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Comment by spoiledtechie | Hacker News Reader

Wanna know why? Because of the good developers don't actually work for the military.

Your statement is offensive because it's a blanket generality. Maybe if you had said "the government has difficulty attracting top engineering talent because of any number of reasons, including workplace culture, comparatively low pay, etc"...Then that's a point worthy of discussion.

F35 is made by Lockheed Martin, a private company, not the US government. The only people involved from the government side would mostly be management paper pushers or engineers who do IV&V work (independent verification and validation). Basically just check boxes that say LM completed XYZ and passed testing.

Yes, I'm very aware of who makes the F-35. Lockheed Martin is the prime contractor and operator of the Final Assembly and Check Out (FACO) in Fort Worth, Texas, where the majority of F-35s will be made (all but two to date have been made in Fort Worth, but the other two FACOs in Cameri, Italy, and Nagoya, Japan are now building F-35s). Northrop Grumman and BAE Systems are the other two major players on the team.

And you are not quite correct on who the people involved on the government side are. There are management paper pushers, but every engineering team has government engineers working side by side with their contractor counterparts, and the program has been run that way from the start. They do far more than just "check boxes". They have helped with the design and testing all the way through the program.

> every engineering team has government engineers working side by side with their contractor counterparts

I'm curious about the government engineers and their roles: Do you mean aeronautical and other engineers who do the core development and design work? Or do they monitor, provide customer input, ensure quality, and do other oversight of the contractor's engineers? Or something else?

Also, whose payroll are they on? Defense Contract Management Agency? Some other Dept of Defense group? Air Force?

The short answer to every one of those questions is: yes. There are government people who were involved with design work from the beginning. There are also engineers who directly participate in test/evaluation (not just in the supervisory roles, either, I mean engineers who are actually doing tests). And there are also those who are in a supervisory role. There are DoD people (from all kinds of agencies), there are DCMA people, people on active duty in the military...

With a program this big and that has already lasted over 15 years, the answer is going to be "yes".

Thanks for responding and sharing what you know.

Yes, they are working on sexting apps and ad injection.

I guess then Grace Hopper wasn't a good enough developer for you?

Isn't that back when people generally believed that American wars are for greater good of the whole world tho?

Lots of people still believe that, even if it's a less popular opinion in a lot of tech hubs.

Just manufactured propaganda. The other side believed the same thing.

I've worked with some especially brilliant engineers that came out of the military. In point of fact, the attention to security concerns is generally impressive.

Do you think that none of the best scientific minds in America worked on the Manhattan project?

The original point may or may not be true.

But I don't see how trying to compare the F35 to a project from 70 years ago is relevant.

That's just untrue.

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