to help develop and analyze WIS products. The purchase requisition was for somewhere in the $8,000 range if I recall correctly, but we were unable to purchase it due to the budget cut. We still needed the functionality, of course, so that meant we had to build the functionality in house. I spent the better part of a year to rebuild a small percentage of the ENVI package for our needs. The following year, we put ENVI in as the first item to purchase for our project and received it immediately. The work I had been doing the previous year was migrated into ENVI in a few weeks’ time. Considering my salary, overhead costs, lost time to work on other tools, etc., Hughes un-saved about $90,000 by eliminating the $8,000 purchase order.
There is an additional bit of info in this story worth bringing up. During the year this budget issue took place, I switched from an employee to a consultant/contractor for Hughes and also began teaching IDL classes (ENVI is written in IDL) outside of Hughes for Research Systems. One of the items I negotiated with Research Systems as part of teaching the training classes was an ENVI license for my own use. The license I had was only for use on Mac systems, while Hughes was purchasing ENVI for Sun systems. By the time WIS was utilizing ENVI to a larger degree for processing and analysis, I was pretty much the only person familiar with the software on the team and I was working less on the project. About a year later, I left the SBRC division and started working completely on my own not too much longer after that.
I’ll cover starting up the consulting business in a future entry.
While working on this project, we had budgets within Hughes for projects, hardware, software, etc., each budget essentially a different bucket that could not be mixed together. Early into the year, our software budget was cut just as we had a purchase requisition in the pipeline for Research Systems’ ENVI (now part of ITT). This is a high end image processing and remote sensing package that is aimed straight at the type of data WIS produced, so it was a natural match to help develop and analyze WIS products. The purchase requisition was for somewhere in the $8,000 range if I recall correctly, but we were unable to purchase it due to the budget cut. We still needed the functionality, of course, so that meant we had to build the functionality in house. I spent the better part of a year to rebuild a small percentage of the ENVI package for our needs. The following year, we put ENVI in as the first item to purchase for our project and received it immediately. The work I had been doing the previous year was migrated into ENVI in a few weeks’ time. Considering my salary, overhead costs, lost time to work on other tools, etc., Hughes un-saved about $90,000 by eliminating the $8,000 purchase order.
There is an additional bit of info in this story worth bringing up. During the year this budget issue took place, I switched from an employee to a consultant/contractor for Hughes and also began teaching IDL classes (ENVI is written in IDL) outside of Hughes for Research Systems. One of the items I negotiated with Research Systems as part of teaching the training classes was an ENVI license for my own use. The license I had was only for use on Mac systems, while Hughes was purchasing ENVI for Sun systems. By the time WIS was utilizing ENVI to a larger degree for processing and analysis, I was pretty much the only person familiar with the software on the team and I was working less on the project. About a year later, I left the SBRC division and started working completely on my own not too much longer after that.
I’ll cover starting up the consulting business in a future entry.