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Comment by snakeyjake | Hacker News Reader

My employer cannot hire H-1Bs.

You must be a US citizen to work for my company. No "US Persons" (visa holders) or foreigners allowed.

You have to be eligible for a Secret security clearance. You don't have to get one if you don't want to as there is usually plenty of uncleared work to go around, but you have to be eligible in case that goes away and we need to put you in for a clearance.

We cannot find qualified applicants.

I've had this conversation many times on HN so here are some preemptive responses:

No, we don't make weapons for the military. Well, we do but not my part of the company. The most harmful thing the products I build do is quantify in precise detail how climate change is dooming us all.

No, our positions aren't ghost positions.

Yes, we are willing to train someone who is motivated. We won't re-teach linear algebra to a developer applicant but we will pay a tech writer to go to school nights/weekends to get a degree in engineering (me, I did that).

Yes, we have extensive high school and college work-study/internships and participants make $72k/yr. with full benefits for the duration of the program. That pipeline is actually successful.

No, you can't work remotely. You (even programmers!) have to touch the things we build in order to build them and nobody has an ISO certified clean room in their house.

Yes, we pay well.

No, we don't pay as much as Meta. We build components for satellites that have been sold to space agencies and purchased by various departments/ministries of the environment, not your personal information to advertisers-- one party has more money to spend than the other.

We have shortages in mech/EE/Aero, shortages in software, and critical shortages in engineering technicians.

One issue is that we expect programmers to remember linear algebra and have more than the ability to shovel frameworks on top of each other until a phone app comes out the other side.

View on HN

> We cannot find qualified applicants.

Your company is incompetent. I've applied to hundreds of companies like yours within Huntsville, AL in the past year, rejected or ghosted all the time.

Defense morons will talk about how hard their work is and how they can't find anyone to do it. Completely skip over how prevalent affirmative action is in their hiring process; who were you guys interviewing in 2020? Why is the defense small business base completely dominated by veterans who stack 10% disability ratings and minorities with a preferred SBA sticker on their website?

Complete joke of an industry.

that's an assumption

its just as likely that their process is auto-rejecting candidates and nobody has looked yet

"After his HR department hadn't found a single candidate for a job, the manager submitted his own resume. It was auto-rejected."

syndicated here

https://www.yourtango.com/self/manager-proves-hr-system-auto...

and the associated reddit comment that the articles are based off here

https://www.reddit.com/r/csMajors/comments/1f8x5ma/comment/l...

this is likely the more common practice

Not commenting on the rest of their assumptions, but to be clear, auto-rejecting candidates that could reasonably fill roles in your company isn’t a defense against incompetence accusations— it supports them.

I was referring to the discrimination rant

even candidates that might fit a poorly implemented affirmative action program are likely getting auto-rejected

nobody knows if its helpful to mention their race or disability, or whether its hurtful

My "discrimination rant" is informed by my ex-girlfriend being hired for an M&S/OpenCL job as a non-programming mech-e. Why? Because all the work was already done and it would look better to the government client to have a female, black engineer sit around in a SCIF doing nothing all day. Stuff like this is absolutely rampant.

This is absolutely true. Government contractors have what is effectively diversity quotas. People will get hired to fill the quota regardless of what they actually do. It’s absolutely not true that diversity hires are all useless, but there are significant incentives to create diversity numbers in order to gain a government contract. Hiring 100 people to do nothing and get the lucrative contract is better than hiring based on need and not getting the contract.

It’s clear you just want to be heard but that doesn’t prove that’s what happened to your application

“assumption” doesn’t imply a lack of truth, it points out your inability to know that out of all possibilities, which possibility applies

it means there is no point in doubling down on your data point of 1 in 1 niche industry when there is this other industry wide practice occurring as well

an industry wide practice that would affect minorities applying as well as existing employees alike

I’m not an HR person, but I’d be surprised if the ATS bouncer algorithms even have access to the eeo information, and making assumptions about ethnicity based on name seems unlikely to be a feature. Sure, someone could code their own solution easily enough but I really doubt that’s a common enough occurrence to warrant discrimination accusations at the auto-reject level.

It's not an assumption, Affirmative Action along with many other requirements is mandated for the contractors working with the US. You can start from here https://www.dol.gov/agencies/odep/program-areas/employers/fe...

but its implementation different per organization and at any moment in time.

it could just as easily be any other reason, like the one I identified

its an assumption to know what's being applied to you.

its obvious that the frustrated guy just wants to be heard, it is still an assumption. that doesn't mean its not happening. it means its an assumption about what exactly applied to you.

unless they specifically said that and you won an employment discrimination case then you literally dont know.

I have worked for a few defense contractors in my time. There is significantly more diversity outside of defense than inside defense.

I had a team of 14 with 2 women and 1 non-white male. I had a team of 10 with 0 women and 0 non-white male. I had a team of 20 with 1 women and 0 non-white male.

Looking at it another way, thats 40 successful white male hires, and 4 successful non-white male hires.

if only having access to 91% of jobs instead of 100% is the reason you can't get hired....

edit: To clarify, as a software developer of 10+ years both in defense and faang, I have never once had a team where there was less than 50% white men.

I haven't worked in FAANG but I recently applied to Amazon in Australia. I interviewed with 3 asians, 2 indians and 1 white guy. YMMV.

Veering off topic a bit, but I wonder what would happen if a company required that for any new hiring filter for Role X, it must pass everyone currently in Role X or above.

Does it make sense, in general, to prevent the hiring process from becoming more selective in the future? If so, why? But if not then a rule like that wouldn't make sense.

I don't think it makes sense to prevent it becoming more selective, but I do think it makes sense to avoid passing over candidates who can do the job. And your best (only?) data on who can actually do the job is who is currently doing the job.

If you really need everyone in Role X to have a PhD in Psychoergonomics, then what's up with Jane over there and her MD?

If you're hiring because you need someone? Yes?

It makes sense to sort candidates with the more niche requirement to the top of the pile, but to require it? When you need to fill this role?

There's also hiring because "wow, this candidate is great, we should find a place to fit them", and there it makes sense to become more selective going forwards... but when a company is saying "we need people and can't find them", that doesn't seem like the time to be more selective.

For some reason I fancy buying myself a new watch.

Anecdote: Amazon has a hiring bar that states that new hires have to be better than half of the current population in the role. Whether or not it’s adhered to, there’s a reasonable motive for doing so.

I couldn’t agree more. Hiring for tech workers is insanely broken. I was a hiring manager at a FAANG company. I wanted to hire my ex intern (he’d gotten stellar reviews, then gone on to finish his degree while attaining highly relevant additional skills) Since he’d already applied when I reached out I was told by my hr people that I had to wait for the process to complete. They flew him out for onsites (now mind you I’d worked with him previously and vouched for him and would have simply made an offer immediately) They sat him through the whole suite of interviews. You know the kind, panel interviews with people unrelated to the role asking stupid questions unrelated to the job. A few weeks later they rejected him. I opened up his packet (as an hiring manager I had access to ATS) and it was stellar. Every question answered perfectly. I called the guy whose name was on the rejection “why on earth did you reject? Did he say something so bad you couldn’t write it down?” “No we just feared he was so good he’d get bored and go do something else” This from a company that claims to hire the best and the brightest. I called him, apologized and asked him to be patient with us. I literally had to start the process over. Fly him out and pretend to interview him again. All the while knowing I was going to make him an offer. Shit like this is why companies and hiring managers have trouble finding candidates. Not because the talent pool is not there, it’s because your process is broken, absurd, and insane.

Defense morons should be a more common term. These guys have been given free money for generations in VA and can barely do anything other than suck cash from the government. I’m an American it’s disgraceful they are children compared to my Asian colleagues.

Maybe, when you interview, they sense your anger and that you feel as you say, they are morons, so they move onto more desirable candidates?

What a weird last sentence.

It’s just a fact it really changed my perspective. American as a people have a learned helplessness mostly because of wealth, when asked to do something they gripe about the boss making excuses and acting juvenile. Asians just do the thing.

if they're getting free money, they're not morons!

humans think we're the most intelligent because we built New York while the dolphins have just been hanging around having a good time. the dolphins think they're the most intelligent for the same reason.

I'm picturing a lot of corp execs boarding a spaceship and saying 'so long and thanks for all the tax breaks'

Have you considered that it might be your attitude costing you job opportunities? Anti-woke baby raging isn’t exactly exactly an attractive quality in a potential candidate

Wow, I can't imagine why companies don't want to hire you

its perfectly acceptable to be bitter and express it sometimes when you have the perception that life has been unfair to you for half a decade.

It doesn’t necessarily speak to the parent’s attitude before becoming bitter. Hard to draw such a direct conclusion for me.

Becoming deeply bitter is a very normal outcome of dealing with US company hiring processes in 2024

Becoming deeply bitter is a very normal outcome of dealing with literally anything, in any year. It has very little to do with US company hiring processes and a lot to do with someone’s attitude and outlook on life.

Both of my dads (father and FIL) got cancer this year. My mom almost did.

You don’t have to become deeply bitter, no matter what your situation. Many people do anyway, and that is by no means a moral failing of any kind, but it has very little to do with the individual events that precipitated it.

This deserves a much more thought out and nuanced answer than I am capable to give.

I will try anyway.

Let's take something that we have more information about: burnout. Since burnout is a hot button topic, we're all somewhat aware about it.

Many people misconstrue burnout to mean "overworked" - which it's not, it's a type of depression where your emotional investment is not getting adequate emotional returns: and that's what's happening with your depiction of "bitter".

You had objectively worse situations happening to you, yes! However- the conditions in which they happened were:

* Not artificial. There was no concerted effort by the universe to conspire to give your fathers cancer.

* You were given sympathy

* You were given the opportunity to actually air grievances about it before it boiled up- likely you were told that it's healthy to feel bad or to express yourself.

Likewise, bitterness is the culmination of being treated in a way you perceive as unfair, and it starts small. It gets worse when not treated. Treatment is as easy as letting people be a little angry sometimes or to let them talk about their issues and be met with something other than condescension.

You had a worse situation, yes, but you're talking about people getting moody as a moral failing.

It would be like me telling a woman not to be moody on her period because some men have their arms blown off on oil rigs. They're not comparable at all.

You misunderstood me. I very explicitly do not think it is a moral failing at all. I do not have any problem with someone being moody. Problems aren’t a competition. I mentioned mine not to imply that mine were worse, but just that they were different, and to show that I wasn’t speaking from a position of “having no problems” or being oblivious to them.

It is completely reasonable to be bitter. But long-term, it is still a choice.

I don’t disagree that being bitter, at the onset, is not a choice. And often requires treatment.

Burnout is a great example because I agree with everything you said about it. Becoming bitter when burnt out isn’t a choice. Staying bitter is.

For short periods, it is almost always even necessary; treatment requires feeling.

But too many people get stuck in it, do not seek treatment (or are afraid to / taught not to, even amongst friends), and do not move forward. Even that is still not a moral failing; but it does make me sad.

> Becoming deeply bitter is a very normal outcome of dealing with literally anything, in any year.

No it isn't. Most people only become bitter when they feel they have been treated unfairly and badly for a very long period of time.

Citation needed. People get bitter over good things sometimes too; because they see others as having gotten more, or perceive unfairness when there wasn’t any, and so on.

I am not implying bitterness is bad. But you can absolutely be bitter for almost any reason.

I have rarely encountered someone as wrong about anything as you are about this.

Would you care to make an argument? Or just insult and leave?

If you genuinely didn't become at all bitter from multiple family members getting cancer, you should probably see about getting a psychiatric evaluation.

I felt plenty of emotions. Sadness, fear, and so on. Bitter was not one of them, and I definitely don’t feel bitter now. It helps that both are in remission, but that wasn’t the obvious (or even expected) outcome in either case.

And thanks, but I am quite aware of my mental faculties, and have seen psychiatrists and therapists plenty; I have ADHD, after all, and recurring depressive episodes (though not true clinical depression).

Perhaps don’t assume that people who are different from you are… mentally ill? Seems a bit of an arrogant stretch. :/

Why would anyone be bitter about family members getting cancer? If some big company polluted the water in their town with hexavalent chromium and that caused the cancer in all the family members, I could definitely understand bitterness, but this doesn't seem to be a case like this at all. Most of the time, cancer just happens unfortunately, and isn't directly caused by some evil person or corporation (at least as far as we can tell in most cases). Why would someone be bitter about it? Angry at god or something? Sad, sure, but not bitter.

