Hacker News Reader

Comment by missedthecue | Hacker News Reader

I knew someone who works for a major tobacco company. Nothing fancy, his job is basically just to ensure convenience stores and shops in his sales region stay stocked with his firm's brands. I don't know anyone who is more loyal to their employer than he is.

My uncle was also a corporate pilot for a major defense contractor. He worked there for 30 years. His wife had a advanced breast cancer but they kept him on payroll for two years while he took care of her until she passed. He was able to back to work and stayed there until he retired.

Perhaps these companies have to show more loyalty to their employees to stay competitive while cleaner industries can afford churn. This can cause employees to show the same loyalty in return.

View on HN

Are defense contractors still vilified? Americans (and Ukrainians) all seem to love Raytheon now:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Javelin

I expect this goodwill to vanish once the current war ends, and reappear the instant China invades Taiwan.

As it turns out, there's no shortage of goodwill towards the military industrial complex when people feel they're actually making the world a safer and better place.

As it turns out, that's what they were doing this whole time, at least with the Javelin program. Not something you can design and ship overnight.

The military-industrial complex exists for sure, but it's good to have high-tech arms when you need them.

Yeah, it certainly exists, and always did. In greater numbers than people know due to classified defense programs and their budgets.

The real problem is we spend TOO much money on defense compared to other needs. Do we really need so many aircraft carriers? Is that really what is required these days? Or submarines? Or even just soldiers. Defense is expensive.

With drones becoming the main way of warfare, I wonder if aircraft carriers are on their way out, the same way that WW2 was the last gasp for the battleship. Drones are cheaper, smaller, less vulnerable, less risk, less human loss of life, etc.

Fun fact, did you know the Gatling gun was invented to reduce the amount of people killed in war? Oops.

Big ships are obsolete. One missed rocket and it sunk. Russian Moscow ship proved it hard way. Rockets are too powerful and too precise and you can’t count on 100% rockets being intercepted. Modern war machines should be cheap and autonomous. We need some kind of sci-fi power field before big machines would become viable again.

If US would engage in war with some big army, like Chinese, Russian or European their carriers will sunk every day.

You can see this with stuff like the burgeoning market for air launched effects/loitering munitions.

Fortunately, the US military is investing heavily into these kinds of systems.

There is no way to make cheap, autonomous war machines that can operate at extended ranges like in the Pacific theater. Anything we build to use there will have to be large and expensive in order to meet the mission requirements, regardless of whether it has humans on board or not. For example, the US Navy and Air Force 6th-generation tactical aircraft programs will probably be optionally manned, but will be larger than their 5th-generation predecessors (F-22 and F-35) in order to reduce reliance on vulnerable tankers. Unit cost will be upwards of $300M.

Big ships are vulnerable, but far from obsolete. There are many ways to break the kill chain before missile point defense comes into play. Lessons learned from battles in the congested Black Sea littorals don't necessarily have much relevance elsewhere.

Drones are far from becoming the main way of warfare. That is science fiction, not reality. The small, cheap drones lack the range and sensors needed to fight in the Pacific theater, where aircraft carriers and submarines are the most effective platforms. And autonomous flight software is still very primitive, so any complex drone missions require remote piloting via satellite connections; those satellites are increasingly vulnerable to ASAT weapons.

Drone technology will continue to improve, but it's never going to be cheap to project power over long distances. The defense budget will continue to increase inexorably, until we hit a real fiscal crisis or just give up and decide to allow China to dominate.

You could put the us military budget at zero, and you'd still have an unsustainable high public deficit.

The fact of the matter is that welfare and welfare alone is the highest expenditure by far, and any cuts anywhere else will be meaningless unless deep and permanent cuts are made to the welfare state.

That has already done that in the US.

Maybe if healthcare was sorted, all those profits not going into the system could go back into peoples pockets and there would be space for a little more tax to pay for welfare.

Give poor people money and they spend it, boosting the economy.

How much profit is there in the healthcare system as a percentage of the federal deficit?

I used to work with someone who'd previously been a manager for development of one of the defensive systems.

One time, the manager mentioned that morale on their team back then had been low, and the work was maybe feeling too abstract, so manager had taken the entire team out to see a test/demo of the real system to which the team was contributing. And something about that re-energizing them, as we'd guess.

(If they could've seen a little into the future, they would've seen their system on TV news, shielding real civilians from a real aggressor's weapons, and I guess there would've been no morale problem whatsoever. I'm not sure I can accurately imagine all the feelings when something like that was successful.)

I remembered that story when I started feeling in an enthusiasm slump, years into computer work involving aviation. Simply making photo prints for my office of some of the more exotic aircraft I'd been working with only via code and data, and a trip to the airport to see some more conventional airliners and operations, made it more real/relevant at some level, and was a significant boost.

Since February, yes. But in the decades of the Iraq war and then Afghanistan conflict? They were villainized.

Really? I don't recall that. It was mainly politicians who were villainized. Most Americans aren't even aware of which weapons systems Raytheon sells.

Things like this used to happen all the time

https://tucson.com/news/local/crime/6-anti-war-protesters-ar...

Those were tiny, isolated demonstrations by the usual hippies who show up to every protest. They only even make the local news on a slow day. No one cares.

Could it be that these companies know about their image and heavily engage in countermeasures internally to keep employees happy? Similar to chemical companies where safety becomes number 1 priority and many have a very low accident rate.

I would hope that any company with hazardous environments would have a heavy focus on safety, green or not. It shouldn’t be seen as a benefit.

Churn makes for more efficient companies and stronger employees. When you have 20 year veterans who stayed in a single place for 20 years, you have no exposure as a company to new practices developed in other companies. You have no exposure to what performance level your employees could be achieving. And as an employee, your own skills are not well developed by being stuck at a single place for 20 years.

Churn makes salaries adapt more quickly to market conditions too. That's an advantage when the Fed is dumping capital into the market with QE.

The disadvantage is yeah, there's chaos sometimes and loyalty doesn't exist. But you need some exploration AND exploitation too, else you get stuck at a local minima.

It depends on the industry. In any industry not undergoing disruption, having the long-time employees probably is a good thing. They know how to execute processes well, and know the detailed ins and outs when any random thing goes wrong. They also know the 10 or 50 other people to call when help is needed.

When any of those individuals leave, you have to hope they have a successor who's been handed the core knowledge.

Is there any actual evidence of this? My experience has been the opposite, that successful companies have staggering amounts of momentum and institutional knowledge.

It also eliminates chances of a singular long term vision being executed. I'm sure the success statistics of long term visions aren't great, but when it hits, it hits, I think.

I think that comes down to having strong leadership (which you would want to minimize churn in, because the timescales of executing projects as an IC are an order magnitude different from executing on strategic goals). E.g. Amazon, Costco, Patagonia, etc.

If executives could finish meaningful goals in a few weeks like ICs can, I'm sure they'd be switching every 2 years too.

As engineer on an architectural track, I have long term visions for the codebase too :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com