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Comment by MichaelCrawford | Hacker News Reader

You have a wooden head.

...No need to be insulting and condescending. I understand that you were making a joke. But the fact is, your joke example was poorly chosen.

I can see your point.

However a problem we really do have is that we have lost our expertise. The COTS mandate lead to less demand for the kinds of engineers who could have prevented this breach.

My friend Murray Sims is a naval civil service coder. He rang me up once to beg me to work for the navy:

"People are dying because of software bugs."

Id love to but I get a little loopy sometimes so have no hope of getting a clearance, instead I write technical articles.

http://www.warplife.com/tips/

I admit I was a little saddened to be insulted by someone whose work I admire.

Your friend definitely has a point. People are dying because of software bugs. And process bugs. And outdated hardware.

I agree with you that we have lost our expertise. I think the defense industry in general has a demographics problem. There's a lot of old guys who are about to retire. A lot of young, inexperienced people. And not enough of the mid-career engineers.

I offer my heartfelt and humble apology for insulting you.

That was not my intention though I do understand why you took it that way.

I intended to insult the United States Congress.

A well-met insult. The government is putting itself into a corner with their current policies on hiring criteria. If you have an idea on how to change that, I'd support you however I could. If it matters, I really admire your apology, not many people have the "balls/vagina/both/neither" to admit, at the very least, a mis-interpretation of a comment.

Their hiring criteria are ridiculous. Every job I have ever applied for through USAJobs and other government systems (NASA STARS, US Navy CHART, and several others I cannot remember the names of at the moment) has resulted in a rejected application.

NASA's system told me that I was not qualified to work on rocket telemetry systems, even though I was then working as a telemetry engineer for the prime contractor on the NSROC II sounding rocket contract.

The Navy's system told me that I was not qualified to work on aircraft instrumentation and telemetry systems for NAVAIR, even though one of my past jobs was as an aircraft instrumentation and telemetry systems engineer for NAVAIR.

My wife has similar anecdotal experiences. She applied for a job with the federal government requiring experience as a K-12 biology teacher. She was rejected even though she worked as a high school biology teacher for almost a decade and won several national awards and two educational fellowships.

I have lots of ideas as to how to change that; the problem is not unique to the government.

Real Soon anow http://wew.warplife.com/jobs/ will redirect to a domain that my brother in law will register for me because my reputation for speaking my mind has made me completely unemployable.

Thank you for your apology. I see how I misunderstood.

Is there some way I could do military computing without a clearance?

I applied to the US Air Force Cyber Command as well as all manner of military computer security jobs. I received but one response, that my application to be an encryption machine trainer was declined.

http://www.warplife.com/mdc/resume/

I am not an absolute authority on this. But my decade of experience in the defense industry tells me "probably not".

Then I expect the best contribution I could make is to continue writing.

I was an unclassified subcontractor once. The primary contractor selected me for my expertise with "the part".

What he should have done was to ask me to select the vendor. The part I was asked to write code for had quite a serious design flaw.

It was plainly apparent who "the clint" was.

That got on my nerves.

"'The client' is really, really happy with all the prototype boards that we just soaked The American Taxpayer for."

"Great. Please tell 'The Client' that YOU SELECTED THE WRONG "PART!"

Click.

I have the idea that I could offer the consulting service of selecting 'The Parts' to the extent they are unclassified. They often are. But I dont have the first clue as to how to get started. Among my concerns is that some contractors dont want to pay someone to tell them how to avoid cost overruns.

Please do continue writing. I enjoy your writing very much.

Your Wish Is My Command:

   I State This That It May Be Rejected:
   The Lysistrata Manifesto
   http://www.warplife.com/manifestos/lysistrata/

tl;dr: I shall withhold sex until the computer industry fixes its product defects.

Humor is not allowed on HN. It's for our own protection - most of the people here are so autistic a simple ironic statement could lead to the end of the internet as the HN readers spaz out all at once.

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