People have all sorts of emotions about stuff that "just happens". Sure, those emotions aren't logical, but emotions aren't logical.

A rant on the internet has nothing to do with how someone acts as a (prospective) employee.

They want top tier talent to work on crappy quality products/code

Meaning people who can unravel all the crap they have to maintain but with no agency to enact any sort of long term fix.

Plenty of this kind of work going around, the older the codebase is the less willing people are to work on it. Soon good engineers don't want to anymore and mid engineers are not good enough to even tweak it. Leaving the only lever these companies can pull being salary and they can't compete with FAANG on that.

Reminds me of those anecdotes you hear from Oracle and ASML engineers. The difference there is that they can still use the salary lever.

This. "You can't pay me enough to work on something where I have almost no agency to do anything without constantly raising my hand, asking if I can improve something, then having to wait and wait and wait for approval to consistently be told 'No.'". Unless I'm allowed to be free to do other things while waiting or allowed to work remote/asynchronously (not tethered/shackled to a desk/keyboard), then I might be open to doing it, but still for a lot of money to deal with the redtape/bs.

The last sentence is key. A quality dev can do all the work required to make par with 5-10 hours of work a week. They can be happy if the salary is good enough and they approach it from a "don't care, getting paid" mindset. However, if they're forced to be in an office instead of remote, where they can do as they please with an extra 25-30 hours a week vs. a standard job, they will be miserable.

I think I understand what you're trying to say but as I read what you wrote it's a bit confusing. Please correct me if I got it wrong.

What I think you're saying is, if a developer is forced to be in an office/at a desk when/where no "real work" can be accomplished (that's to management gates/bottlenecks) then they will be miserable. Is that correct?

Defense industry has lower standards and higher salaries for tech jobs, because they're restricted to nationals only. Not sure about AA

How exactly does affirmative action lead to a company being unable to fill a position at all?

So many contradictions!

You pay well, but not so much.

You search for qualified applicants but can hire a student.

You require linear algebra but ok with technical writer.

Looks like your managers don't know who they need to hire or don't want to really hire.

> Looks like your managers don't know who they need to hire or don't want to really hire.

It's prevalent in government-adjacent companies. It's all a completely opaque byzantine system to mask the nepotism and the fact that a lot of those people just siphon money from the government like it's a jobs programs.

Not to mention that their application systems are usually complete garbage like Workday or Taleo.

The defense industry _is_ a jobs program, I thought this was clear to everyone. It's cheaper than keeping all the vets on the payroll directly and also cheaper than letting them become another homeless crisis on top of the existing one.

Defense contractors are usually located in out of the way places. If you work for the USAF Lab in Rome, NY, you make less than a Facebook intern, but the only guy richer than you in town is the state trooper with overtime. They are also stable gigs with good benefits.

Yeah, but you also have to live in Rome, NY. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to live in a major city; but being _near_ one is pretty handy. And if the job doesn't pan out, then being in Rome, NY means your options for the next job are extremely limited. Unless your family is ok with uprooting and moving (probably _again_), the pay to move to Rome for a job would need to be catastrophically large to lure me there.

> the pay to move to Rome for a job would need to be catastrophically large to lure me there

On the other hand, when in Rome...

Exactly. The fit for an employee is challenging, but for the right person it’s the ideal job.

Alabama, ditto. There is no amount of money that would compel me to live there. But for the right person, it’s paradise.

I moved from a string of coastal metropolises to a much smaller city in Alabama, voluntarily. Pay was not a factor, since I kept the same remote job; but obviously my purchasing power is higher here, especially for housing. There are certain aspects of living in or near a "world-class" city that are lacking here, but for my lifestyle, that has no impact on my day-to-day.

I'm not specifically trying to change your mind about Alabama (since as you said, everyone has a different lifestyle), but I would wager that perhaps some of what you think about these Deep South states are contrary to reality.

One of my biggest concerns of doing something like this is being too far away from specialist healthcare in my old age. I see my 70 year old mother struggling to find specialist doctors without going to the big city (which is 2 hours away). She is not even _that_ far away from the big city.

Meaning around one time per month she has to devote a whole day for a doctor trip. I am afraid when she grows older and can't do that by herself anymore. Most of her doctors are still local though, but specialists are hard to find.

When my dad had cancer he had to take similar trips for his treatment. Except it was weekly with occasional multiple times per week. It was brutal for him and my mother.

I dealt with cancer this year. I had my choice of health systems, one 30 minutes away or one 5 minutes away. By the end I was very grateful I went with the closest. At one point I had radiation every morning at 8:30 for a month. Drop the kid at school then swing by for the appointment is much more manageable than an hour commute while feeling like ass.

It's not just the specialists either. My pcp at a local health clinic is a MD/PhD from a top 5 med school. Most of the best in any field don't want to live in Podunk either.

I can’t handle Southern weather.

The redneck stuff is fine with me, I lived in a small town and it has a certain charm. Good place to raise kids, etc. But I like winter… I live in a small northeast city and enjoy it.

> but the only guy richer than you in town...

Or, you know, any tech worker with a remote job. The point is if you have technical skills and want to live in Rome, NY you can do that and still have a better job.

> They are also stable gigs with good benefits.

Maybe 30 years ago. Today the benefits don't compare to what you get in a large tech company and I think everyone one I know with a career in a DAPRA/Defense contractor job has eventually been laid off and struggled to find new work since it's generally challenging to transition out of that industry involuntarily.

I think he is saying that they’ll hire folks as technical writers (so you do technical writer stuff) and then help out with engineering classes if things seem to be going well.

This is pretty different from somebody who wants to go in as an engineer but doesn’t remember their intro classes.

Don’t forget “we don’t build weapons…well the company does but my team doesn’t.”

> Don’t forget “we don’t build weapons…well the company does but my team doesn’t.”

It's totally possible. There's an defense contractor in my area where all the work at the local office is on non-defense government projects.

Sure, but it could still be a deterrent for some applicants. They might not care enough about that distinction to apply to the company.

That's fair enough but it's an arbitrary place to draw the line. If you pay tax in the US then you build weapons. If you live in a country that doesn't either build weapons or pay someone else to build them for you, then you'll soon be getting told what do by some country that does, and building weapons is one of the things they'll probably tell you to do.

After what went down in Ukraine I struggle with the idea that folks can still find military tech inherently problematic.

It's currently the only thing preventing a liberal democracy from being overrun and genocided because a tinpot dictator with nuclear weapons woke up on the wrong side of the bed back in 2022 and said "I want, I take."

> You pay well, but not so much

Don't really see much of a contradiction. A good salary is not necessarily the highest salary.

> You require linear algebra but ok with technical writer.

I'm a tech writer but went to engineering school. While I assume it's not a fairly common situation, it's also not unheard of. The original comment seems to imply that they'll frown upon a candidate that will expect to be taught linear algebra at the workplace but will be ok with one that has only a basic grasp and it's willing to attend engineering school to improve.

Not to pile on, but if linear algebra is really a part of the day-to-day job and not some manager’s mistaken idea of a proxy for more general talent, then you’re hiring specialists and the pool will not be that large. People who remember all their math and enjoy it and can also code, are also very employable at all the AI companies and departments, including at Meta.

And how do you know if someone’s eligible for security clearance without applying for it? (Other than the obvious “be a US citizen, don’t be a spy” part.)

Isn’t linear algebra heavily used in machine learning and computer graphics (not just know it, but be able to wield it proficiently)? So ya, the talent probably exists, but they hit the “these engineers are making half a million a year to do something else” problem.

Yes, exactly, I would (naïvely) assume it's common among e.g. ML specialists, who are in high demand and thus hard to recruit. I'm sure there are a lot, but if I had to extrapolate from experience ("OK, who's good at math, hands up?") I would say it's less than 20% of coder genpop.

There is a lot of published research work in ML that had huge impact without explicitly touching linear algebra.

Given that is the case, to answer your question: yes, linear algebra is the foundation of ML. No, a lot of impactful day-to-day ML engineering can be done without touching linear algebra.

This is how assembly is the basis of compilation and programming. But you probably are going to get a whole lot of work done without ever using it.

It's generally a nice flex when applicants can code assembly, and usually a yellow-flag when the company suggests they require knowledge of assembly.

To me, my eyebrows raise when an industry person mentions linear algebra. I'm just saying the odds are really low that you actually use it.

> People who remember all their math and enjoy it and can also code, are also very employable at all the AI companies and departments, including at Meta.

That's either a wishful thinking or a stretch of definitions, IMHO.

What about the opposite? My math is getting super rusty but it doesn't matter because all I do is push protos around. Yet I seem to be pretty employable.

> if linear algebra is really a part of the day-to-day job [...] then you’re hiring specialists

It kind of bothers me that the parent and other readers here are passing off knowing linear algebra as some kind of esoteric skill. Linear algebra is a year 2 course in a undergraduate eduation. There are polished libraries to make it fast.

Unless you mean enough knowledge to be writing linear algebra libraries, there is no need to consider this skill a high hurdle.

Why is this down-voted? I was going to add most people have already seen some sort of linear algebra even in high school. Determinants, Gaussian elimination, etc.

It's unclear what "linear algebra" means to GP, though. I agree writing linear algebra libraries is next level, since that involves numerical code and knowing FP math well.

> Determinants, Gaussian elimination, etc.

Umm, not in Pennsylvania government high schools, not typically. Not by a long shot.

This is a real life version of this comic

https://xkcd.com/2501/

The number of American (and most other countries too) students who interacted with Gaussian elimination or Determinants in High School can fairly safely be rounded down to zero.

And we wonder why the US is declining in the ranking for HS math competence.

I don't think it's esoteric, I just don't think it's used much in real-life, day-to-day software engineering as practiced by most professionals. I didn't mean to imply it's a high hurdle, just that IMO a minority of actual SWE's are going to bust out the proverbial slide rule, and anecdotally it seems like they have a lot of options.

That it's a year-2 undergraduate course for some people argues more for forgetting than remembering it, if you're not using it regularly.

> Linear algebra is a year 2 course in a undergraduate eduation.

From what I’ve seen, the year 2 course is great for graphics programming, game development, that sort of thing. It’s not enough for the tasks that require more serious linear algebra, when you’re working with systems of linear equations, large matrices, etc. These “big” linear algebra problems come up a lot in fields like physics simulation, finance, and machine learning / AI.

I’ve done some hobby work in graphics and game development, and I’ve done some professional work in physics simulation. The kind of linear algebra you use in physics simulation is a different beast.

I would expect the type you are talking about to be described as something more like scientific computing or HPC or something, right? Numerical methods.

I took these classes in college and none of them would be described that way. They were linear algebra classes.

Huh, interesting. What did they cover? I guess I thought you were talking about stuff like sparse iterative solvers (Krylov subspace, that sort of stuff). But those are computational tools mostly, I guess, right?

The math department at my college had three linear algebra courses.

“Intro to linear algebra.” 200-level. Vectors are (x,y,z), more or less. Class includes math, engineering, science, and business majors. 200-level makes it nominally a second-year course but lots of first-year students will take it. Required course for many different majors.

“Applied linear algebra.” 300-level. Vectors are finite. Eigenvalues, linear transformations, determinants, matrix algebra, factorization. Touches on numerical methods but doesn’t spend much time on them. Students were mostly math, with some physics and electrical engineers mixed in.

“Advanced linear algebra.” Series of two 400-level / 500-level courses. Almost exclusively math majors and math grad students. Algebraic topology, tensor spaces, exterior algebra, spectral theory, differential forms.

There were also numerical methods courses—one in the math department and one in the CS department.

Can't take graphics until you have finished linear algebra, otherwise how would you deal with all the rotation and projection matrices?

Right, but there’s another linear algebra after that one.

Linear algebra may well be year 2 in a math B.S. program, and you’ll encounter it in physics and quite a few engineering fields, too. Maybe a bit of linear algebra in CS. And a lot of graduates who go do something else for a while will not remember too much linear algebra.

I can easily imagine that an overly aggressive linear algebra requirement will eliminate many excellent candidates.

In Australia Linear Algebra was straight out of high school first year university basic STEM common core math course work for Engineering, Physics, Chemistry, Medical, Biology, etc. streams.

Also true in the US; I don't know what the "year 2" people are thinking.

At my university, the quickest you would be able to take it was the second year because Calc 1 and Calc 2 were considered pre-reqs. Assuming you're a normal student doing only Fall/Spring semester, you can't take Calc 1 and 2 simultaneously.

