There is absolutely noting wrong with using old technology. Being modern just for the sake of being modern is wasteful.
I will grant that there are some things that just keep working and I also would be tempted to leave them in place. But if their functioning is critical then we either need to cultivate the necessary knowledge in our organization to ensure we can manage them adequately or replace them with something that the current market of people will be somewhat familiar.
A bigger part of the hiring problem is aerospace software, specifically military aerospace software is a difficult field to hire for. Clearance requirements limits your pool. Building weapons of war limits your pool. Low salary compared to other software job limits your pool. Very high level of process / low velocity of shipping limits your pool. If you require experience in the environment, rather than training otherwise appropriate candidates, that's going to be a limit too, but if you work in a specialized environment, you really have to accept that you will need to train people.
The current hiring model of "hit-the-ground-sprinting day 1" I suspect is largely the problem here and stems across many industries complaining about hiring difficulties.
Since this "best existing skillset match" hiring model businesses have widely chosen to adopt provide little-to-no on the job training, people will inherently focus on learning the most widely adopted skills of their target market(s) to increase their odds of finding a position in the labor market. Even niche skills will typically target larger proven successful niches and not target risky niches.
As a result, your business better follow industry and technology trends as they shift or you better start investing in your employees and maintain a positive relationship so you don't lose your knowledge assets that are likely undervalued by your business.
Even if Lockheed pays me double, even triple, my current rate, it's likely not worth it for me me wasting my time investing months to years in their specific architecture and fairly non-transferable skills acquired doing so since employer/employee relationships and loyalty are dead. That's a hefty investment on my side with little investment on theirs.
No thanks. It can sit empty and their project can fail for all I care.
And re-doing all the avionics would be a probably decade-plus effort costing billions of dollars. Cheaper to hire some old VAX guys as consultants, pay them exorbitant rates, and have them train up a new generation of VAX people.
Iteration time goes down by a lot in wartime. Also, choosing technologies which have much shorter iteration times could be a disruptive game changer. I'd bet shaped charge carrying drones with a range of 4 km would be much faster to iterate on than tank guns with the same range.
I think that it's important to remember that there are both direct and indirect costs to "not changing something that's working".
If you don't keep abreast of change, then you're unable to be nimble enough to change when change is hugely advantageous.
Locking yourself into design decisions is usually cost-effective for the short term, but may be ultimately very harmful in the long-term.
Code is legacy the moment it's put into production. Keeping technical debt from piling up, and keeping on the bleeding edge to avoid costly maintenance of old systems is extremely expensive. And the costs escalate very quickly when you're talking about airplanes. The cost of dealing with legacy becomes acceptable very quickly.
Perhaps you should not fire them, then.
That said, I'm not flying airplanes over here. It's mostly business software. So there's that.
require(‘left-stick’)"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."
I think you're thinking of Mark Twain.
That's true, but military logistics has adapted to mitigate some of these costs.
> Parts become obsolete
There are two ways this is dealt with. The first is an activity called Diminishing Materials Suppliers (DMS). DMS is an ongoing support activity during production where the availability of parts is monitored and alternative parts are selected and evaluated if a manufacturer announces they are stopping or modifying production of a part for which they are the sole supplier.
The second is the lifetime buy. Near the end of a production run, and sometimes earlier, engineering figures out how many of a given part is needed to complete the full production run and provide spares for rework and repair. Purchasing then gets approval under the contract to purchase the entire quantity of materials and the stock goes to a warehouse until it's needed.
> engineers retire or move on
Knowledge transfer is one of the big reasons the defense industry is so big on systems engineering and mountains of documentation. Obviously that only goes so far, but generally there is less tribal knowledge within a DOD program than in most commercial engineering efforts.
> IT has to maintain archaic devices, operating systems, and tools
In general, IT doesn't go anywhere near the software and equipment used to program, test, and troubleshoot hardware and embedded software. Those pieces are owned by specific engineering teams on the program.
Within a well run DoD program. Most of the larger programs are not well run, in my personal experience. And DoD did this silly thing where it let contractors keep the rights to their engineering data until relatively recently, meaning that US taxpayer dollars are funding the purchase of hardware the government by definition can't understand, because the government isn't allowed to know about or look at much of the engineering data. So there's a HUGE amount of tribal knowledge in some of these programs because there's nothing else to reference.
What's crazy about these systems is they spend decades writing millions of lines of code, and then only put it in 200 devices.
But there's an entire industry which exists to soothsay away these concerns and get companies to upgrade, whether or not it really makes any sense. Nobody has an interest in encouraging companies to keep using their old gear and do internal training; many companies have an interest in encouraging upgrades.
In the case of war birds, newer technology does not mean faster development time. In order to qualify electronics for a weapon that needs to be stealthy and resistant to electronic warfare you need decades of operational data on all of the major electronics components. Any system that gets upgraded to newer technology has to go through risk assessments and that often requires tons of data collection before you even get started.
I think you vastly underestimate the lengths our military industrial complex goes to protect operational capabilities. The F22 is as much a beneficiary of those technologies as a platform for keeping them alive for future use.
Feel free to apply for some jobs in the defense sector to find out how much they pay. You'll make more money working at FAANG companies, and you don't have to wait years for a security clearance to be approved. Jobs in aerospace, in particular, are pretty lousy paying compared to what engineers are getting elsewhere.
