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Lockheed has an opening for engineers with VAX experience for the F22

lockheedmartinjobs.com

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Re: Lockheed has an opening for engineers with VAX experience for the F22

#161

Post by cmiles74 »

nabla9 wrote: post #73

Modern is relative. F-22's first flight was 1997. F-35 development started in 1992, first flight of X-35 was 2000 and F-35's first flight was 2006. There is absolutely noting wrong with using old technology. Being modern just for the sake of being modern is wasteful.

I see the "there's nothing wrong with old technology" comment a lot, and in this case I disagree. There's a good chunk of this thread pointing out how hard it is to hire for this position because practically no one is familiar with these technologies. This, to me, illustrates that there absolutely is something wrong with using old technology, especially in this instance.

I will grant that there are some things that just keep working and I also would be tempted to leave them in place. But if their functioning is critical then we either need to cultivate the necessary knowledge in our organization to ensure we can manage them adequately or replace them with something that the current market of people will be somewhat familiar.

Re: Lockheed has an opening for engineers with VAX experience for the F22

#162

Post by Kadin »

sizzzzlerz wrote: post #134
nabla9 wrote: post #73

Modern is relative. F-22's first flight was 1997. F-35 development started in 1992, first flight of X-35 was 2000 and F-35's first flight was 2006. There is absolutely noting wrong with using old technology. Being modern just for the sake of being modern is wasteful.

In general, I would agree. However, the longer that old technology is deployed, the more expensive support costs. Parts become obsolete, engineers retire or move on, IT has to maintain archaic devices, operating systems, and tools.

However, practical experience suggests that second-system syndrome is very real, and the cost of replacing 'obsolete' systems is often vastly higher than just maintaining them, even taking into account the need to train people in skills that are difficult to hire for.

But there's an entire industry which exists to soothsay away these concerns and get companies to upgrade, whether or not it really makes any sense. Nobody has an interest in encouraging companies to keep using their old gear and do internal training; many companies have an interest in encouraging upgrades.

Re: Lockheed has an opening for engineers with VAX experience for the F22

#163

Post by carlmr »

Loughla wrote: post #151
audiometry wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you need to be a "self starter"....

I hate those HR phrases for reasons that I believe are my own, maybe others share them. Sure, it's a meaningless phrase and no one is going to say, "I'm not a self-starter, I hate figuring out what to do with my time I wish someone would just hand me a list of things". Or maybe very few people are going to do that. What upsets me the most about phrases like 'self-starter' or 'motivated' or all that other HR shit, is…

>Phrases like that are treating the world like it is full of people who would swallow their own socks, on accident, if only we were given the chance.

I'm guessing those people went into HR and are projecting.

Re: Lockheed has an opening for engineers with VAX experience for the F22

#164

Post by johncalvinyoung »

jabl wrote: post #32
alex_hitchins wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I seem to recall something along the lines of large bombers running valves as they were less prone to effects of EMP around nuclear blasts. Not sure if this perhaps something similar?

In one of the documentaries about the Vulcan raid on the Falklands (1982), one of the pilots interviewed remarked that somebody flying Avro Lancasters in WWII would have felt right at home in the cockpit of the Avro Vulcan. E.g. the navigator used mechanical clocks to keep track of when to turn, and so on. Not sure if this was a conscious decision wrt EMP, or was it just that they were in a hurry to develop a jet bom…

Which documentary was this? I read Vulcan 607 about ten years ago and loved it.

Re: Lockheed has an opening for engineers with VAX experience for the F22

#165

Post by Kadin »

devonkim wrote: post #128
akiselev wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ECC doesn't help when you have an EMP caused by an atmospheric nuclear detonation. Those are the kinds of things the design has to consider.

Makes me why we don’t count NASA under DoD similar to DARPA to help with their funding.

The point of NASA was to create an agency for non-military aerospace development, while ARPA was supposed to handle military applications.

I think Eisenhower thought that this would insulate NASA from postwar budget cuts and make its funding more secure rather than less.