Unless you had AP Calc in high school and managed to get the university to accept it. I think quiet a few ABET schools don't accept AP Calc as a full replacement for Calc 1 if your an engineering major.

Here in the US I was: calc 2 (year 1), calc 3, linear methods (year 2), discrete math, theory of computation (year 3). The downside being that the math and comp. sci courses had no overlap, so I've basically forgotten the first 1.5 years. Might have been better off at a state college.

And wow, coming in from the other end of the scale to even the bias...

Did an internship in biotech then spent the next ten years working the only 2-3 blue collar jobs I could land while applying to thousands of jobs per year and writing hundreds of cover letters per year: retail, call centers, IT, software development, comp sci, secretarial, and other random fields I have certifications in. All told, zero interviews. Spent my spare time working on open-source projects and tutoring programming and data science.

Suffered a horrible work-related injury near the end of the decade and had to quit, but just as my savings were about to expire I managed to find a government contracting job for 80K/year, which is nearly 3x my previous salary. I suffer incredible pain at work due to my injury, and spend all my spare time recuperating and exercising, and spend all my money on healthcare and moonshots to no avail. I've wound down all my hobbies. I thought I'd start socializing once I could afford it, but I'm in too much pain.

Competence in government really doesn't reflect my experience in landing a job. What a silver lining. When I can barely walk I can just not show up and nobody would even notice. So career-wise I don't think I'm going anywhere. Life-wise I'm limping on, I guess.

I’ve seen it put after calculus for whatever reason, usually. Surprisingly, even for engineering students, calculus often takes up the first year of classes in the US.

In Australia, and a number of European countries, Calculus takes up the last two years of high school in the advanced stream (for anybody intending to go to university and take Law, Engineering, Medicine, Physics, Chem, etc).

Interestingly in serious university mathematics when looking at the foundations of mathematics, Linear Algebra is a functional prerequisite of multivariate calculus and anything higher dimensional as LA provides a literal basis for abstract spaces and local approximations to continuous functions, etc.

(Often the two are formally taught in parallel)

It’s the same in the US. My son is in 10th grade doing Pre-Calculus now and should be in AP Calculus next year.

If you don’t take the AP class to test out of it, you’d have to take it first in college though.

I imagine many people strong enough in math to pursue sciences will go the AP route and test out of it, but not everybody takes the same path.

At the place I went, they designed the curriculum around students that came in without it. But I guess testing out gives room for a gen-ed.

I dunno. The vibe in high school’s hardest math class and college’s easiest math class is kinda different. Might be worth doing both, haha. Easy A, too.

I generally think it should be taught along calc 3 (advanced integration and differential equations), as there's decent conceptual overlap and basic calculus helps weed out those who might not be ready for a more rigorous course.

Also to clarify wrt calculus, it is very common for university-track students to take AP calculus in high school, which allows them to take an examination that most universities accept to prove mastery of the equivalent to calc 1 or calc 1+2 depending on the examination.

I got an A in linear as a sophomore… a long time ago. If it’s needed for a job, I got some studying to do.

Agreed - If you got a Computer Science degree from an engineering school, you probably had to take Linear Algebra as one of your required classes. Also, Linear Algebra is not that hard to learn.

And you’re going to remember that at a job interview 10 years later after never dealing with it after class? Uh, no.

I took through calc 3 + discrete math, but didn’t have to take the full linear algebra course for the BS in CS. I’m sure I could refresh myself on calculus, but almost no one is regularly maintaining their more advanced math knowledge in this field.

I got a CS degree from a fairly high ranked state university.

Linear algebra wasn't a requirement. I took it as an elective just for my own curiosity. I have a feeling loads of programmers really don't know anything about linear algebra, and probably a large number are like me and learned it due to interest in game development.

The upstream comment mentioned Linear Algebra as a base requirement for applied programmers in their domain; satellites, remote sensing, communications, navigation, etc.

You can assume they're interested in esoterics like those who can grasp the spherical harmonic equations used to model the daily magnetic flux epoch models to control sats via mag torque, those who can do a multivariate 512 dimensional SVD reduction against pipelined multi spectral data to create sharpened images, create fuel optimal paths in constrained resource starved environments while dodging projected debris paths, .. you know, all that jazz.

The bigger risk I think is that most engineers took it in the first couple years, didn’t realize they were applying it in all their other classes, and forgot about it.

It's not so much that it's esoteric, it's that it's not something most people use every day, and skills decay over time. I mean, Differential Equations (Diff-e-screw) was a year 2 class for me, and I assume I'd fail it if I took it today.

But most people that have any exposure to it can pick it back up fairly rapidly. And most people that have a reasonable exposure to math in general could probably come up to speed (a little less) rapidly.

How many years do you expect most working professionals to remember the content of each of their undergrad courses - unless they use it on a regular basis?

Linear algebra is not a universal requirement for CS and EE.

I didn't take it in college. Never needed it in my swe career. I am the norm.

> And how do you know if someone’s eligible for security clearance without applying for it?

The short answer is "You can't, not with 100% certainty.".

Based on my experience from decades ago, the long answer is "Anyone who's a US citizen and doesn't lie about their drug use and debts can get a Secret clearance.". Things MIGHT have significantly changed since my clearance lapsed way back when, but I doubt it.

Actually, after engaging my brain a bit more fully, I realize that one can be eligible for a security clearance but fail to actually be granted one.

That is, eligibility concerns whether or not the State Department will consider your application, not whether or not they will grant the clearance after performing their background and lifestyle investigation.

> Yes, we pay well.

Prove it. What city are you in, and what is total comp for software engineer & hardware engineer with 20 years of experience?

I worked in national defense. It was a pain in the ass: shit pay, worst politics, massive tolerance for incompetence & mediocrity, meeting hell, and secrecy (necessary, but "need to know" gatekeeping wasnt at times).

Why would I work in person for less money when I can work remote? For in person work on critical applications like satellites, I'd expect (spitballing here) a staff eng to be making 300k base with substantial bonus/espp on top. Consider that most midsize tech companies are going to pay staff level 200k or above and ask how the company in question compares, before pricing in the crushing inflexibility of in person work.

> I'd expect (spitballing here) a staff eng to be making 300k base with substantial bonus/espp on top

This is a fairytale in DoD work and while I think there's room for us to improve our compensation I'm not sure this is a reasonable number at the moment. Please don't flame me for this, just sharing my opinion. I work on a critical DoD new-work project.

The only way to achieve that number in this sector would be private consulting with a very strong network. I will say that it's a very easy world to network in, at least in my experience. I also find the work and location I'm in very meaningful and interesting compared to most of the private sector work accessible to me at this point in my career.

I don't think as many people love remote work as HN suggests. We have an extremely flexible hybrid and PTO policy here, and we're in a great midsize city that people love living in.

This is just a random jumble of thoughts in response. Cheers

I appreciate your insider perspective and insight here. I realize that most industries don't pay their engineers like tech companies do. I just wish that we as workers instead of accepting less would instead agitate for better wages across the board. I previously left a very engaging pharmaceutical research job to work in finance because the money I was leaving on the table got to be too much for me to justify, regardless of how much I enjoyed the work.

That number shows up very often for the Principal SWE LCAT on contracts serving agencies at Ft. Meade.

I don't work for the DoD, but announcing it seems like bad OPSEC?

In that case I am obviously joking

Always good to wrap up those loose ends.

Yeah, it just sounds like the ole "no one wants to work anymore" line when really it's you're not paying enough.

We pay $400-700k for L4-L6 and we have a hard time finding qualified candidates.

Then it’s not enough. This isn’t hard.

Your statement is trivially true in terms of market mechanics, but considering that $400k/yr for an individual puts him in the 99th percentile of all income earners in the US, the argument gets a little harder to make.

I reckon a L4-L6 engineer should be in the 99th percentile of talent and value for US workers so I don’t see the problem.

"400k" (he/she says they work for a private company so they haven't told us how much of that is actual cash in hand) and also in an unknown location which could be the bay area which in that case, just go work for Google/Meta/Netflix and make that money in cash/RSUs.

Yeah it's SF/Seattle/Chicago

$400k is base + bonus

I fail to see how the argument got harder, please enlighten me how the fact that other people make less means this job should pay less even though it currently can’t attract the talent they want

Maybe they haven't advertised the job anywhere.

Define "qualified".

Can design and launch a software product that will scale to 100M reqs/day on pretty much unlimited infrastructure.

It's also fintech, so there is no room for error.

That's extremely vague. What kind of requests? Scale to 100M requests a day with any budget for infrastructure? Or is just choosing naive autoscaling without considering costs not ok? Are the requests evenly spread out throughout the day?

What do you mean "no room for error"? Every networked application has errors. Do you mean that the application should never throw an error? Or that errors should always be retried an infinite number of times? Or that requests should not get dropped and should be guaranteed to me handled? And how do you guarantee that? It is quite impossible to have an application that serves 100M requests a day from real users and have 0 errors or dropped packets.

I'll take it. My resume probably doesn't match your qualifications, but hey I'm sure you guys are willing to train people up where they're deficient, right? For that kind of pay, I'd never leave - surely me being a drag on productivity for 6 months while I come up to speed is an acceptable trade, right?

Do you work in big tech, high finance, or private equity?

midsize fintech "startup" 1500 employees with ~$2B ARR.

I’m interested, work in finance, and am in Chicago. How do i apply?

You didn't name your employer for someone who might be interested. Perhaps visibility is one reason you can't find anyone?

I applied to a similar position locally this year. I far exceed their requirements and experience and I got rejected at the application stage. And the same goes for nearly all of other places I applied to. Hiring has most definitely changed over the years. They are not just looking for "qualified applicants". There is something else going on.

>I applied to a similar position locally this year. I far exceed their requirements and experience and I got rejected at the application stage.

Could be "This one is overqualified, we can't pay that much" or "He doesn't have experience in the exact thing we need." Or just that they want a qualified applicant but they've got lots of options.

But then the narrative of "there aren't enough qualified people" collapses, and H1-Bs unjustified.

Then they’d also have to pay more and not have someone they could put under their thumb.

I thought that the original comment was about a company that could not fill with H1-Bs yet they didn't contact him either. There are many reasons that he might not be contacted. I think there are plenty of US programmers for jobs that require only US persons. At least, my experience with those jobs has been that being basically qualified is insufficient to get much interest. They're looking for other things, like very particular experience, salary range, security clearance, demographic characteristics, etc.

> We cannot find qualified applicants

> No, we don’t pay as much as Meta.

So, essentially, you are seeking special treatment from US citizens. I’m not saying this is always unreasonable, but you’re in the territory of a centrally planned economic decision, and in the US philosophy that is supposed to be done minimally.

Maybe the right thing is for your company to shut down or change their line of business, freeing up the labor for Meta.

There are 4.8 million developers in the US most of them are not making Meta salaries and I would say that 80% will never see 200K inflation adjusted in thier lives.

Instead of going to levels.fyi go to salary.com and choose any major city in the US that is not on the west coast.

No most developers don’t get RSUs or anything else aside from their salaries and maybe a bonus.

And before someone replies that I’m “bitter”. No I’m good, I’m 50. I did my stint at BigTech and I don’t have the shit tolerance level to deal with the politics of any large company.

You are actually proving my point. If there are 4.8 million developers who are not commanding Meta salaries, and they "pay well" it should be fairly straightforward to get labor.

It's simple: the more picky you are the more you will have to pay. The GP admitted the upper bound of Meta, which is a company that is sustainably operating in the same country. If you cannot compete in a labor market, either raise your product pricing or be more efficient. If not, you will make less profit and/or go out of business, which is an appropriate outcome most of the time.

No one is entitled to their business model.

I think the other part of the problem is no one in software wants to work in Huntsville.

There are numerous reasons why AL sucks.

There's a ton of reasons to not like AL, but Huntsville is actually pretty decent from what I've seen of it.

Huntsville isn’t the socially liberal (ie we are all people and you do you) oasis like Atlanta, Miami and other major cities in red states.

To be clear, I’m not saying all conservatives are evil. I have nothing against the Kemp’s (GA’s governor) and traditional conservatives.

I totally agree with you, people thinking of moving there should be aware of the politics of the area.

But compared to a lot of the rest of Alabama and other stereotypes of the South, it's really a decent place. Definitely not the anti-science, anti-intellectual backwater many might assume. There's a lot of bright people there with interest in aerospace and engineering at all levels. And it's also a college town.

