Silicon Valley and Defense Tech | Hacker News Reader

Silicon Valley and Defense Tech

blog.eladgil.com

35 pointstosh8 comments

I am not sure why this is worth mentioning. If you look at the whole US defense industry, it is big. There is a lot of money to be made there with products and services, so I would expect some companies to provide for that market.

Also, why just defense? We have continued to support companies with patchy record in basic human rights with our money. For example, the story of human rights violations in Apple's contract manufacturers factories is not new, we have been hearing them for a long time. [1] Did something happen to their revenue and profit growth because of it? No.

Why would companies not keep doing these things when we have shown in the past that at best what most people do is create some noise on social media.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/18/foxconn-l...

> Existing incumbent solutions (the C-17 rockets) cost $200M each.

The C-17 is not a rocket, it's a cargo plane:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_C-17_Globemaster_III

and yeah it's >$200M to make, not fly. A C-17 flight almost certainly costs way less than a rocket launch.

It's an interesting article, but getting to this point makes me seriously question what this writer actually knows about the subject.

Nice high-level breakdown without pushing one moral stance or another, just focusing on the business-side facts.

I always wonder about the employee-side of the equation - since the pool of job candidates that can hold a government security clearance is small realative to the pool of skilled engineers, what are the implications for hiring/retention/culture for teams that do defense work?

My experience is pretty dated but back when I did some work with DARPA retention was a mess at the two defense companies I interacted with. Management wanted to minimize getting security clearance for employees since it involved a substantial amount of money/effort to get and then it was almost guaranteed that the employee would immediately jump ship to another better paying job requiring clearance elsewhere.

The other disturbing trend I learned about was how even if a company lost a contract, they would almost inevitably still work on it as a subcontractor for whoever the new contractor was. Part of that makes sense but it gave me the impression that no one ever really loses a contract.

It’s very difficult to break into government contracting and nearly impossible to get into defense contracting as a new company, especially after the tidal wave of mergers among defense firms in the 90s.

Seems TFA is right on the money with the way new contracting is done: the pentagon likes a thing made by the private sector and they want their own military version of it, or they piggyback on corporate infrastructure with military hardware (as was referenced with spaceX).

But these days it would be very difficult for any new company to break into military contracting.

Isn’t SpaceX the perfect example of a new company taking on the remaining defense contractors post 90s mergers?

https://www.sbir.gov/about

Plenty of small companies are suckling on the government teat. From what I saw, the bar is pretty low, and some really terrible solutions are bought by the government. Someone with the patience to understand the process of applying for contracts could establish a very profitable business I think.

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