Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

lockheedmartinjobs.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 330 posts

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

#171

Post by zild3d »

dotancohen wrote: post #14
aosmith wrote: post #2

Here's the backstory: http://web.archive.org/web/20100310163744/http://www.stsc.hi...

The way that the fine article was worded, it seems that the engineering team knew that they needed approximately 1.5M LOC before they has started. How could they have known that? Or is it simply poorly worded? > The ATF Team planned to develop approximately 1.5 million source lines of code, across more than 20 software development companies located throughout the U.S., Canada, and Europe.

Used to work in missile defense at LM as a Systems Engineer, and seen similar estimations done for cost, schedule, LOC, FTEs, etc.

To get to the total 1.5M LOC, it's after decomposing the system into lower level black boxes and doing some modeling/simulation.

How many lines of code has it taken in the past to build our navigation systems, radios, weapon system A, weapon system B, etc. How much integration work is there? If its a CAN bus, the last project had X LOC for the bus architecture. Add em up, and add a big fudging factor.

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

#172

Post by rtkwe »

cushychicken wrote: post #98
vonmoltke wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ISTR? Anyway, the processors in the F-22A are a mix of different cores. The power supply in the Gen 3 radar used a MIL-STD-1750A processor. The PICC[1] processor modules also used the MIL-STD-1750A originally, but moved to a newer processor in a refresh (if I remember correctly). I don't know what the non-Raytheon components of the plane were using. As for the compiler, you are spot-on. We had a MicroVAX in a vault (…

"I Seem To Recall"

Huh never seen that before. Seems like a upmarket version of the more common (to me) IIRC (If I Recall Correctly).

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

#173

Post by vonmoltke »

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, the longer that old technology is deployed, the more expensive support costs.

That's true, but military logistics has adapted to mitigate some of these costs.

> Parts become obsolete

There are two ways this is dealt with. The first is an activity called Diminishing Materials Suppliers (DMS). DMS is an ongoing support activity during production where the availability of parts is monitored and alternative parts are selected and evaluated if a manufacturer announces they are stopping or modifying production of a part for which they are the sole supplier.

The second is the lifetime buy. Near the end of a production run, and sometimes earlier, engineering figures out how many of a given part is needed to complete the full production run and provide spares for rework and repair. Purchasing then gets approval under the contract to purchase the entire quantity of materials and the stock goes to a warehouse until it's needed.

> engineers retire or move on

Knowledge transfer is one of the big reasons the defense industry is so big on systems engineering and mountains of documentation. Obviously that only goes so far, but generally there is less tribal knowledge within a DOD program than in most commercial engineering efforts.

> IT has to maintain archaic devices, operating systems, and tools

In general, IT doesn't go anywhere near the software and equipment used to program, test, and troubleshoot hardware and embedded software. Those pieces are owned by specific engineering teams on the program.

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

#174

Post by linksnapzz »

vaxman wrote: post #138
oldsklgdfth wrote: post #118

I had a job maintaining fortran code on an openVMS OS running on itanium hardware. Itanium was intel's failed attempt at a 64bit architecture and that's the platform VMS decided to port to. That made hardware expensive and as of recently obsolete (i think hp discontinued that integrity line of servers) VMS doesn't natively support TCP/IP, because it predates it. The VMS communication protocol was called decnet. So yo…

That's outrageous... 1. RE: FORTRAN. VAX FORTRAN was the most awesome implementation of FORTRAN ever. FORTRAN because these systems didn't have much RAM and CPU power was limited. FORTRAN went into the background for a while when the C fad began in the early 1980s; however, academics cringed at C for reasons that the industry would eventually learn "the hard way" and FORTRAN came back along with a government knee-jer…

Bless Your Heart.

BTW, this will give you the warm fuzzies:

https://www.vmssoftware.com/updates_port.html

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

#175

Post by icedchai »

ch_123 wrote: post #64

ISTR that the avionics code is written in Ada, and runs on top of Intel i960 processors, and that the Ada compiler for that target only runs on VAX/VMS (not even OpenVMS, but specifically VMS on the VAX).