And yet you'll suffer from their policies. Just avoid getting pregnant and have complications, for one example.

I can’t believe that his work is so complicated that he can’t take a good older developer in thier 30s, who would be more than willing to move to a lower cost of living area where they can raise a family affordability and design an internal training program to get them up to speed.

Offer things that we care about like free health insurance, “unlimited PTO”, a generous 401K match with immediate vesting, etc.

I personally wouldn’t move to Alabama. But many would.

At 50, I need to work. But I don’t need to chase after FAANG salaries. I optimize for my other priorities. As I said in my previous post, I’m not “disdaining what I can’t have”. I’ve been there done that.

Given that Meta pays so well, why are they so dependent on H1B?

Or google? In 2023 they had a net elimination of 6576 US jobs, but added 5479 H1B.

This isn't a simple market issue, these companies are abusing worker visas to replace Americans from their own companies.

While I'd normally use levels.fyi for more accurate data, since you don't want to rely on that, here's info from glassdoor.

Senior: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/remote-senior-software-en...

> $178K - $262K/yr

Principal: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/remote-principal-software...

> $269K - $415K/yr

> The estimated total pay for a Principal Software Engineer is $329,957 per year in the Remote area, with an average salary of $196,928 per year. These numbers represent the median, which is the midpoint of the ranges from our proprietary Total Pay Estimate model and based on salaries collected from our users. The estimated additional pay is $133,029 per year. Additional pay could include cash bonus, commission, tips, and profit sharing.

Sounds like the right ballpark. If you're in a location that doesn't pay as well, remote can pay much better.

Exactly how many “remote principal software developer” jobs do you think there are available and that’s a self selected sample and even then they for some reason separate “senior software developer”.

Look at salary.com where you can see by cities.

None of the BigTech companies have many remote jobs. Google is even requiring their customer facing professional services department to be in certain cities. That was a bridge too far even for AWS.

Yes, because obviously we as a country should prioritize creepy VR avatars over understanding climate change.

By this reasoning no charities should exist (they pay less than commercial orgs) and even people who are willing to work for less in order to feel good about their contribution should not be allowed to.

It’s a very cynical, even nihilistic view.

> Yes, because obviously we as a country should prioritize creepy VR avatars over understanding climate change.

As a country we have decided to let the market decide what to prioritize. Who are we to judge "creepy VR avatars" are less important if people are willing to fair and square pay for them? If they are creepy, don't pay for them.

> No charities should exist.

No that is not the appropriate conclusion. People are of course free to work for less and balance their circumstances. If they want to volunteer for a charity by choice, more power to them. But no, using taxpayer money to fund "charities" is by-and-large corruption in my book.

> It’s a very cynical, even nihilistic view.

If we are doing labels, yours is a very communistic, statist, view.

P.S. regardless of your PoV, I like that you acknowledge my core point: that the OP is seeking special treatment in the form of cheap labor from the US. You are simply arguing for that special treatment being justified, not denying that's the core demand.

Profit is not and shouldn't be the primary driver for whats useful economic activity. There is a lot of good work to be done that can't or won't be sustained by the market. Basic scientific research for example.

I mean sure you could argue that, as communists and others perhaps do, for instance, but we are chiefly talking about the US, where individual profit is decided, IMHO correctly, as the primary metric. Sure, you may want to choose to minimally do certain things for national security or other legitimate reasons as the people vote for (as I mentioned in three posts above), but that is supposed to be a deliberate choice of the people and their representatives, driven by their desires, not as an automatic subsidy to any pre-established business, in the form of lax immigration policy which can have second-order effects.

Who ends up paying for the decision to pay a meta engineer x, but the climate change engineer x/5?

It’s the engineer who picks the climate change job instead.

Essentially what you’re saying is that due to society not being willing to pay competitively, engineers should take the kick to the nuts and be paid peanuts to make up for societies bad decisions.

Sounds like a pretty stupid decision, frankly.

Sure the engineer ends up losing out. Thankfully, some people put values over personal profit.

It sounds more like someone is taking advantage of people, using nominative idealism to do so.

You are very confused about how the US works. Go find out where the Internet comes from, for example.

Ironic that you use it as an example, since Internet blew up exponentially the moment commercial activity was allowed.

It blew up with commercial activity, but it never would have existed in the first place if it hadn't been created in taxpayer-funded research labs.

[citation needed].

ARPANET was not the only network in existence, even then. Networks existed in various forms. Later, BBSes existed. My guess is sooner or later there would have been something (probably more than one, even) our current internet, but we would never know. Would it look worse or balkanized or proprietary, my guess would be yes, I give you that, but we'll never know that either.

(I originally noted in my topmost post minimal, surgical, involvement is the aspiration, not necessarily zero, but I digress.)

You have a good point. We should fund government positions more so they can pay people better. Then the government orgs would have better talent and produce better output that would benefit everyone, since these are charities.

Someone that wants to do some good in the world can have a bigger and better impact by getting paid much more and donating half the difference to charity.

Working for a company that launches satellites that examine climate change is far less impactful. It's not worth a big pay cut even when you're focusing on altruistic motives.

> Someone that wants to do some good in the world can have a bigger and better impact by getting paid much more and donating half the difference to charity. [Citation needed] Working for a company that launches satellites that examine climate change is far less impactful. [Citation needed] It's not worth a big pay cut even when you're focusing on altruistic motives. [Citation unavailable as its purely subjective]

Working for a company that sometimes makes satellites that make measurements of climate change is so indirect at helping people if at all. Donating to that company (by being paid less) is not a good use of money, in terms of charitable benefit. I don't think any of this is wild enough to need citation in a discussion where the median comment is not expected to have citations.

How many people honestly think it's a good idea to donate to a for-profit company?

> It's not worth a big pay cut even when you're focusing on altruistic motives. [Citation unavailable as its purely subjective]

I'm talking about level of benefit, which is not subjective.

Edit: Also I just reread the original comment and realized the climate change measurement was listed as a negative, so for the two citation neededs I point back at the original post about the company. Donating a single dollar beats a negative.

This is entirely reasonable as marginal analysis but it's not universalizable. Ultimately, somebody has to work for the charities or there wouldn't be anything to donate to.

We're not talking about working for a charity though. Just a rather ordinary company.

For the broader analysis, the people that can easily get huge salaries should prioritize donation, and the people that can't should prioritize actually working at a charity.

IF Meta is the benchmark for “good” pay, then this is nuts.

There are far more people who need code, than just the people at FAANG companies.

Are you saying that these firms are economically uncompetitive, with META, and should shut shop?

>Are you saying that these firms are economically uncompetitive, with META, and should shut shop?

A company with same requirements but not the funding? Absolutely

>There are far more people who need code, than just the people at FAANG companies.

With different requirements you can find way more people.

In that case, there is 100% going to be a move to offshoring.

Ideally, the industry would relocate outside of the US, to a place where they can be competitive.

However, since this defense, they can’t, and will never be competitive.

So defense will languish.

I guess that’s all I have. I can’t see a way out of the situation if we accept your premise.

Defense margins aren’t going to beat social media margins, that too of something like meta.

Requirements are requirements. If you need a hammer, scalpels won’t help.

> Defense margins aren’t going to beat social media margins

Really? It's the first time I am hearing US is procuring defense for cheap!

If there is a margin issue, that's an efficiency problem, i.e. the company is being an idiot or deliberately wasteful/stealing (perhaps due to structural problems like overreliance on cost-plus contracts).

This isnt the first time you are hearing that social media margins are better than defense margins.

That is a misrepresentation of what was said, and an unkindness to the conversation being had.

Tech scales, in a way that manufacturing and physical products dont. I would assume that on HN, this is common knowledge, and that you also are aware of it.

> However, since this defense, they can’t, and will never be competitive.

The US defence budget is ~20x Meta revenues. They can be competitive, but they don't choose to allocate their resources that way.

They seem pretty happy to try to guilt trip people into taking the pay hit ‘for the good of the country’ while someone in the middle pockets the difference though.

I understand your struggle. I have worked with US and non-US orgs that are in similar boat.

In my experience this is often and at least in part a self-inflicted wound. As you describe your side of the business, it should not restricted, but it is. Maybe? Not enough detail to be certain.

What I see time and time again is business not willing to implement proper DLP, labeling and isolation of restricted things. Instead, they just throw everything into a single bucket, because it is quicker, faster, some of the risk and compliance is shifted to third party, and initially cheaper.

In short, a US, UK, Aus company that does government contracts will just force everyone into NOFORN, on-prem requirements (because DFARS, CMMC, CE+, Essential 8, or whatever). It is way quicker to do this for entire company than actually label data, isolate environment and resources, and so on.

I'm a U.S. citizen and I've applied to plenty of these types of jobs. Had an offer at Palantir previously but would not take that now due to ethical concerns.

I'm an older worker in management. Willing to be hands on. Not looking to get paid as much as Meta (I've worked there too) but also don't want something that pays peanuts. Willing to relocate to many places.

Genuinely curious where I can find such jobs.

For clearance specific kinds of jobs, I use

https://www.clearancejobs.com/

It would be good to have a "no military" filter.

Results would probably come out empty anyway.

I think many Aerospace jobs that aren't directly Defense/Military (think SpaceX Falcon 9 flight control development) are also behind clearance. Of course you will indirectly help launch military satellites but I wouldn't call it a military job exactly.

Don’t we first need security clearance before applying to these jobs? Or at the time of joining the company helps us to get clearance?

Some employers will pay the cost to get a security clearance. Others will not. IME, employers will tell you in the job description which kind of employer they are.

"Must have a currently active $TYPE clearance." and "Must be eligible for a $TYPE clearance; position contingent on acquiring a $TYPE clearance." are the sorts of phrases to look for.

Depends on the company. My company prefers you to have one incoming, but since few people do, we sponsor most people.

In my experience roles at companies like this in the southeast US pay around $120k for senior engineers, probably a bit more for management. Not sure if you consider that peanuts, but it’s significantly less than Meta.

The pool of Americans that can qualify for a clearance is very small. You'd be surprised how many people have poor credit, bad debt, foreclosures, foreign connections, drug use and/or arrest history. It's not a fair comparison to the applicant pool available to your typical industry business. When I got my TS out of college, the OPM agent went to my old frat house and interviewed people at random, then went to my girlfriend's sorority house and interviewed random people there. It can be brutal.

past drug use does not preclude a clearance (edited)

It absolutely can. Depends on the drug and when it was last used, if you had any drug-related incidents or court ordered rehabilitation.

That’s going beyond simple use. The two year lookback is real but nobody is going to fail a basic clearance over college pot use.

I didn’t say anything about pot. I said drug. That’s any illicit drug or controlled substance including prescription misuse. The look back for declaration is 7 years, not 2, and generally you are auto denied if use was within the last 12 months, college or not.

>I didn’t say anything about pot. I said drug. That’s any illicit drug or controlled substance including prescription misuse.

Pot is still illegal at the federal level where a clearance would be taking place.

It can, but not necessarily.

If you are a citizen but your spouse is not a US citizen, does that count as an out? I hard a while ago that having a spouse from China could ruin your chances of getting security clearance, but I’m not sure if naturalizing solves that problem or not.

Yes, it will make a huge impact during the investigation and adjudication process. For TS and TS/SCI, even with naturalization the chances for approval will be slim and naturalization likely won't help, especially if they have family in China. For the government, it's all about calculating risk of someones loyalty, character and having things that can be exploited by financial issues (debt is the biggest disqualifier), foreign contacts or family, and anything they'd want to keep secret that could be used for blackmail.

> debt is the biggest disqualifier

If they have a good candidate and the only problem is debt, they should offer to pay it off. They have no qualms printing billions to save some broken banks.

Someone with lots of debt likely has some aspirations of foreign travel to risky locales, regardless of what they say… so it makes sense why that would be a disqualifier.

Why would having a lot of debt make that person have “… some aspirations of foreign travel to risky locales…”?

Plenty of people get into debt just doing normal shit at their homes

High risk behaviors correlate… It’s not a foolproof assumption, but it probably will be true more than half the time.

If we’re going to be that ridiculous about risk management but not other ones that , I at least believe, are in the same tier i.e. alcohol abuse, then we might as well go full bore and have the government pay an extremely generous, generational wealth paying position.

That’s the only way you’re going to get people with self control and willing to live the life of ascetic monks for the duration of time to both learn how to build these systems and then actually build them

Your first paragraph is incoherent… can you try to write out the actual argument legibly?

