Who says engineers can’t write? John Ruffa spent a long career as an engineer at NASA. He oversaw teams of people working to develop space flight missions. Along the way he learned a thing or two about the contemporary workplace. So much so, he wrote a book about it called Nice Guys Finish Last and Other Workplace Lies. He joined the Federal Drive with Tom Temin to discuss his book and his experiences.

Interview transcript:

Tom Temin And 40 years in NASA — almost; we’ll round it up to 40 years — and it sounds like you were studying the workplace there as much as you were studying the engineering. Let’s begin with what you were doing at NASA.

John Ruffa So, Tom, at NASA, we were building advanced science spacecraft missions. And one of the things that we do there is you’re working with state of the art electronics to allow discoveries that have never been done before. And so what we would do is we would design, build, test and launch spacecraft right from Greenbelt, Maryland. I think a lot of people don’t realize that that’s what happens there. And it was very exciting work. As a child of the Apollo age, it was great to actually work for NASA and to have things with your fingerprints go up into space.

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Tom Temin Engineering, then, is a group exercise as far as NASA’s concerned. And so it sounds like in developing these highly technical objects, space telescopes and listening devices and so forth, a team has to come together to make it happen.

John Ruffa Tom, that’s an excellent point. And I think that’s something that many people miss. Some of our teams were hundreds of people, and all of those people need to work together as a team to get the job done. And I think that was one of the biggest surprises for me. When you go to school as an engineer, you think “I’m going to learn technology and that’s all I need to know.” Well, that’s not true. You need to know how to work with people. And I think that was the biggest surprise for me. The biggest challenges that we have in the workplace, even at NASA, are interacting with people and making sure that people can work together as a team to achieve a goal. It was a big surprise.

Tom Temin And of course, all of the modern things we live with, aircraft and computers and so forth, take large numbers of people to design. Semi-conductors, the latest graphics processing chips for artificial intelligence, are not designed singly. And yet it seems like a solitary pursuit sometimes, engineering. Do engineers get along in general?

John Ruffa So engineers are an interesting bunch. Obviously, I am one and my wife could tell you a thing or two about being married to an engineer. Engineers in general, and this is a little bit of a generalization, they’re not always the most interpersonal people. They’re not always the best communicators, which is a real problem because in order to have a team of hundreds of people working together, you need those skills. And so one of the things that we would see, Tom, is every mission had its technical challenges. And we could never tell you from mission to mission what the unique technical challenge would be for that mission. However, we could tell you with astonishing accuracy what type of non-technical people type challenges would have on every single mission they repeated, on every mission. And as I went through my almost 40 years in the workplace, I started seeing these patterns and I started writing down and working them. And that’s really the basis of my book. How do you navigate the modern workplace? It’s a real challenge, and I think a lot of people need assistance and advice on how to do that.

Tom Temin We’re speaking with John Ruffa. He’s a retired NASA engineer and now author of “Nice Guys Finish Last and Other Workplace Lies.” And you mentioned that there were certain things you could count on in terms of the interpersonal issues that would affect an engineering project. What were the top two or three things, that phenomena that you noticed?

John Ruffa Well, just a brief anecdote. One time I was the lead engineer on a almost billion dollar mission, and we had this technical challenge we just could not get around. And I kept trying to solve it, trying to solve it. And finally, one day, one of my engineers, who was a good friend, came, knocked on my door, closed the door behind him and said, “hey, you know that technical challenge that you have that you think is a big deal? That’s two people who don’t want to talk to each other.” I was like, “What?” He said, “yeah, these two people are just not getting along.” You would think that you wouldn’t have this problem at a place like NASA. But this is unique to every workplace. The follow on to that is I asked him, “well, why did someone not come and tell me that?” And my friend sighed and said, “You’re so high up in the organization that people probably aren’t going to come talk to you about this.” And these are the challenges. One: people not getting along, which is universal. And two: There are strata in the organization where someone feels like they can’t go up. Even though the solution was obvious, someone didn’t feel like they could go up to the guy in charge and explain to them what it was. And I would say these are true at NASA, but they’re unique to any organization. If you think of the kind of organization you’re in, these problems exist there.

Tom Temin And so as a manager, then how can you make sure these things surface? You were lucky because your friend said, Hey, Harry and Joe can’t stand each other and if they could talk to each other, they could solve this issue.

John Ruffa So that’s the challenge. When you start off, you graduate from college and you’re an engineer, you think all you need is the technical skills. The problem is, as you go through the workforce as a new employee, you’re really unequipped for these kind of challenges. You just are. And it takes a lifetime of usually trial and error to figure them out. And that’s why I wrote this book, because when I retired, I felt like there was there was still something missing. I had taken 40 years to learn all of these skills, and now they’re going to get left on the table. And I felt like younger engineers, but also people in any technical field or any non-technical field would benefit from these examples that I learned over my career.

