Part II
Being valued is what we missed in India!
Today, he may be the principal engineer at Space X and the cynosure of all eyes but life was not easy for Sanjeev Sharma. Employed in a cushy government job in the Indian railways (a feat most Indians aspire to accomplish), where he did not even have to carry his own bag, he could have continued to live a comfortable life in India. However, after a decade of service, he decided to go to America to learn more about his first love- mechanical engineering. But it was a precarious move. It was a new land and he had to start from scratch, not to mention also risk the ire of his family who wanted their only son to stay with them in India.
When you first went to America and then decided to stay there, what was your parents’ reaction? Were they supportive?
I think first-generation immigrants always have to face this kind of challenge. Initially, my parents did not support my move. But over time, they have accepted it. I have two sisters who live close to my parents in Delhi and take care of them. I also keep visiting them every couple of years and also talk to them frequently.
What was the move to America like?
I did not move to America in a very planned manner. By the time, I decided to move, I had been married and had a one and a half-year-old son but I did not take them along because when I went back to college after eight years, the university said that first they needed to see my performance and since I had some experience, they would consider me for some research projects, without which I would not have got any tuition waiver or funding. Moreover, as a government employee, my wages were not enough to save for even one or two semesters’ worth of tuition on my own. So, I went there, worked hard, got the research projects and the tuition waiver. It was then I brought my wife and son here.
How was life there?
It was tough. When I went there, I was thirty years old, which is young according to my standards. UC Boulder is on the foothills of the Rockies and it gets really cold. It snows a lot. I wasn’t at all prepared for the climate. I remember I had to pick up a job on campus to earn money. I was paid seven dollars an hour for picking up the mail from the PO box of the university and sorting it out for each department. Then I had to drive around in a van and deliver it to the front desk of each department. So, after the first two classes, I used to deliver the mail. At that time, I used to dress in a shirt, pants, and black leather shoes, which was what I wore in my Indian job. So, I would go around dressed like that in that cold. It was a very different scenario from India where I as a railway officer did not even carry my own file and had an official car to take me everywhere.
How did you start working in Space X?
As I mentioned, I was working in Seagate technologies. There came a time when the computer hard disk (HD) drives were replaced by solid state drives (SSD) and the industry went through a downturn. I decided to move from Minneapolis to California primarily to escape the exceedingly cold weather.
I applied to SpaceX on a whim. I did not know much and at the time I didn’t know anything about aerospace. To my surprise. I got the opportunity to interview and got accepted. I joined SpaceX in 2013 and by that time they had they had gained some name by being the only private company to drive a capsule to the International Space Station, dock it and return it with goods By then, they had a contract with NASA and they were the first private company to pull off such a feat and it would be able to accomplish that so it had a lot of promise, but it was still a startup with an uncertain future because space business is very risky. I still decided to take a jump though Seagate people very nicely told me to come back if things didn’t work out.
I worked as the dynamics engineer in the structures group where we were tasked with designing and getting the first stage booster back and reusing it. But I didn’t have any experience in space but I was very well-versed in the transportation and management of large mechanical structures. I realized that my experience in large structures weighing tonnes along with my experience with small hard drives with spans of millimetres and micrometres came together in Space X. Even to this day, SpaceX has a philosophy of not hiring for experience but hiring for drive and talent. They look at your track record and whatever you have been able to accomplish, especially the hard things And that’s true for entry-level engineers as well as senior engineers with experience But they don’t insist on hey, we have to you know, design this frame thrust structure of the rocket Do you bring 20 years of thrust structure design experience with you? They don’t ask that question. So that’s how I got my foot in the door. And it was a great opportunity to learn and do but it was a completely unbounded problem. No one in the world at that time had recovered a liquid propellant booster after an orbital launch.
There was very little precedent that I could look at, very little research on the project but as I said, I was working along with a great set of people and learned a lot from that and we kept moving through and I think in the 21st flight we had already recovered a booster and then subsequently from there on my efforts focused on how to get the maximum kind of reusable life despite the metal fatigue and crack growth in space and manage these things to ensure the reliability of the reuse. Once I had done that the project was almost complete. So, in 2018 I was looking for a new project.
During this time, I decided to move to Northern California since my son was in Berkeley area. So, I started working for Matternet, a company specializing in medical drone deliveries. As the head of engineering, my job was to get them through the process of certification by the Federal Aviation Authority, which is the regulatory body. The certification is a must even if you have to fly a small drone. It was a tough job since it is still not freely permitted in the US to fly an autonomous drone without a human supervisor or an operator in commercial airspace. Because of those restrictions, it’s hard for a company, for a drone startup to grow at a pace that is required for a startup to grow, to get funded, and to get revenue streams. Our development slowed and then I told my boss that I needed to look for a different job because my whole focus was to come in and work on something new.
In the meantime, in 2022, one of my friends from SpaceX called me back and said that they need people here back in the new Starship project. had heard about the Starship. I was, following every detail of SpaceX because I kind of missed the really fast pace and I thought I already had the skills I needed for the job.
I thought this was one place where I could apply my skills to a new product which is why I took the jump back again and I’m now back in Los Angeles working for SpaceX again.
You talk about how engineers are working so hard and coming up with such inventions. Tell me, what will it take for engineers in India to reach a level like you’ve reached? Probably not going abroad, but in India?
That’s a great question. I think before the Industrial Revolution, there was hardly any difference in the technological or scientific understanding of things around the world. India was probably leading the entire world in terms of technology.
With the Industrial Revolution, we saw that there was more and more focus on growth or, new technology coming from Europe rather than anywhere else in the world. And it’s not because of any other reason, like, people sometimes kind of say, oh, they have more brilliant people over there. Well, the people were the same, like, two generations ago as well. What changes is, I think the principles of intellectual property rights, the principle of capitalism, I grew up in an India, which I regarded as socialist. I think everything was controlled by the government. So in that scenario, it’s very difficult or the individuals do not have the incentives to make something new and gain from it. So even if you make something new, you’re going to gain nothing. And in that, so that’s what’s been holding India and the countries like India back. It’s not that they don’t have brilliant people. It’s the layers that exist in the society of valuing invention, valuing intellectual property rights, valuing, you know, capitalist systems of reward, and accepting failure. When failure occurs, even in the U.S., I think seven out of ten startups will fail and everyone knows that. But it’s not held against you if you have on your resume that you started six startups and all of them failed. It’s not at all negative. So, that’s one of the fundamental reasons why new growth and development have been held back in India for so long. And now I see a refreshingly different view from here in India that we are now seeing a very cultural change, in the society itself. We need to work on that first before we start looking at individuals who become successful out of that. So, you need to make the field fertile before we focus on the crop. The crop is great engineers and great products. The field is to respect intellectual property rights, have a system of reward and risk-reward, and also have, you know, a tolerance to failure and allow people the resources to work on new things.
To be continued…
This article by Shailaza Singh appeared in Rashtradoot Newspaper’s Arbit Section on November 6, 2024
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