I think they do try to keep people with substance abuse problems from getting clearance. (Unless they are friends with then President or something like that).

I'm not sure how that's relevant. The goal is to assess the individual's susceptibility to coercion. Maintaining safety from kidnapping while traveling can certainly be a concern when you hold a clearance, but simply taking your family on a vacation overseas is not among the high concerns. If you have bad debt where you are drowning financially, or if you have strong foreign ties or connections, or other behavioral risks, they make you susceptible to coercion. Selling secrets to adversaries to repay loan sharks, being extorted using threats against overseas family members, getting drunk or high and divulging secrets, secrets in exchange for drugs, etc.

None of those disqualify you, necessarily. They are first and foremost concerned about 2 things: can you be honest with them, and can you keep secrets.

Even if both of those were false in the past, you could still pass.

Look, by "won't reteach" you give it away. Those who are not rusty in linear algebra will tend to be recent grads, younger people who are probably not looking for a boring defense job with no remote somewhere in Alabama. Those jobs appeal to people who may have had enough time to forget how to implement a SVD without googling.

Alternatively the developers who do remember and use linear algebra many years into their career or even more advanced math/numerical methods and are also interested in using it are in higher demand than ever before due to the explosion of ML/AI, and thus can command a much higher salary.

The simple answer is always they simply don't pay enough to attract the people with this skillset. If they paid as much as Meta (who they used as an example) they would certainly have way less issues with hiring.

On the latter point I agree completely, on the former--demand for mid-late career quant types, I want to agree but also think we'll need to wait and see because current AI will lower a lot of bars, and as you acknowledge it's all about money ultimately.

We cannot find qualified applicants. ... [a bunch of requirements] ... No, we don't pay as much as Meta. ... [some more requirements]

The shortage on $5000 ferarris continues as well.

I work in the space. You are massively understating the difficulty of finding candidates willing to get a security clearance, and the cost to the company of sponsoring those clearances. It's not as simple as the compensation number alone.

Yeah, no surprise. Getting a clearance sucks.

It takes forever and you're subjected to very intrusive scrutiny as well as potentially psychological tomfoolery like polygraphs.

Why would a qualified individual subject themselves to that unless they have no other option.

There's a reason clearance jobs have a reputation as make-work for ex service members.

>You are massively understating the difficulty of finding candidates willing to get a security clearance, and the cost to the company of sponsoring those clearances.

I find this hard to believe. I'd totally get a security clearance, but no company seemingly offers it, they only want people who have a pre-existing clearance.

Well that’s the second half of the issue with clearances, they cost the company a fortune to sponsor.

sounds like you have a requirement that filters out a lot of people. typically when things get rarer they get more expensive.

> I work in the space. You are massively understating the difficulty of finding candidates willing to get a security clearance, and the cost to the company of sponsoring those clearances. It's not as simple as the compensation number alone.

I don't understand what point you're trying to make. You're saying that a security clearance is a big problem or inconvenience that makes hiring more difficult so salary alone is not comparable... right, but the organization with that big problem is paying less. That's the problem.

Yes, we pay well. No, we don't pay as much as Meta.

How well do you pay? If I were at Meta, my total comp would be 500-600k. I make half that at a small startup. Can you afford me?

No they cannot, unless maybe you have advanced degrees and a couple decades experience.

Yeah but then you're too old. Need to be in your 20s with a couple decades of experience.

Calling it now - a leetcode-based kindergarten programme is the next big a16z investment.

"Hit the ground running."

You say this ironically, but someone who’s been working hard 15 hours 7 days a week in a niche, 50 weeks a year, from age 15 to age 29 has clearly a much higher potential than a 45 year old following the normal path in life.

And almost certainly a higher employable value too unless they have catastrophically bad social skills…

Did they develop those social skills during the free time they had?

Why does this matter?

They can develop it while lying in bed and daydreaming for all the difference it makes.

The implication was that someone who dedicated all of their time as physically possible to working and studying, would not have had time to develop social skills

Talented people can improve in multiple directions at the same time… unless you don’t believe this?

Plus any 29 year old who can actually land a genuine 500k-600k USD compensation job at a big company is a literal genius, at the very least.

Do you honestly believe that an individual who

>… been working hard 15 hours 7 days a week in a niche, 50 weeks a year, from age 15 to age 29…

Developed the same level of social skills as the average individual who lived a more normal schedule?

I have to ask before you even answer that. Do you believe that social skills are something to be practiced and built upon, are they some waste of time they only hormones bother with, or some other option I haven’t considered?

They can develop, in many aspects, far superior to an average individual given the same amount of time.

And develop to a comparable level given a much shorter period of time.

That’s pretty much by definition for literal geniuses.

I think you might be delusional if you think that the people who can do all of this at the same time and don’t come out maladjusted to society is anything beyond a fraction of a fraction of a percent of outliers

Are you confused about what geniuses are? Or did you not finish reading the comment?

Because this reply doesn’t make sense in relation to the previous comment.

They are very much outliers, so they are by definition a very small fraction of society.

This is just magical thinking on your end. I’ve met some of these “literal geniuses” making 500k at faangs and most of them are completely socially maladapted once you’ve taken them out of the pipeline they’ve lived in since high school to getting their first job mid or late 20s after their masters or PhD.

Secondly you started off this chain with talking about how someone working hard for 15 hours a day for decades is going to be more valuable and they’ll just be able to pick up every skill a human could have or need because they’re “geniuses”.

If they’re really geniuses why do they need to grind?

If you’re implying that they are only part of the set of geniuses that grind that long and there is another set of geniuses that didn’t, then how does that track with geniuses being a very small fraction of society?

I never said they are guaranteed to be this or that?

Clearly some fraction do have critically bad social skills which do materially affect their prospects to a significant degree.

But the majority of them do exceed that very low bar, so it’s simply not that critical of a hinderance most of the time.

You appear to be reading absolute implications into my comments, and/or inserting your own conjectures which aren’t there on a plain reading.

> But the majority of them do exceed that very low bar, so it’s simply not that critical of a hinderance most of the time.

Describing not having catastrophically bad social skills as a “very low” bar is not a valid take when it comes to the world of computer science. I remember when visiting Carnegie Mellon as a senior in high school and evaluating their comp sci program, how the guides suddenly got very serious when they informed our parents(not the prospective students) that a course on hygiene was required freshman year and could not be waived. I’ve also worked with near limitless number of engineers who think they have the social skills down and then don’t understand why no one wants to work with them when they will do shit like call someone else’s project they’ve worked on for months pointless or useless in a group setting without even trying to approach said coworker with even a modicum of social awareness.

Those kinds of behaviors don’t show up in a population where having non catastrophically bad social skills is a “very low bar”

> You appear to be reading absolute implications into my comments, and/or inserting your own conjectures which aren’t there on a plain reading.

I think we’re coming at this with different axioms. You seem to believe that social skills are trivial and don’t matter next to the hard sciences that people grind away on. I am coming from one where I have to constantly make excuses or apologies for various people in software engineering or comp sci because they appear to be literally incapable of empathy or understanding that other people might have a different viewpoint than theirs.

Given my axiom I think your are handwaving away a lot, and that’s where you see my statements as inserted conjectures.

Let's say they sleep 6 hours a day, every day.

Someone who works for 15 out of 18 of their waking hours, leaving 3 hours to eat, exercise, and have any semblance of social interactions or secondary interests, for FOURTEEN YEARS is not a genius. They are actually an idiot, wasting their life.

How many years of experience?

I fall almost exactly on the low end of this range: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/senior-aerospace-engineer...

With 15 years of experience.

I'm at the low end of my peers.

Like I said, auctioning off access to your users to advertisers pays better than the European space agency.

Wait the low range of that link is £45k but you say work study placement people get $75k a year?

There might be some regionality built in; viewed from the US the range is $265K - $463K/yr.

That is outrageous that two seemingly developed countries could have such a huge compensation gap. A senior aerospace engineer in the UK can make as little as 45k GBP, or 56k USD? One fifth as much as the lowest-paid American??

The take-home on that is £35k. The median rent in London is £26k. I suppose the person making £45k doesn't likely live in London, but still pretty grim.

https://www.economist.com/special-report/2024/10/14/the-amer...

You guys get the NHS though.

Yes but those numbers are pre-tax income.

I don’t know if you’re making a joke or not, but getting NHS isn’t worth $200,000 USD per year.

Most Americans get employer-provided health insurance, which costs money (the amount specified in the DD section of the W2), and its often in the $1500/month range. That DD amount isn’t part of your income or the salary Glassdoor mentions. It’s an added benefit of top of that.

In the UK and elsewhere, around $500/month/person in taxes pays for your healthcare. That’s essentially subtracted from your income. So the uk income is even lower when you subtract the taxes the NHS costs.

> I don’t know if you’re making a joke or not, but getting NHS isn’t worth $200,000 USD per year.

Nope, but NHS + no/less student loans + no car dependency + cheaper childcare + time off + a ton of other things shave quite a bit off that $200k. Not equal, and not in every personal case, but a lot.

Isn’t housing extremely unaffordable in the UK though? That erases a lot of these benefits, doesn’t it? (I’m aware this is true of a lot of HCOL areas in the U.S. as well.)

Canadian and not UKian, but our public healthcare is definitely not worth 50% of my take home cash, I get much better access to care in the US right now. it still says Canada on my passport so I can get healthcare if I get fired or chronically ill

> One fifth as much as the lowest-paid American??

Americans are often blown away and kind of ignorant of how, relative to the rest of the world, they are really wealthy and well paid. Like, people have way less disposable incomes in other parts of the world, even developed countries. The purchase power of the USD and the power of the US economy is absolutely insane.

The UK is really, really poor compared to the US.

The UK is poor because they decided to financialize the economy in the 90s and stop making things. It's like canada where the GDP per capita goes down every year. I'm amazed there hasn't been a revolution.

> canada where the GDP per capita goes down every year

Couldn't this largely be explained by their importing huge amounts of low-income people?

Of course. Canadians are still getting poorer every year and that's the salient point.

Sure, but expanding the definition of “Canadian” to include people who were already poor is a bit different from people who were already Canadian becoming poorer.

I don't think the average migrant salary is much different from the average UK citizen salary. Then again, I also don't find the "financialisation" argument very compelling. Plus, the GDP per capita visibly does not go down every year.

> GDP per capita does not go down

It does in Canada, I think that’s what he meant

It doesn't go down every year in Canada either.

GDP per capita has not gone down every year in Canada or in the UK:

https://tradingeconomics.com/canada/gdp-per-capita#:~:text=T...

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/gdp-per-capita

(Click the button to check the 25 year view.)

According to Stats Canada, “Real GDP per capita has now declined in five of the past six quarters”, so fair to say it’s currently declining. This was news to me.

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/36-28-0001/2024004/artic...

OP’s post clearly suggested a long term trend of declining GDP per capita (“every year”), which is not the case.

The UK is poorer than the US, but US software engineering salaries are an outlier. The difference is not as big as that comparison would suggest.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/03/britai...

"another respected data journalist, John Burn-Murdoch, calculated that without London, the UK would be poorer, in terms of GDP per capita, than even the poorest US state, Mississippi."

Yes, it's true that the UK economy is very London-centric, but the original poster was talking about the UK as a whole vs the US as a whole. (The flip side of this is that the figures would look better if you compared London to a major US city.)

None of this changes the fact that US software engineering salaries are a poor comparison to use to illustrate wealth disparities between the US and other countries, as they are an outlier.

The above comparison was actually aerospace engineering, not software.

Regardless, Americans are not five times richer than Brits by any reasonable measure. The salaries in the comparison upthread are outliers. The exact figure obviously depends on which stat you look at, but Americans are around 50% richer by most measures.

>One fifth as much as the lowest-paid American??

Quite! A top 10% earner in Finland, a supposedly very developed country, by saving all of their net-income spending zero on food and letting their SO pay the bills, could in 2-3 years afford a new Skoda.

Ah I think I see where the confusion lies.

The US is not a developed country, rather it is a particularly rich third world country.

They don’t call them europoors for nothing

Yes, Aerospace Engineers don't live in London because there are very little (if any) aerospace jobs in London. Biggest aerospace employers in the UK are BAE Systems and Airbus, and both have factories in much cheaper locations (Wales, Northwest of England).