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Tom Temin Well, let me ask you a tough question here. Should engineers then, since they are peculiar and they don’t like to communicate as a rule.

John Ruffa Okay, so I’m going to get in trouble if I agree with “engineers are peculiar.” I mean, they’re different.

Tom Temin All right. Well, going with different and don’t communicate very well, which you did say at the outset. Again, a generalization. Should they be promoted to management? Shouldn’t there be maybe professional managers that came up through some program where that’s their specialty is interpersonal issues in dealing with and making sure the engineers get together?

John Ruffa So that’s a good question, Tom. But it’s not just management. It’s any group of people working together. If you’re sitting by your desk by yourself, you really don’t need a lot of interpersonal skills. The minute you add someone else in there, you need it. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a manager. Maybe you’re a team of engineers working on a purely technical issue. You still need to get along. You still need to share information. You still need to do these things. These skills are universal. And we’re talking about engineers. But say you’re a lawyer. Lawyers need to get along. Say you were a teacher. Teachers need to get along. My wife is a teacher, and there’s challenges on teachers getting along. Every career field has challenges of people getting along. It’s a universal constant. So that’s one of the reasons, again, why I wrote this book, because it’s not just engineers. We may be, as you said, a little bit particular or peculiar, but it’s true in every organization.

Tom Temin And the common wisdom now is, well, people are very productive, as productive as they were, or maybe more so in the telework age than they were when everyone came to the office or to the lab or to the engineering site. Do you think so? Or do you think it’s better if, say, in an engineering situation, everyone’s working on a common goal, different components of it that have to work together, that they should be together.

John Ruffa So telework is a tremendous advantage. And I think during COVID, where there were a lot of organizations went remote, we saw the advantages of that. There are major disadvantages of telework as well. We worked on, the last couple of years before I retired, we spent two years working remotely. There were people who I never met face to face. There are problems with telework. That interpersonal interaction is so essential on getting the job done no matter what you do.

Tom Temin Plus, solving the minute by minute issues, which can hold up something are so much less friction laden when you can just walk over and say, Hey, what about this? Can we… And then bang, you’re done. You don’t have to send a note here or an email or schedule a call and blah, blah, blah.

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John Ruffa Well, and never underestimate the value of hallway conversations. Tom, so many technical issues were solved through hallway conversations. I remember one of the things that NASA, at least Goddard, Goddard Space Flight Center where I worked, does really well, is they would co-locate teams. That was invaluable in solving problems. When people are together, they talk. When people talk, you do have issues, but you resolve those issues. I believe you need to be co-located. There’s there’s absolutely room for for remote workplace, but you also need to come together.

Tom Temin And the title of your book, “Nice Guys Finish Last and Other Workplace Lies.” Tell us about that.

John Ruffa So when I started in workplace, there’s the conventional wisdom. So I’m running into all of these interpersonal challenges that I’ve never really had to deal with before. I didn’t think were going to be part of my job. I’m an engineer, after all. I deal with technical issues. One of the things that I discovered over time is a lot of the conventional wisdom on how you solve issues is not true. It’s misleading. Sometimes it’s just plain wrong. For example, in the title of the book, the first chapter, I talk about “nice guys finish last.” So that’s kind of the conventional wisdom. If you want to get ahead, nice guys, they finish last. So you if you want to get ahead, maybe you have to do some things that aren’t quite so nice. Maybe you have to be a tough boss, an unfriendly boss. You have to take credit for other people’s work. And, full disclosure: In the short term that will allow you to get ahead. However, in the long term, people figure things out. People start recognizing that you’re not a good person to work for. You’re not very honest. You’re a little duplicitous on the things you do. In the long term, that is not a good strategy. But we repeat that so many times that people believe it. Again, over 40 years, you learn a few things and you see examples and you say, Wow, people who employ these tactics, they don’t do well long term. The people who are actually wildly successful are fair, honest people with a lot of integrity, and people trust them. They build loyalty and they follow them. And there’s a lot of those kind of lies out there where conventional wisdom would tell you this is what you need to do. But the reality is it’s not. And the only way you’re going to figure these things out is if you’ve been through it and you’ve seen it. Yogi Berra has this great line where he says, you can observe a lot simply by watching. But there’s a lot of truth there. If you’re around long enough and you observe things, you will determine that certain things are not true.

Tom Temin And maybe your book is a good shortcut to that.

John Ruffa Yes. And that’s the hope, that rather than having to go through 40 years in the school of hard knocks yourself, maybe there’s some lessons learned that someone can read and they can get a leg up.

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