Your dad sounds a bit like mine. Mine didn't speak of work often (some of it was secret govt stuff), but in the 60s he was on the Hughes Aircraft team that designed the camera systems for the Surveyor mission. Most of the other Surveyor systems, like the soil testing, broke down, but darn if those cameras didn't send back some of the coolest pictures ever. I'm pretty sure he was proud of that, but he really never bragged much or put down the other engineers whose systems failed. And of course, the tech they developed in the 60s led to a lot of cool stuff, like this phone in my hand that lets me talk to the entire planet, practically.