You're basically comparing "super specialised job in the middle of nowhere with very low cost of living" vs a "super specialised but much more needed job in multiple high cost of living locations" (Seattle metro area, LA metro area to name a few).

Wichita Kansas is home to about 20% of aircraft-manufacturing workers in the United States. Not exactly known for HCOL.

The U.S. engineer can be fired on a whim immediately and lose their health care (COBRA) and the company that fires them can even contest their unemployment benefits (that the employee paid into) if they feel motivated enough. That's one of the reasons they get paid much more.

I’ve been fired before by a major American tech company. I was underperforming, unmotivated, and depressed about it. They gave me a substantial severance payment in exchange for quitting voluntarily, and for signing an agreement that basically said I wouldn’t sue them. They let me pick my last date, they paid my health insurance through the next three months, and my manager told me I could use my last month of employment to find a new job. I was quickly hired into a better-paid position at another company, with a better manager, and I did well there.

I realize this story sounds absurd to anyone who hasn’t experienced it, but my understanding is that this form of firing (“managing out”) is basically the norm for low performers at top-tier tech companies.

To get actually fired, you usually have to fuck up big time, like sexually harassing a coworker, stealing trade secrets, or trying to start a union. (That last one is a joke, sort of)

lol, it's not specific to aerospace it's all software. Only the US overpays us

I feel like that range is a on the high side, at least for jobs outside the Bay Area. Unless aerospace pays a lot better than software jobs at government contractors. When I was laid off less than 2 years ago and applying to a wide variety of places, the gov contractors were only offering in the $120-$140 ballpark for senior sw engineering positions. They tended to play up gold plated benefits, high 401k match, etc as well but there’s no way that would get it up to $263k.

Holy shit, that auto-redirects to the salary range in Canada for me (66K-95K CAD)

Tried again with a U.S. VPN and I'm gob-smacked by how different that range is.

Yup, I’m in Canada as well, and I was quite a bit thrown off by the redirected Canadian pay range.

For anyone curious, the Canadian pay range is:

Base pay $66K - $95K/yr

$79K/yr Average base pay

The low end of that base pay ($66k CAD) converts to $45k USD.

While the U.S. pay range is:

Total pay range: $266K - $463K/yr

$346K/yr Median total pay

Pay breakdown $137K - $223K/yr Base pay $129K - $240K/yr Additional pay

Realistically, there are plenty of competent people they could hire for any low six figures amount (unless they are directly in the DC area, in which case add 20-30k for cost of living). 500-600k or half of that is a unicorn salary that doesn't apply to those industries or areas and is irrelevant to the discussion. Even if they offered you that salary you wouldn't take it because the work environment would be radically different from working at a bloated web tech firm, or working at a silicon valley startup.

Totally different markets. You wouldn't be interested in that job, and they wouldn't want to hire you even if you were interested. Even the tone of your post makes that obvious.

We should be discussing early to mid career folks from somewhere other than silicon valley startup or big web tech land. Aka "meat and potatoes" tech jobs. That is what's being discussed.

I don't know what their problem is with hiring either and I agree with you that it could be partially compensation related. But not being able to compete with Silicon Valley on compensation is not where I would be going with that argument....I think it's more likely to be related to environment and interview style and notions of what "experience" means. In other words...bad hiring practices...not necessarily raw compensation issues. The compensation for non "big tech" firms can sometimes be quite good in comparison to other career paths especially when located outside of the valley, so being unable to hire talent makes me suspicious of hiring practices more than compensation (assuming they are reasonably large and hit market rate for the area and are in a reasonably large metro).

Just my two cents.

> You have to be eligible for a Secret security clearance. You don't have to get one if you don't want to as there is usually plenty of uncleared work to go around, but you have to be eligible in case that goes away and we need to put you in for a clearance.

Y'all should probably make that clear. Usually, the moment I see something like that as a job requirement, I move on. Not because I may or may not qualify, but because I honestly don't remember a lot of the information required and because it's not clear that I can work in a non-weapon-building role. Probably should offer refresher courses in linear algebra - I've been a developer for 25+ years and have never knowingly used it.

> You must be a US citizen to work for my company. No "US Persons" (visa holders) or foreigners allowed.

This is illegal under IRCA unless another law or government contract mandates it. [1] If every single role at your company requires a Secret clearance, then I question how separate “your part of the company” really is from the part that makes weapons.

[1] https://www.eeoc.gov/national-origin-discrimination

Obviously this company is a government contractor.

Not all government contracts require all employees working on the contract to have clearances or be US citizens.

I remember visiting a family member’s work (similar industry) and the front office did a screening of me as a visitor to make sure I met those same requirements before I could enter.

I’m guessing the contracts that make paper clips don’t need those stringent requirements, but the ones that make sensitive comms equipment do.

Large companies (think FAANG) can and do have non cleared, non citizen, non us persons (permanent residents, refugees and asylees) working on such projects with the proper separation of scopes, data access restrictions and so on.

One of my old managers has a story about how he was tasked with documenting an unspecified something for the US government. Because he was not a US citizen (though he was a citizen of a very close US ally), he was then no longer permitted to read the document that he wrote.

Probably just lawyers being lawyers, but still pretty funny.

But some do! And sounds like this is one of them.

Companies can chose to not sponsor visas. That’s not illegal.

True, but they aren’t allowing recently admitted permanent residents, asylees, and refugees, all of whom have federal protections against immigration status discrimination in employment.

Some places like NYC offer legal protections in this area to all categories of immigration status, of course within what applicable federal and state law requires and allows. Federal law allows preferring citizens over equally equalities noncitizens, requiring employment authorization to already exist, and complying with any specific legal requirements for restricting certain jobs to citizens. NYC law respects all of this. But overall NYC is totally allowed to, and does, add protections beyond federal law.

Late typo correction well beyond the edit window: “equally equalities” should have read “equally qualified”.

That just means that if you’re going to hire someone on a VISA you can’t discriminate which country they’re from.

I believe there is some protection against discriminating against greencards, but not visas

Recent green card holders, asylees, and refugees get federal protection, except when a law requires or permits otherwise. The other commenter’s company has a blanket rule of allowing none of these categories. Approximately this got SpaceX into trouble with the DOJ recently.

Some state or local laws offer additional protections beyond federal law, including NYC for all immigration statuses, except as required or allowed by other applicable laws. (So, for example, NYC doesn’t pretend that companies have to hire people who don’t already have employment authorization.)

It is required by law. Most likely through prohibitions for "exporting" defense technology, which can be very broad. "Exporting" can consist of having a casual conversation with a non-"US Person" or having a document visible on your desk.

"Secret" classification is really mild, about 5 million people have one.

>The law prohibits employers from hiring only U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents unless required to do so by law, regulation or government contract.

At these workplaces it will be a combination of all 3 of law, regulation, and government contract.

You are referring to ITAR. Under ITAR, permanent residents are considered US Persons and not subject to export controls. Clearance is a totally different thing that people often confuse with ITAR, which is only granted to US citizens, and though it is possible to grant something somewhat like clearance to non us citizens, it is almost never done.

Edit: Ah I see you are not disagreeing with what I said at all. Apologies, I cannot count the number of times I have seen in reddit and here, where people confuse ITAR with clearance.

To be fair, he never said "every single role at your company requires a secret clearance." He has specifically mentioned that you can get by even without them. You have misquoted.

I think it probably is illegal as well. My company had to settle a lawsuit with the DOJ recently for this reason.

Presumably government contract does mandate in this case.

Do you offer to sponsor people to get their security clearance? many jobs I see in the sysadmin space want someone who already has clearance, and are not willing to do the process of getting someone their clearance.

Came here to say this. I have a friend who is a manager for a defense contractor. He says that competition is fierce for people that already have clearance and they can't really hire someone to sponsor them because of how long it takes. There is a 2-3 year wait for obtaining security clearance because of a backlog caused by COVID.

The people that have it can write their own ticket and do very little work apparently.

> No, you can't work remotely. You (even programmers!) have to touch the things we build in order to build them and nobody has an ISO certified clean room in their house.

What part of the country are you in?

This. If you're not in or near a major urban center you're going to have to really be attractive to pull people in to work there.

And if you are near a major urban center pay needs to reflect the HCOL environment or the unpaid commute time.

a lot of these fed or sec clearance type jobs in VA/Maryland area.

They talked about manufacturing satellites, some of this aerospace stuff is in Alabama because a senator back in the 60s got some space contracts for the Huntsville area - good luck finding people who want to move to AL. Not saying that the poster is necessarily in AL, but if they are then that could be a reason they're not finding people.

Some people say that when you leave Huntsville you enter Alabama.

Granted, it is still a red state.

If someone is a software developer who has done non-trivial things and linear algebra but not recently and needs to be refreshed, do you provide time/training to refresh on the math skills?

I’d imagine that the rusty candidate could refresh themself on linear algebra in what, two three-hour evenings before the interview.

Who’s putting in the work to study for a niche skill set for a place that will pay you less than the market?

Normally that kind of requirement leads to _higher_ compensation

If you think of it from a return on investment/expected value point of view, why would you ever take time out of your day to refresh yourself on linear algebra and other numerical methods assuming its not out of personal interest just to apply somewhere that already has so many barriers to entry that don't exist elsewhere, on top of admitting it will not pay as much as other positions that would require these skills.

I'd rather spend my time focusing on applying at other positions that will pay just as much if not more without being required to spend nights and weekends relearning a skill that is just not used very much elsewhere and not requiring security clearances, and why would I waste my time applying there when other jobs that do require these skills compensate more for the effort.

On the other hand if this company did pay closer to Meta salaries (the comparison they used) then it gives all candidates, including US citizens who fit more of their eligibility criteria, that much more incentive to actually relearn these skills and makes the expected return on investment potentially worth it.

I agree with you on the overall reasoning, but I conclude that "this job is not worth applying to even if it took 6 seconds of preparation" rather than "this job is not worth applying to because it would take 6 hours of preparation".

Defense contractors have loads of entry level jobs, but most require you already have a clearance (e.g. wanting US Army 17c or IC vets) or certifications which cost $500+ plus. Many don't sponsor a clearance, because it takes a long time, high chance of the application not passing and because they may just use you to get a clearance and job hop to a higher paying job.

Defense contractor jobs are the only ones I've seen that haven't been outsourced overseas yet, but good luck getting a CJO for one that will sponsor a clearance and actually getting cleared.

A top tier three letter agency sponsored me for TS SCI FSP and it took 9 months after the conditional job offer (CJO) after 10+ offers of personal interviews with me not counting my old jobs, college and friends/acquaintances just for them to cancel my app for "other traits, conduct or behaviour" and to reapply after a year.

I heard other applicants on the free bus ride that it was their 3rd or 4th try at the polygraph or that the agency forgot about them so they had to a Congressional inquiry after 2 attempts prior etc.

It's a lot of BS and I've tried for a few years now to work for the federal government and military, but they just don't want me. I've given way more effort than normal folks, so honestly screw them.

Amen, good to see it wasnt just me. My last job search was this summer and I hit this all over.

I'm fine with working for a defense contractor or the feds. I'm fine with taking a pay haircut relative to FAANG to do something meaningful. I'm even fine with commuting, and the agencies poking into my life to assess a clearance. But I need to move from one job to another without a gap.

Private sector employers won't touch me without a clearance, and in my part of the world there are lots of people who already have one, so I'm not worth their time.

The US government would put me through a clearance, but their hiring practices are so slow and arcane that they're just not viable for someone who needs to find a job starting say in the next 30 days.

I wish it wasn't that way, but it is. So, I stay in the uncleared commercial sector.

I once worked in defense as well and it could be that the pay is insultingly low with immense hassle and responsibility (do this thing wrong and you goto jail). I'll only consider going back if a new major conflict starts.

I've looked at jobs at places like this (some requiring quite high clearance) and the pay is hilariously bad, and I don't make anywhere near peak FAANG rates (or work in FAANG)

50% pay cut for a DevOps/SRE role requiring a Q clearance (DoE version of Top Secret I think)

You can't find employees because the job isn't exciting (you're probably not NASA) and the pay is bad. Maybe your recruiters are bad too.

They're probably located way out in the sticks too. Who wants to pack up all their stuff and sell their house and move to the rural deep South for a job that may or may not work out long-term? And if it doesn't work out, they now have to sell the house they bought there (because there's nothing decent in that area on the rental market) and move cross-country yet again?

