You're more wrong than almost any poster I've ever seen on Hacker News. At least you got a throw away before you posted this ignorant comment.

I think you are thinking more of defense contracting than darpa.

Also, darpa has real use-cases and those use-cases tend to be hard to solve ones, they aren't VCs looking for the next trend to vampire like a national security version of the TV show shark tank.

Granted, it is 2023, it is the govt, and it is tech/eng/sci holy trinity of profit so I wouldn't be shocked if I am off the mark with my assessment.

Edit: typo

Maybe. Even when a PM is very technical in their field, they are not expected to know the nitty gritty of the broad area they tackle in a program. To come up with realistic programs and execute them successfully, a PM needs to know where are the boundaries of current knowledge, how much $$ is required to push research to transition to real tech... and sniff out bullshit being sold by research labs. Bullshitters or not, they need to be really good at sniffing bullshit!

No, that's crypto. And some parts of AI.

So, government?