> younger engineers often have the capability but not the inclination

Kids these days... Why would someone in their right mind think working on the Voyager project could damage their careers? You can work on new and fancy tools all you want to improve supporting tools, and it's still one of the coolest space missions active. Plus, it has a real end - at some point, support will be further reduced and the person will move on to another space exploration job, with the extra golden star of having been on the Voyager.

> Kids these days... Why would someone in their right mind think working on the Voyager project could damage their careers?

It's an isolated legacy-project with no future. Mostly everything you learn for it will be only useful for this specific project, so all time to invest there is time to can't invest into something useful. Sure, there are probably some parts to learn from this too, but It's less than what your competitors will learn on their fancy modern projects.

> You can work on new and fancy tools all you want to improve supporting tools

Voyager is in maintenance, there is no big innovation or big progress to be made there. It's just work to hold the line as long as possible. And I guess nobody want's to be the one killing it because of a poor attempt to innovate something.

>"Why would someone in their right mind think working on the Voyager project could damage their careers"

Assembly? Understanding how things actually work? No Agile? No K8s? No Rust, No React? - death knell for someone's resume

>"and the person will move on to another space exploration job, with the extra golden star of having been on the Voyager"

this is the best case with the result of being tied to another single project for years and unemployable anywhere else. in more realistic case - warm goodbye in few years and start your life from scratch with no credits for the thins done.

I would go further... This project gives a rare opportunity for a young engineer to learn to build truly mission critical, resilient software while requiring complete, top to bottom understanding of the software and hardware stack.

Because software development back in the day wasn’t like how it’s now now, the charade so called software development now is a clown show: scrum, daily stand ups, open office style, tickets, tons of ci/cd BS, and of course, the wrangler aka PM and all politics involved, none of this existed like the cult it is now, I only had one experience in such environment and despite the effort I had to ask for some common sense, it was like insulting someone’s religion, “how dare you challenge the sacred methods that the silicone valley companies are using?!!”

Additionally, back in the day there was true ownership for the code you write, the code is owned by you not the company, and I know few old engineers that until now (they are retired) the companies still pay them for using their code they wrote while working there. That sense of ownership encourages you to tackle hard issues rather feeling like a machine spewing code for someone else’s business, I have seen some contracts too where the company will have ownership for anything you do while you are in the contract, including your personal projects on your own free time.