What’s your company? What exactly do you pay? I haven’t done linear algebra in a while but certainly remember enough from graphics programming (and of course physics and linear algebra proper) in undergrad. Feel free to check out and contact me via any of the routes available on my GitHub: https://github.com/JonLatane

You might believe that you don't make weapons, but nobody else does.

You're building satellite components, which I'm quite certain are dual use.

The linux kernel is dual-use.

This is why you can't hire anybody competent.

Maybe try admitting what you're building and justify it as necessary instead.

Insulting people's ability to reason is a certain way to repel anybody with a brain.

I used to build fantastic little things the likes of which no human being had ever seen before that have killed many, many, people including (if reports from that side of the company are right, and they are) thousands and thousands of Russians and their tanks.

Now I design radar panel assemblies for weather satellites.

They're both a good living.

> They're both a good living.

Only someone who has never seen war first-hand can make a statement like that. You've never been in the kill zone.

I was an infantryman in the US Army from 1998-2008.

I used the GI Bill and Army College Fund to pay for my bachelors.

I deployed to "tHe KiLl ZoNe" twice with C Co 1/503rd infantry and A Co 1/23rd infantry.

I guess even if he knew he was making weapons, he wouldn't be able to say it... And that's another reason why these companies cannot find workers.

Security clearances are a giant hassle. Why go through all that for less than FAANG pay?

[flagged]

sorry, what's GP here?

Grandparent comment.

What you’re saying just doesn’t jive with the experience devs have when applying for jobs. You hear horror stories about juniors applying for hundreds of jobs. They are absolutely qualified for entry level work - they have CS degrees.

I have experienced applying for dozens, including those posted to HN: most won’t respond at all. Maybe months later you’ll get an auto-reject message. Or you’ll go through several interviews not to be selected, even while passing technical assessments. My colleagues and friends have similar experiences.

> We won't re-teach linear algebra to a developer applicant

Why not? Isn’t this just part of your ramp-up if it’s a niche qualification? We re-teach networking to developers who probably forgot it—that’s a semester course, easily. If you’re not willing to invest in candidates that are 90% of the way there, then you’re perpetually going to have difficulty hiring.

> We won't re-teach linear algebra to a developer applicant but we will pay a tech writer to go to school nights/weekends to get a degree in engineering (me, I did that).

Why? Linear Algebra is certainly something that can be learned faster than a degree in engineering. I expect the average software developer (someone that can understand algorithms) can achieve competency in less than a semester's worth of time. If someone is a good developer, learning specific skills sets for the domain is pretty normal.

I’ve applied to a variety of your positions each cycle for the past 3 years. New grad, clearance-eligible US citizen from a mid-range state school with a historically strong defense/gov. connection. I have multiple internships, a math minor, and my standout project is a rendering engine with a physics/collision system. I’ve never had or expected a remote option, and 70k (outside of the extreme-COL areas) sounds fantastic.

Your company has never offered me a phone screening. Seeing claims that Northrop is in sort of qualified candidate crisis when myself and many applicants I know of similar profiles are lucky to get so much as a rejection email is borderline infuriating.

What’s your companies general location? Do you have an office where tech talent wants to work? Location is an important part of a competitive employment offer.

And I highly doubt linear algebra is a day to day requirement for a typical worker. Sounds like a case of expecting chauffeurs to know how to build a drive train from scratch.

In other words you are looking for people who are willing to get paid less what they are worth

If you doubled the pay you’d probably have more applicants than you could ever hope for. And why don’t you pay as much as Meta? The defense industrial complex can pay retired generals massive salaries to sit on boards, they can hire the most expensive lobbyists on the Hill. The defense department specifically can’t even pass an audit. They have so much money going out that they can’t even count it. And let’s take Raytheon for example, have you seen the operating margins? They’re huge. So even with these “critical shortages,” somehow they are immensely profitable. If shortages are affecting those margins, then there should be plenty of money to pay “critical” people more. Revenue per employee at Raytheon for example is almost $420,000. For typical manufacturing companies, a “good” number is $300,000. So a “critical” employee is worth a lot more than they’re being paid and there are probably a lot of employees that are dead weight and keeping them around means less money to pay the shortage areas.

I once applied to work a government project for a subcontractor and they were adding “headcount” simply because the terms of the subcontract required a specific number of people regardless of the amount of work required. They were essentially hiring people to do almost nothing. I spent over 3 months waiting for a response. Apparently their critical shortage wasn’t that critical because the hiring process was so long and convoluted and subject to “contract renewals,” that I simply gave up and went to work for someone else.

I could go on for days about the extreme waste and oftentimes outright fraud that happens in government contracting, subcontracting, and sub-sub contracting. And despite formerly having a TS/SCI clearance, any job in the “McLean Area,” pays less than most startups. And jobs in places like Huntsville pay even less. Even overseas work in “austere” environments pays less than a junior developer at Stripe. And you don’t get potentially shot at at Stripe — And I don’t have to work 100 levels deep for contractors or contractors of contractors on site using often circa 1996 development practices and lowest-bidder equipment managed by IT departments that seem to be led by dinosaurs and it can take weeks or months to simply requisition a dev server even within an unclassified cloud environment.

Why to do that for salaries/benefits that are lower than I could get as a janitor at Netflix?

Make the workplace/work environment and benefits compelling and you’ll get more applicants. Small startups literally have better benefits. You also don’t have to endure a Tier 5 investigation — the outcome of which entitles you to a job that pays so little comparatively.

A lot of people don't want to have to get a security clearance for a mediocre pay job.

I'm a programmer, I know linear algebra (I actually have a master's degree in maths). I grew up in Houston, lived there from 1998 to 2010, but never got a citizenship owing to some of my father's medical issues disqualifying us from a green card.

If you're willing to sponsor me for a green card and wait five years, and you're located in a city I'd actually like to live, I might come work for you :)

similarly i am in this ridiculous position. I am a security engineer, wanting to work in vulnerability research. Got an EB2-NIW green card due to my skills being valuable for the national interest. Can't even get an interview because all vulnerability researcher positions require TS clearance... I guess i will just have to wait 4 more years for the citizenship, but it's a pity.

> Yes, we pay well.

Not enough, apparently.

> No, you can't work remotely.

You'll have to pay even more for this.

> No, we don't pay as much as Meta.

So again, not enough.

> Yes, we pay well.

> No, we don't pay as much as Meta.

Are you saying you pay well as comparing to the local McDonalds? That being said, my guess you can't find "qualified applicants" is because you are putting too many restrictions and paying too little. So you end up with students who will take anything and then you come here to complain about the lack of talent.

> No, we don't pay as much as Meta.

>> Are you saying you pay well as comparing to the local McDonalds?

That's just disgusting.

> Yes, we pay well.

Let's hear some numbers for junior, mid and senior. I bet they are not great.

> No, you can't work remotely. You (even programmers!) have to touch the things we build in order to build them and nobody has an ISO certified clean room in their house.

I get that this is a legitimate requirement here, but in many companies it just isn't. And this is a huge limiting factor. The way housing is nowdays, no way I'm moving for a job without a relo package.

This isn't necessarily "we can't find qualified applicants", but rather "...that we will pay enough to make this switch"

Do you drug test? Sounds like a place that might. A fairly significant proportion (though definitely not all) of the best developers I've ever worked with would simply pass over places that seem like they would.

You aren't getting a clearance if you can't pass a drug test.

Having eligibility is not the same as passing unannounced random drug tests.

Plenty of people can pass a drug test. That's not the issue I guarantee it. It might slightly help their hiring but it's not the root cause of difficulties, and I seriously doubt compensation is a root cause either.

I don't do drugs; I barely even drink alcohol. But, I think drug testing is a violation of privacy and none of a company's business. This isn't 1950, nobody cares if you're doing drugs on your personal time as long as you're sober for work.

Yes, you need to drug test for clearance. But I'm saying that's a job I'm not applying to unless I have no other choice. It goes straight to the bottom of the pile for me.

My understand is that it comes down how likely it is that the employee could be bought/blackmailed/corrupted. A person with a drug (or gambling) habit could be blackmailed or might need more money to fuel their addiction, making them susceptible to a foreign power buying their support.

Same reason for homosexuality in the past when it was illegal/scandalous.

The blackmail thing always seemed a bit circular to me.

"We'll fire you if you smoke pot"

"But why?"

"Someone might blackmail you, by threatening to reveal that you smoke pot"

"How is that a threat?"

"Because we'll fire you if you smoke pot."

> might need more money to fuel their addiction

This makes a lot more sense to me than blackmail.

I'd quibble though that this overlooks that quite a lot (possibly even most) drug users are able to lead productive lives without having to resort to illegal activity to fund their drug use.

The other thing this doesn't cover is that there are many alcoholics that fall into the same trap. Though there again, most alcoholics are able to lead productive lives despite their addiction.

And through personal experience, I unfortunately know quite a few alcoholics that work in defense with various levels of clearance.

A drug test is not a requirement for a security clearance.

Have you tried recruiting people in school in mathematics programs?

You’ve repeatedly mentioned being unwilling to train linear algebra skills, but will train other things, so go recruit math nerds.

> programmers to remember linear algebra

Programmers who know linear algebra probably also know basic calculus & stats, so now you’re competing with companies hiring ML engineers.

This is a flaw in the system. Candidates from 5-eyes partners should be able to get any clearance necessary. I know from experience that Lockheed has a lot of non US nationals working on secret projects which require clearance. During the F-35 program a ton of Brits were involved, both for the avionics components made in the UK, and as test pilots for VTOl (where Brits were preferred given Harrier experience and their acknowledged skill as the best pilots of that type).

I don’t know why Brits, Canadians, kiwis and Aussies can’t get cleared for you guys. They are getting cleared at every level all the time. NSA, CIA, etc.

Sounds like we work in similar worlds. I completely agree with your experience. I think its a balanced mixture of compensation and qualified applicants.

I passed on a bunch of jobs that required clearance, because getting it sounded like a nightmare.

Your paragraph at the end sounds like maybe your company culture is also a problem.

> No "US Persons" (visa holders) or foreigners allowed.

FYI, a "US person" means a US citizen or a Permanent Resident.

> ISO certified clean room in their house

Well it's not ISO certified, and its more of a box than a room. But yes I do actually have access to a sterile (not sanitised) environment at home.

I can't work for you on account of my SA citizenship though. It looks like my only option to get that kind of clearance is to start my own company.

Wow, I was all ready to look you up in your profile ... until I read all of the follow-up responses.

I knew it was too good to be true.

Define competence. What fraction of graduates in EE and CS from top 50 schools would you regard as competent?

> You must be a US citizen to work for my company. No "US Persons" (visa holders) or foreigners allowed.

Just to clarify, being a dual U.S. citizen (e.g., U.S.-Canadian, U.S.-Irish) doesn't necessarily prevent a person from obtaining a U.S. "SECRET" security clearance.

What is your definition of qualified.

By definition a US Person would not have a visa, since that qualifier only applies to US nationals, permanent residents (which do not need nor have a visa, permanent residents do not apply for admission after status is granted), refugees or asylees.

> No, you can't work remotely. You (even programmers!) have to touch the things we build in order to build them and nobody has an ISO certified clean room in their house.

This is just plain wrong. I'm wrapping up on a project where I wrote significant chunks of the flight software for a moon rover while being 99% remote. If you're requiring software engineers to be onsite regularly for non-cleared work, your process sucks, no exceptions.

ETA: By the way, I personally only went fully remote due to covid (although I moved away from the office and have no plans to return), but some of my coworkers have been remote for well over a decade, and this is a government agency. I've seen way better setups in private industry.

> We cannot find qualified applicants.

It's not just that you're restricted to US Citizens.

You point out all the issues in your post:

> You have to be eligible for a Secret security clearance

So, even though I'm adult and it's legal in my state, I can't smoke weed now and then? Oh and depending on the project may be subject to a polygraph... sounds fun!

> No, we don't make weapons for the military.

Every.. government... defense... contractor has this speech. Why even pretend that you're not in the war business, which ultimately means killing people? Honestly I would be more comfortable working for an org that wasn't afraid to admit what they do. Making moral compromises is not uncommon in tech, and I don't judge people that choose to do so, but I do judge those that pretend that they're not.

> No, you can't work remotely.

I've worked remotely virtually my entire career, including for the Federal government. You may have a good reason for this requirement, but it absolutely shrinks your pool. You don't even mention location, but I'm guessing it's not in a top city like NYC or SF.

> Yes, we pay well.

