The US Army is really just 10 thousand motor pools. All the war, guns and explosives are really just an excuse to make more motor pools to maintain.
How I got a medal from the Army for writing code
51–60 of 82 posts
Re: How I got a medal from the Army for writing code
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Offer to do their laundry. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7817895
What has kept me in (after joining to get better pay during college) was medical services for my child and (related to that) the potential to get one of the few remaining good pensions available in the U.S. In fact the latter thing is the only real incentive keeping many very talented members of the military (or at least the Navy) in technical fields at pay below the private sector.
Agreed. I just switched from Marine Corps to Navy after 10 years to keep from dying at 50, and mostly for the tricare and the free TS.
Re: How I got a medal from the Army for writing code
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
What has kept me in (after joining to get better pay during college) was medical services for my child and (related to that) the potential to get one of the few remaining good pensions available in the U.S. In fact the latter thing is the only real incentive keeping many very talented members of the military (or at least the Navy) in technical fields at pay below the private sector.
Agreed. I just switched from Marine Corps to Navy after 10 years to keep from dying at 50, and mostly for the tricare and the free TS.
[deleted]
Re: How I got a medal from the Army for writing code
#54The US Army is really just 10 thousand motor pools. All the war, guns and explosives are really just an excuse to make more motor pools to maintain.
If Joseph Heller somehow reads this, he is going to wish that he thought of that.
Re: How I got a medal from the Army for writing code
#55Ah, Army IT style. Back in my conscript days, the unit's secretary once had to take a list of soldiers from system A (LASTNAME/FIRSTNAME) and convert them to the format required by system B (FIRSTNAME,LASTNAME)... so she was doing this manually in Excel: click, highlight, ctrl-X, delete, cursor cursor, ",", ctrl-V, repeat. So I dumped the file to CSV, wrote a one-liner awk script that did the transformation, and impo…
[deleted]
Re: How I got a medal from the Army for writing code
#56Ah, Army IT style. Back in my conscript days, the unit's secretary once had to take a list of soldiers from system A (LASTNAME/FIRSTNAME) and convert them to the format required by system B (FIRSTNAME,LASTNAME)... so she was doing this manually in Excel: click, highlight, ctrl-X, delete, cursor cursor, ",", ctrl-V, repeat. So I dumped the file to CSV, wrote a one-liner awk script that did the transformation, and impo…
You could text-to-columns it then concant it via B1 & "," & A1 then drag down. Alternatively, you could use =left(find()) and =right(find()) to function it.
I touched on it in the mainteannce/ops space, but the admin space is also susceptable to this. I find that there's a very rapid change in fundamental understanding of capability between age groups. Of course there's exceptions in both parties but many people born after about 1980 really do underestimate the benefits they have by having grown up with personal computers. They simply just think about them differently.
Re: How I got a medal from the Army for writing code
#57In 2009-2010, I was an infantry officer working in Kandahar (Afghanistan) Airfield's brigade HQ; a canadian HQ then. My job was to receive all the reports from the ground and fan that info out thorough the HQ and our higher ups/sides. The HQ was processing things like medical evacuations, support fire missions, contact reports. The way it was done was very inefficient, frustratingly so. For instance, a medical missio…
Amazing work. Imagine if a skilled developer did 2 week rotations in every department.
Re: How I got a medal from the Army for writing code
#58Well not for actual code, but how about a medal for repairing a database?
It was 1984. I was stationed at Babenahusen, Germany - Field Artillery. Yes, I was a 13 Bang Bang (13B). At that time, I was the only one to have a PC in the barracks. I used to stretch a phone code to the wall phone in the next building and dial up BBS's.
Anyway, I ended up working on the brigade's Wang System. I got there cause the S2 saw me hacking away on my Commodore one night and thought I was perfect for the job. Next week I was reassigned. Classic for the Army.
The PBO (Property Book Officer) did something, I never found out what - but the system crashed. Many of the personal records were stored in that system (and on 8" Disc's - remember those?). And it was my job to fix it.
I had completed Wang's various training courses so I was familiar with the system. But I had no clue how to even figure out what happened. I ended up calling Wang in NYC. And over the phone their engineers and I got the system back up. It took almost 2 days. And I got at most an hour of sleep.
I got an Army Commendation Medal out of it.
Re: How I got a medal from the Army for writing code
#59Not bad for a motorpool guy. The place that I remember really needing some programmers was on the MI (military intelligence) side. They spend all of their time looking for patterns in data, and in 2009 it was still mostly done by hand. Plus that is where most of the smart Soldiers end up.
Why doesn't the Military hire more computer science graduates then?
Like most aspects of the military, they don't want/need experts. They want someone who knows which knob to turn until all the nixie tubes light up.
Re: How I got a medal from the Army for writing code
#60Very cool story. Can you imagine how fun an Army hackathon might be? 'We've hooked up this Missile Command arcade game to a Patriot missile battery. Now you shoot down enemy targets with a track ball!'