You'll make more money working as an NBA player, and you don't have to wait years for a teaching certificate to be approved. Jobs in schools, in particular, are pretty lousy paying compared to what sports lovers are getting elsewhere.
The fact that FAANG companies employ about 0.1% of the software developers could have something to do with this. Practically speaking, nobody works for the NBA or for a FAANG company.
So it is a silly comparison. Defense contractors can and do beat plenty of normal companies. For example, Tesla pays software developers just $78k to $147k. Defense contractors can beat that before even adjusting for quality of life. You can work a 40-hour week, or you can have Elon Musk cracking the whip. The defense contractor positions are frequently in affordable locations, making the numbers a far better deal than they would appear.
Citation needed. That seems suspiciously low for silicon valley.
>Likewise, why wouldn't any person who loves sports work for the NBA instead of as a gym teacher?
Your argument doesn't make much sense here. You trot out this line, but then you try to make the case that defense contractors pay well (which isn't really my experience; they pay OK (except for "cyber" positions which are paying really well currently), but nothing fantastic compared to non-defense companies in other non-silicon-valley areas), so it doesn't follow. Gym teacher jobs pay close to poverty-level wages, so accordingly, the people who take those jobs are usually people who aren't good athletes themselves, or maybe people who have a spouse with a good income and can afford to have a job for the fun of it.
https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Employer=Tesla_Motors/S...
It is improper to declare that any company outside the highest paying 0.1% is somehow not up to standard.
It is also improper to ignore working conditions. If you end up working 60-hour weeks for $180,000 the pay is no better than working 40-hour weeks for $120,000.
It is also improper to ignore cost of living. House prices can differ by a factor of 20, not even counting the collapsing locations. Just the difference between San Francisco and a medium-small non-coastal southern city is that much.
This isn't correct at all; you're totally overstating the CoL differences. If a decent apartment in the Bay Area costs as much as $3k/month (I'm guessing here), there's no way in hell you're going to find a comparable place anywhere in the country for $150/month. In my experience, cost-of-living just doesn't differ as much between places as people like you claim it does. What does differ is price-per-square-foot, but no one realistically expects to live in a giant McMansion in the Bay Area or Manhattan as a middle-class person. The problem with "low cost" areas is that they typically don't have any actual inexpensive places for single people or childless couples, and your options are usually either a house that's much too large with huge utility costs, or a trailer park surrounded by opioid and meth addicts.
In the middle of San Francisco, at 200 Amber Dr, a house sold in January for $2,450,000. It isn't anything special, at just 2020 square feet. It, frankly, looks ugly and unlivable. It's some old trash from 1962 on a lot that is measured in square feet! Converting that 3149 square feet gives just 0.07229 acres. It's a joke of a little house that should have been bulldozed by 1985. BTW, it would rent for about $7,500 per month.
In much of the country 1/20 of that ($122,500) would get you a similar house on a 0.14 to 0.30 acre lot. Let's see...
You can get 3021 square feet on 0.68 acres for $130,000 in Cocoa, FL. It's older. OTOH, you get more bathrooms. Note the 50% extra floor space and nearly 10x property size.
You can get 1652 square feet for $122,900 in Melbourne, FL. It's being built in a 55+ community by a developer. It'll come with all sorts of community extras, including a lake for fishing.
You can get 4992 square feet on 0.3 acres for $150,000 in Georgetown, KY. There are 7 bedrooms and 4 bathrooms. It comes with beautiful wood floors, high ceilings, a partially spiral staircase, and a fireplace. It's right on Main Street.
You can get 1904 square feet on 5 acres for $89,900 in Georgetown, KY. It's a manufactured home. There is a brook (stream) on the property! You could go hunting with an AR-15 in your backyard. Again, it's 5 acres, and look at that price.
You can get 1987 square feet on 0.1436 acres for $134,900 in Fairborn, OH.
You can get 1976 square feet on 0.41 acres for $115,000 in Beavercreek, OH.
You can get 1920 square feet on 0.1015 acres for $48,900 in Dayton, OH. It does have that icky city feel, being 500 feet from a large park and 750 feet from a damn bus stop, but evidently you wouldn't object.
BTW, while looking for houses I stumbled across trash in Dayton, OH. One is a 4-unit place with the units renting for $300 to $390 per month. The whole thing can be owned for $99,900. A similar place going for $129,900 has 3 units renting for an average of $458 per month.
I see this in the DC area where I live. It's perfectly possible to rent a very nice place for 1500-2000/month. It's totally impossible to rent anyplace decent in the country for $75-100/month (a 20x difference).
There I guess you'd want to be in Arlington or Alexandria, less than 1000 feet from a Metro stop. DC itself, at least the residential parts that don't need a car, is far from decent. In any case it clearly isn't "Bay Area or Manhattan".
Rent prices normally track house prices. Except during the steep parts of a bubble and crash, you can compute one from the other. One expense is thus a proxy for the other.
I'm pretty sure your "very nice place" isn't so nice. First of all, rentals are fundamentally inferior. Second of all, I doubt you are getting equivalent size. (indoor space, parking spots, land) Third of all, the cheap parts of cities are horribly violent.
In any case, I never said 20x would apply to DC.