And yet you never give a range. Last time I worked for a DARPA contractor, Google (this was the earlier days) basically hired every elite member of the R&D team in a weekend (exaggerating here, but not much) since both the pay and work was drastically better.

> One issue is that we expect programmers to remember linear algebra

Ah great, unjustified ego to boot! I'm sold!

I'm a US Citizen, work in a remote small company doing opensource work largely for the good of the world, likely paid roughly the same, it's nobody's business if I want to smoke weed, and most of the team has a quantitative PhDs (but would blush to mention it) and those that don't could easily teach a course on linear algebra.

I'm just one engineer, but I can't imagine applying at company like you describe. You might have better success hiring qualified applicants if you at least admitted how unattractive such a place is to the many engineers I've work ed with who use linear algebra everyday and tried to find some compromise.

As a counterpoint I've been involved with several companies in recent years that did not have a particularly difficult time hiring similar candidates. The only clear difference was that these jobs were remote friendly.

It's impossible to say for sure from the outside but a few factors that might be making it difficult for you to hire:

- A lot of tech workers value remote work these days.

- You aren't based in a location with a large enough talent pool for the work you do.

- Your company doesn't pay as well as you think, or has other details that turn off some potential applicants.

- It could be variance. There's a lot of randomness in the job market.

Why linear algebra? Honest question, i have not seen this as a specific requirement before.

It can be inferred that they’re making satellites, or at least satellite components. It’s pretty likely that vector math will be involved in some of the software being written in that context. In particular, if anything they write involves navigation (which is a lot of things when it comes to satellites, from actually maneuvering to observation correction) you need to have a pretty good understanding of linear algebra to write good software. And aerospace isn’t an industry where you want someone relying on google for mission-critical logic.

Sure, but there's a huge spectrum between "mild competence" and "can recite strang's verbatim". My experience is that companies emphasizing specific math skills beyond normal professional baselines typically expect the latter despite usually offering the same (or lower) salaries than the former.

strang's would be something that is entry level in terms of linear algebra.

I think they should clarify whether they want somebody that has passed a linear algebra class with high marks based on something like strangs' entry level book before...or are on the cutting edge of graduate level linear algebra research. It's not clear from the post and I suspect that might be an issue.

Give me a couple months and I could recite strangs entry level textbook. I passed that class with an A+. But I could not become a PhD level maths student with a linear algebra research focus in that amount of time.

There are multiple very different ways to interpret a requirement for being competent in linear algebra.

Knowing everything covered in strangs introduction to linear algebra is actually quite low on the potential list of requirements and could be self studied.

If you need a specific specialist degree (like a PhD in linear algebra), then that's just the professional baseline knowledge I already mentioned.

When I last read Strang's, my course included a lot of spectral theory that was decidedly not introductory regardless of what the title says. Either way, the point is that most non-specialist practitioners don't need that. How often have you truly run into determinants mod N or stochastic matrices in real life?

It sounds like our linear algebra classes were somewhat different though. No one received an A in mine. I had one of 3-4 B's.

Never ran into modular determinants IRL but stochastic matrices are pretty common in many jobs - that said honestly anyone that's actually good at linear algebra and dev work has some pretty good options in many fields so considering it as a baseline unremarkable requirement is uncalled for, I agree.

> Give me a couple months and I could recite strangs

Yes, most people had LA classes during college. But would you take a couple of months to relearn something that would be used only to interview for one job that you have no idea you'll get? That's certainly a reason why few people want to interview there.

I would argue that, if the sole differentiating requirement is “must be proficient at linear algebra” (at an undergraduate level), the pay requirements shouldn’t be that different from most other similar jobs. Almost every engineering job will have some domain specific requirements; would you say a job asking for applicants to be “proficient in undergraduate-level fluid dynamics” would require higher pay than any other chemical engineering job? Or, back to SWE, if there’s a requirement to have experience working with microcontrollers, should that job pay more than any other C developer position?

If an SWE job posting has a narrow set of requirements, none of which require particularly high-level education, that means the ideal candidate is a “regular” SWE with experience or knowledge in the field being hired for. It’s not like this aerospace company wants someone who is an expert at linear algebra while also being a full stack dev with intimate understanding of a few major cloud platforms’ offerings and knows how to write windows drivers and does silicon design in their spare time. They’re just looking for a particular type of developer for which there simply may not be any candidates. Yeah, technically you could triple the salary and steal employees from other companies who weren’t looking for jobs, but the economics of that aren’t feasible. If there are n positions and n-a total eligible developers (for some positive a), it doesn’t matter how much you increase pay, there still aren’t going to be enough people to fill the roles. And you’re eventually going to run out of money, because you usually can’t just triple the price of your products.

Satellites go in circles and need to point at things.

> Yes, we have extensive high school and college work-study/internships and participants make $72k/yr

This is below COL in many areas. If you increase this to 125k like Bucees then you should be able to draw in more candidates.

I'm not USAian, but everything you described to me makes the job sound miserable, especially compared to the competition.

The clearance I won't comment on, as I have no clue what it involves. Presumably though, this means randomized drug tests which is IMO a complete violation of privacy. Also, I'm probably wrong but it gives me the impression that despite your reassurance that you aren't building weapons systems, ya kinda are.

And as you said, a part of your company makes weapons. That will automatically cause many people to be disinterested, for better or worse.

> Ghost positions

In my experience, gov't jobs are the worst when it comes to fake job postings that only exist as a cover for internal promos. Might be different in the states, but I doubt it.

> Yes, we are willing to train someone who is motivated. We won't re-teach linear algebra...

Wait, so will you train them or not? You won't refresh someone on linear algebra which most people haven't touched since their uni days, but you'll put a technical writer through university to become an engineer? Which one is it? Then later on you say the algebra thing is a hard requirement. How do these statements make sense together?

> Can't work remotely

This is an automatic disqualifier for many people, for many reasons. I get that you're working with space hardware in clean rooms, but if this means people have to move to the middle of nowhere (or just move, period) and commute for 2 hours each way, then you're disqualifying tons of people, when their alternative is a job where they can work remotely with all the benefits that entails. I'd personally rather be dead than be forced to commute ever again.

> We pay well

Define well? Especially with everything else I commented on, is it really "well", if they can join a much less frustrating job and get paid more? Also you sound quite snarky about working at Meta. I'm no fan of FAANG, but if we're talking compensation, I think the snark is unwarranted given the situation.

> We expect programmers to remember linear algebra and have more than the ability to shovel frameworks on top of each other...

Again, snarkiness and derision. A bit of a dumb position to take when you're admitting that the easier job not only pays (dramatically) more, but has better conditions (remote work, no clearance-related BS) as well.

No wonder you can't find qualified individuals, your comment alone makes it sound like a miserable job where you're working for bean counters that want to inspect the cloudiness of your piss while forcing you to waste half your life driving to the office and back without extra compensation, while they get to see other, less skilled engineers "glue frameworks together" for double the pay and quadruple the happiness. And I find it rich to comment on advertisers when your company makes weapons that literally kill people. Something about reaper missiles and glass houses comes to mind here.

Since more skilled immigration can't solve the requirement, what is it you think would help?

> You (even programmers!) have to touch the things we build in order to build them

This sounds like an excuse. You think it's completely impossible to write code for some embedded device, robot, whatever remotely? Hire some cheaper remote hands, set up some telework equipment, voila now you can hire from all over the country.

I did development for a scanning optical microscope, was only once even in the same room with one, and even then never got to touch it.

Of course once that issue is eliminated, the security theater one will be raised next. People might be working from their bed next to a Russian honeypot or whatever. National security types tend to have vivid imaginations in that respect, and have to justify all their rules to themselves. The end result? "We can't find qualified applicants."

Btw I'm technically qualified, and in no way a security risk to the US, but you wouldn't be allowed to hire me. Perhaps the feds should figure out a way of doing security screening for foreign nationals. "Must be a citizen" seems like lazy bureaucratic BS. As if citizens can't be security risks?!

>You have to be eligible for a Secret security clearance

Nope. Not doing it. Not going to argue politics, but this is a huge RED FLAG for a lot of people. And I feel I don't need to submit to mandatory drug testing as well.

>The most harmful thing the products I build do is quantify in precise detail how climate change is dooming us all

Then why is it classified? How separate is your branch from the weapons branch, that you acknowledge exists?

A security clearance doesn't necessarily mean you have to take drug tests. You do fill out paperwork about your previous drug usage though.

If you admit to past drug use they're going to drug test you.

Not in my experience.

> Then why is it classified? How separate is your branch from the weapons branch, that you acknowledge exists?

There's a lot of dual-use stuff that's not used for military applications but could be by another actor. Dual-use means that it could be used for civilian and military applications, not that it actually is.

So if I build a revolutionary weather radar that could be used for military reconnaissance by Iran if the technology came out, but the US military isn't interested because they already have something better, it would be completely civilian but classified.

>Dual-use means that it could be used for civilian and military applications, not that it actually is.

This brings forward some cognitive dissonance in me. I love the open source ethics, especially the "ANYONE CAN USE THIS FOR ANY PURPOSE" tagline. But, personally, I do not want any military (especially the US military) to find any usefulness out of my projects. I'm not sure on the legal aspects of it, but if there was an SPDX-License-Identifier for GPL-3.0-NO-MILITARY (or something similar, you get the point), I'd use it on everything.

Closest thing I've heard:

https://github.com/g-truc/glm?tab=License-1-ov-file#readme

Can't believe I never noticed this. I've used GLM a bunch before.

It's funny, and it's nice, but it's not quite the ironclad level of "NO MILITARIES" as I'd like. Plus, enforceability becomes a question with classified military stuff, not even going into the actual legal discovery process. A common license would suffice for me, as I'm not going to modify the GPL as they did.

Thanks for sharing though, it made me laugh.

:/ Never got into embedded programming or engineering, maybe I should though. Invested too many of my math skills in theoretical computer science

Never too late to learn etc. etc.

> We cannot find qualified applicants.

What’s the name of your employer?

>No, we don't pay as much as Meta.

Ah, well. Nevertheless...

> We won't re-teach linear algebra to a developer applicant but we will pay a tech writer to go to school nights/weekends to get a degree in engineering (me, I did that).

Do you consider developer applicants who learned linear algebra on their own or through a product like Math Academy?

Google, MS and other large tech companies do.

Hello! Say a developer applied with ~10 years experience without a technical or quantitative degree but have self studied and feel they have a solid understanding of linear algebra using textbooks and online resources such as the Strang course from Opencourseware - would you still interview someone in this situation?

>You have to be eligible for a Secret security clearance.

Having had to go through one of those: yeah no shit. Not everyone enjoys a colonoscopy without anesthesia.

>You (even programmers!) have to touch the things we build in order to build them and nobody has an ISO certified clean room in their house.

I do, a keg at any rate, but given that I can't get a security clearance because of the people I hung out to build one - yeah.

Curious re: "linear algebra".

What kind of understanding is needed? A basic understanding? It's a vast and unending subject.

And there are well known software apps that do linear algebra these days. Do you folks use a particular software to do it?

Engineering Technician: what does an hour in the life of such work look like?

Thanks.

Later on GP talks about radar, so I'd guess probably at least the basics, convolution, matrix multiplication, and some inverse methods (evd, svd, cholesky...). Not just implementing but understanding what it does, a bit ?

>No "US Persons" (visa holders) or foreigners allowed.

You are not a US person as a visa holder. You are however a US person if you have permanent residency (green card).

Hi, How can I get in touch with your hiring department?

The hard truth is that too many people can’t pass the drug test required for security clearance, and that does narrow your applicant pool.

Where is your workplace located? Perhaps it's in a crappy place that no one wants to live in, and you should look at relocating.

You can't find qualified applicants to work on poor quality technology.

> We cannot find qualified applicants.

By chance has your employer posted on HN who’s hiring?

Without concrete numbers, all of this is worthless. How much do you pay for the roles you have a shortage, and where are you located so it can be compared with the market rate.

If your pay is anywhere below minimum 75th but more realistically 90th percent market rate in your area your answer is obvious and you are just BSing or your employer is gaslighting you to keep pay down.

All the criteria (required security clearance, no opportunities for remote work, knowledge of skills not used very much outside of schooling without allowances for relearning on the job, only US citizens, etc) you listed automatically creates a hurdle to entry that isn't made up for without significantly higher pay than market rate.

What city or state?

Ball?

So do you discriminate against people that consume substances, on their own unpaid time, legal in the location they live at?

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