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Comment by sesteel | Hacker News Reader

It should be noted:

Amazon is a defense contractor. Google is/was a defense contractor. Apple is a defense contractor. Microsoft is a defense contractor. SpaceX is a defense contractor. IBM is a defense contractor. ...

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There’s a huge difference between having your primary business being services projects basically as an extension of the government and your revenue center being unrelated private sector funding. Your corporate structure and business incentives are completely different as a result. I know Lockheed spend many millions of dollars trying to build a DoD-centric IaaS as AWS was being built and it didn’t really matter in the end because so many projects are going to GovCloud. Sure, lots of TS projects are not ever going to be in AWS but boy are people trying. VMware was bought before to try to contain the sheer sprawl of configuration in the Pentagon (your cost is almost entirely around organizational complexities rather than compute / storage cost due to being so heavy on labor costs in most enterprise orgs so the math is fuzzier but usually results in layoffs / workforce optimizations if successful).

Not when talking about payscales. To say defense contractors don't pay FAANG salaries when FAANG companies are in the defense business is a failure of awareness. I was simply pointing this out.

None of the FAANG companies derive any significant percentage of their revenue from defense. None of them are defense contractors in the real sense of the concept. They're corporations who have a defense business on the side.

You either are or you aren't a defense contractor. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have been competing for a $10 billion dollar defense contract. Google just dropped out. Aside, Boeing is considered a defense contractor by many, but only 25% of its revenue is from defense. Where do you draw the line?

You’re don’t get to make the determination that it’s a binary thing.

You may believe that, the market doesn’t.

Boeing isn’t a defense contractor by most people’s metrics. None of the faangs are by almost any standard.

What constitutes a defense contractor to you and I are obviously different, but I don't hold that it is a matter of opinion or interpretation. If you've been awarded a defense contract, you are a defense contractor.

Your definition is so broad as to be useless.

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