In goodbye message, Chaillan unloads over DoD’s technology culture, processes
federalnewsnetwork.com
federalnewsnetwork.com
> The US Government as a whole has a massive talent retention problem. Only the mediocre will stay at NSA / CIA now and we'll probably see more of these leaks / hacks.
That's a verbatim comment I made on this site back in 2017 and it's still relevant. I don't mean to toot my own horn as much as to highlight the braindrain out of DoD / the alphabet soup agencies and into other sectors. It HAS and WILL CONTINUE to bite the United States in the ass.
This is only 15% higher pay than 10 years ago, meanwhile home prices are up 3x in the DC metro area.
1) The expected financial value of a pension. Especially assuming that the millenial in question won’t be willing to tolerate poor quality of life long enough to make it lucrative.
2) Belief that the institution backing the pension will be willing and capable of meeting their obligations in N years.
Personally, I think I’d say that the pension would be close to the value of stock options, but I’d be unwilling to tolerate the crap long enough to actually earn a useful percentage of its theoretical value.
I knew someone who was close to hitting their 20 year pension in the private sector, but the company instead decided they had a performance problem in year 19.
While the federal government has less incentive to play such games, betting on illiquid financial offerings that are contingent on a single entity liking you for N decades and still being around after Y decades is pretty suspect.
With the government I’m confident that they’ll pay, I’m just not confident I personally would be willing to deal with it for 2-3 decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Employees_Retirement_S...
As long as things continue the way they are you wouldn't be able to convince me to code for USG for any price once I retire in a few years. If anything USG has inspiring enough missions that they should be able to attract and retain talent at a discount, compared to optimizing ad click throughs for companies selling sugar water.
DoD jobs are ideal for developers who don’t want to learn anything new and just make money. I’d find a lot of guys close to retirement taking up those roles.
It takes someone who is admittedly done. Otherwise it feels no less life sucking than a retail job.
He's going to be disappointed by the private sector too - I haven't been trained on or even given time to learn anything in at least 20 years. Any learning I (or anybody I've ever worked with) undertake is strictly on personal time only.
An infosec manager/exec/director that made software solutions rather than a bunch of policy and powerpoint drivel?
AND he was in the federal government?
I can't believe it. My #1 complaint about practically all infosec orgs in large corporations is that they set policies and review barriers, but don't offer solutions.
Tata Consultancy Services, India employs more than 500,000 people. They manage the IT stack of companies from Walgreens to Ferrari. I'm not the person to nitpick, But I'm particularly proud of TCS's employment figures because I've personally witnessed many move from being poor to wealthy(by Indian standards) after being employed by them(often the first degree holder in the family).
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/15/economy/tcs-india-it-remo...
Anyone with full-stack experience(gained outside office work, because IT workers in these companies are typically struck with single programming language/framework) would have already moved on from TCS, Infosys, CTS type companies to a well-funded startup.
Pandemic has increased the highly skilled IT job salaries exponentially in India, DevOps personnel with 8 years experience can earn (1.15Cr INR ~ 157K USD) in India[1].
[1] https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/trends/in-the-wild-world-o...
>TCS Recognized as the #1 Top Employer in the United States for 2020[1]
>more than 327,000 employees were trained on multiple new technologies, and over 404,000 trained on Agile methods.
They recruit thousands every year from Engineering colleges in India specifically for SW role. Have been doing that for at least two decades. Their target for FY22 is 40,000 freshers.
It's late in India otherwise I could get the exact figures of IT employees in TCS as every Engineer here knows someone who is working in TCS be it Computer Science or Civil Engineer or even Bio Tech(All of them go to work in IT there).
[1] https://www.tcs.com/tcs-recognized-as-number-one-top-employe...
[2] https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/tcs-to-hire-40-000-f...
Wait what?
Because "agile" is the new hotness, every DoD office and vendor tries to slap the language of agile onto a waterfall model. See this wonderful report from the Defense Innovation Board on "Detecting Agile BS": https://media.defense.gov/2018/Oct/09/2002049591/-1/-1/0/DIB...
I think most of my experience with "agile" has been: we'll make a vague plan that came from god-knows-where, you'll do lots of releases, testers will test incrementally, you'll update us once a week, and at the end we'll release it and you'll do it all again when the users tell us they don't like it or (more likely) when management goes on a new whim.
It turned out making a huge plan at the start was a mistake. It also turned out that no one wanted to ask the users what they thought.
The entire organizing principle of modern US warfare is as fast and adaptive a battlefield loop as possible for: get information -> adapt strategy -> deliver orders.
I believe it goes back to Napoleon, who basically conquered all of Europe using those principles and superior organization.
Still? It's been that way for some time, unfortunately.
You're right that the operational military has long been different and much more flexible. Indeed it's quite annoying seeing agile consultants in the private sector refer to the military as examples of agility! Because that's true on the front lines but it is decided not true at the headquarters level.
Now; aircraft are very different than software. You don't go and manufacture 1000 birds based on a partially completed design. So there's that.
The other important thing to note is the F-35 concept was meant to address the sharply rising costs of building warplanes. By taking advantage of "economies of scale" in manufacturing, to build a multi-purpose plane that all three services could use. (so instead of building say; 100 of one design for the USAF, 100 of a completely different design for the Navy, 100 of a third design for the Marines, they'd build 300 planes - but manufacture variants off the same assembly line.) Adding to that scale was the baked-in "deal" to get NATO partners to commit to buying these planes as well. In that regard, it was kind of a stunning success (that they're actually serviceable; even if all three variants have shortcomings due to engineering trade-offs made for this manufacturing flexibility). At the end of the day, there were flaws that arose in the concept; like, the main central titanium bulkhead, which turned out to be FAR more costly to manufacture than was revealed when they built the prototypes. They just kind of "hoped" that the process for that part would end up being cheaper when scaled. And it wasn't cheaper-enough.
This makes is sufficiently different to the software development process discussion, that I think it's really an apples-to-oranges comparison.
I am hard pressed to consider its development spiral (which requires frequent releases, if not as frequent as Agile). With an aircraft you really don't iterate on airframes the way you might even with OS releases.
> This makes is sufficiently different to the software development process discussion, that I think it's really an apples-to-oranges comparison.
Despite the prime's assertion that it was "spiral", really it was in the end a classic waterfall as I said. But you make a better point: is there really any other way with a mechanical device (especially as demanding a one as an aircraft)?
We do see coarse iterations with various adaptations of aircraft that change length, power plant etc (consider all the versions of 747, 737, A350, et al). It's a stretch to try to consider that spiral, much less agile. The iterations are slow, comprehensive (involving much interconnection) and not really back compatible. More like OS/360 releases (which is the origin of the waterfall metaphor).
I do remember the objective of the program, but it wasn't really grasped adequately (composable elements), a point I think you are making. And there was no feedback in the development process; rather the opposite, with Lockheed given essentially a blank check. The Clinton military-industrial-complex restructuring has a lot to answer for.