In retrospect, Eisenhower was a hell of an optimist.

Re: Lockheed has an opening for engineers with VAX experience for the F22

#166

Post by [deleted] »

hestefisk wrote: post #81
nabla9 wrote: post #73

Modern is relative. F-22's first flight was 1997. F-35 development started in 1992, first flight of X-35 was 2000 and F-35's first flight was 2006. There is absolutely noting wrong with using old technology. Being modern just for the sake of being modern is wasteful.

No Microservices, no Kubernetes. Lame.

[deleted]

Re: Lockheed has an opening for engineers with VAX experience for the F22

#167

Post by Kadin »

hef19898 wrote: post #72
rangibaby wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From wiki for the MiG-25: The majority of the on-board avionics were based on vacuum-tube technology, not solid-state electronics. Although they represented aging technology, vacuum tubes were more tolerant of temperature extremes, thereby removing the need for environmental controls in the avionics bays. With the use of vacuum tubes, the MiG-25P's original Smerch-A (Tornado, NATO reporting name "Foxfire") radar had…

Well, at least in that case it seems like a conscious design decision. Not sure how much of the state of the art design and tech was driven by "I like the colour" or "the supplier is in my state".

The Soviet design bureaus certainly had their irrationalities. They behaved like big, vertically-integrated companies, and preferred 'their' stuff over the other design bureaus' stuff.

Soviet gear was robust because robustness and repairability was priorities as a design criterion. It's not an automatic product of how they doled out work, or of their defense industry generally.

Re: Lockheed has an opening for engineers with VAX experience for the F22

#168

Post by watsocd »

challenger22 wrote: post #88
avar wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like: "We ended up hiring the guy most competent at MS Word at the expense of everything else, because out of the five requirements it was the only one the managers doing the interview knew anything about". "Johnson! We're promoting you to head technical flight operations. We can't believe the level of your MS Word skills!" "Senator, we have no idea why the F-22 inexplicably crashed. That software was designed b…

More like: The guy that designed the flight control surfaces of the F-22 did so using an elaborate Excel spreadsheet powered by 4,000 lines of uncommented VBA filled with aerodynamics equations, and he retired 3 years ago.

Excel is a great proof-of-concept tool where non-programmers can prove their point.

Unfortunately proof-of-concept tools often end up being the end result because .... it works good enough.

Re: Lockheed has an opening for engineers with VAX experience for the F22

#169

Post by jki275 »

jhawk28 wrote: post #156
jki275 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Defense contractors don't pay FAANG salaries. They can't, in general, because they're bound by labor categories and salaries set by the government, and the government isn't paying software engineers above what their GS software engineers get (max of about 128k in the DC area in general, if you're curious). There are a few jobs that can go a bit higher, but even they are capped around 150k as I recall. I don't know wh…

Not true. Billable labor rates are negotiated with the customer. The actual pay that an employee gets is based on market rates and the perceived value of the employee. The one may influence the other.

Sure it is. The government is the customer, and the rates they will pay absolutely drive the rate the contracting company is willing to pay their engineers.

Defense contracting is a very different vehicle from any other. Source -- I am a DOD contract software engineer.

Re: Lockheed has an opening for engineers with VAX experience for the F22

#170

Post by Kadin »

jhawk28 wrote: post #156
jki275 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Defense contractors don't pay FAANG salaries. They can't, in general, because they're bound by labor categories and salaries set by the government, and the government isn't paying software engineers above what their GS software engineers get (max of about 128k in the DC area in general, if you're curious). There are a few jobs that can go a bit higher, but even they are capped around 150k as I recall. I don't know wh…

Not true. Billable labor rates are negotiated with the customer. The actual pay that an employee gets is based on market rates and the perceived value of the employee. The one may influence the other.

It is extremely difficult to negotiate labor rates above a certain threshold; the government contracting officers can and will just refuse if they think you are demanding above-market rates. Sometimes you can justify some overage, but it's not easy, and it's not negotiated on a per-project basis.
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