Just a nitpick, VAX/VMS was renamed to OpenVMS around version 5.5 right around when they started porting it to Alpha. It still ran on the VAX.

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

#176

Post by vonmoltke »

sesteel wrote: post #143
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…

Defense contractors set their own payscales but also compete on price. I know software engineers right now earning north of 150K. Also, overtime is paid and billed in defense. Thus, if you do work overtime, your defense contractor wants to bill it and you get paid for it. My first year out of school I made nearly 100K on a 67K salary because of billed overtime. This was in 2003. There is also the fact that finding wa…

> Also, overtime is paid and billed in defense. Thus, if you do work overtime, your defense contractor wants to bill it and you get paid for it. My first year out of school I made nearly 100K on a 67K salary because of billed overtime. This was in 2003.

When I worked at Raytheon (2002 - 2012) overtime had to be pre-approved (not every contract was eligible) and you had to work at least 8 extra hours in a week to get paid overtime (the 8 hours were paid if you hit the threshold; 7.5 and you didn't get anything extra). There was also an expectation, at least on my program, that you would be working overtime if it was authorized.

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

#177

Post by vonmoltke »

apexalpha wrote: post #141
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…

>Defense contractors don't pay FAANG salaries. This is also a self asnwering question of sorts. If, let's say Lockheed would pay 'FAANG' salaries then it would be 'FLAANG' since the abbreviation is meant to encompass the top paying salaries.

The abbreviation is meant to encompass the top-performing tech stocks. It was appropriated for pay because they are also amongst the top-paying.

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

#178

Post by sesteel »

jki275 wrote: post #124
dvdbloc wrote: post #56

So a couple of the comments here have been mentioning the high pay of people with specialties like this in the context of LM and other defense contractors. My impression from Glassdoor and general conversation with software developers has been the DCs pay pretty low for software in general compared to FAANG or even other engineering companies. Is it true that people with obscure specialties at places like LM can comm…

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…

It should be noted:

Amazon is a defense contractor. Google is/was a defense contractor. Apple is a defense contractor. Microsoft is a defense contractor. SpaceX is a defense contractor. IBM is a defense contractor. ...

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

#179

Post by cicero »

proy24 wrote: post #13

I think all engineers with VAX experience are extinct ...or retired.

I'm 56, and my first job out of college was at General Dynamics Fort Worth Division, which is now part of Lockheed Martin. I did not work on the F-22, aka Advanced Tactical Fighter, but I did work on avionics software for the A-12, aka Advanced Tactical Aircraft, which got cancelled by Dick Cheney in January 1990. I had some contact with ATF engineers because at that time (I can't speak for later), ATF and ATA both used IBM's Common Module computing hardware and the Ada '83 language. We used MicroVAX workstations for our Ada compiler as well as our CASE (Computer-Aided Software Engineering) and documentation software. I was not on the program when the software tools decisions were made. I do know that other programs at General Dynamics used Apollo and Sun workstations, which were Unix based. I can only assume that either someone thought the VAX environment was better, or DEC made them an offer they could not refuse. I was a Unix fan at the time and would have preferred Sun, but the VAX was not a bad system.

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

#180

Post by sesteel »

vonmoltke wrote: post #176
sesteel wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Defense contractors set their own payscales but also compete on price. I know software engineers right now earning north of 150K. Also, overtime is paid and billed in defense. Thus, if you do work overtime, your defense contractor wants to bill it and you get paid for it. My first year out of school I made nearly 100K on a 67K salary because of billed overtime. This was in 2003. There is also the fact that finding wa…

> Also, overtime is paid and billed in defense. Thus, if you do work overtime, your defense contractor wants to bill it and you get paid for it. My first year out of school I made nearly 100K on a 67K salary because of billed overtime. This was in 2003. When I worked at Raytheon (2002 - 2012) overtime had to be pre-approved (not every contract was eligible) and you had to work at least 8 extra hours in a week to get…

Companies have different rules and expectations. I was paid for every overtime hour I worked. Early in my career I was still learning and it was worthwhile, both financially and technically, right out of school. It can simply be a 9 to 5 job which is different than the commercial world I work in now where I don't get paid for extra time.
Post reply on HN