Lockheed has an opening for engineers with VAX experience for the F22 • Hacker News Board

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

#181

Post by somatic » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 3:38 PM UTC

akiselev wrote: post #159

magduf wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, but where are you going to find engineers with experience in those archaic technologies? And stuff breaks; where are you going to find equipment to replace it? The industry has moved on and is no longer making stuff like core memory, so you may not be able to acquire it even if you are willing to spend a lot.

We literally spend tens of billions of dollars a year keeping a significant fraction of the domestic agricultural industry afloat in the name of national security. We do the same with energy, oil, raw materials, and pretty much anything logistically critical in a war. I think you vastly underestimate the lengths our military industrial complex goes to protect operational capabilities. The F22 is as much a beneficiary…

If our military-industrial complex is so concerned with protecting operational capabilities, then why have they facilitated the offshoring of industries to China, especially industries concerned with the manufacture of some of the world’s highest technology? Shenzhen literally has skyscrapers of high electronics logistical heaven; in America we spend billions of dollars on fuck-all software and can’t repair broken consumer electronics circuitboards.

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

#182

Post by toast0 » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 3:40 PM UTC

cmiles74 wrote: post #161

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 j…

That it's (now) uncommon technology is only a small part of the hiring problem. Anyway, what's the alternative here? It is almost certainly not worth the effort to rewrite everything in today's common environment 30 years into the service life of the jet; whatever you do now is going to be uncommon again.

A bigger part of the hiring problem is aerospace software, specifically military aerospace software is a difficult field to hire for. Clearance requirements limits your pool. Building weapons of war limits your pool. Low salary compared to other software job limits your pool. Very high level of process / low velocity of shipping limits your pool. If you require experience in the environment, rather than training otherwise appropriate candidates, that's going to be a limit too, but if you work in a specialized environment, you really have to accept that you will need to train people.

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

#183

Post by anyfoo » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 3:40 PM UTC

wumms wrote: post #43

anyfoo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only storage medium I can spontaneously think of where 1s are heavier than 0s is punch cards. I hope that is not the current primary storage method in the aerospace industry.

Nit-pick: 0s (no hole) are heavier than 1s (hole). http://www.punctum.com/interest/punch/index.en.html

True, I should have said “weight difference”.

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

#184

Post by jki275 » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 3:47 PM UTC

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.

Well that's true. LM is known to pay lower than most of the defense industry as well though.

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

#185

Post by gigatexal » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 3:51 PM UTC

magduf wrote: post #152

inetsee wrote: post #149

I worked for Lockheed Martin for more than a decade and I have many of the qualifications listed, including VAX experience and a special access clearance. Of course, Lockheed laid me off fourteen years ago and I retired three years ago, so I guess I won't be applying.

You should apply, and demand an insanely-high salary while pointing out that almost no one has VAX experience now.

Where is the salary listed?

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

#186

Post by somatic » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 3:55 PM UTC

euler_angles wrote: post #157

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…

In one of my past jobs I was a Level 3 Electronics Engineer for LM, and I made right at the middle of the pay band. It paid okay, but lower than someone doing my same job at the same place but working for Northrop Grumman made. I saw many people jump from LM to NGC just to get a big pay bump while doing the same work. But LM is actively trying to reduce its number of Level 5, 6, and 7 engineers (the highest paybands…

So hang on, let me rephrase this: Lockheed has basically fired most of its most highly experienced engineering talent? Is that right?

What did Lockheed hope to accomplish by this move?

Do you know what the total realized effect was?

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

#187

Post by icedchai » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 3:58 PM UTC

oldsklgdfth wrote: post #144

vaxman wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You sound a lot like some of the people I worked with, hey Tim :). 1. The codebase that I was working on was not awesome, it was a mix of Fortran (while i am a fan of and would much rather use that than C for scientific code) and DCL. Lots of stuff that was clearly a design afterthought, but with decades of momentum and an attitude of "just keep it working" 2. There's a lot of history in VMS, but unfortunately it's p…

For #3, you are correct. VMS originally required a separate third party product to support TCP/IP. MultiNet was one of the more popular stacks: http://www.process.com/products/multinet/

Newer releases (6.0 and above, I think?) do have DEC's TCP/IP layered product included. I believe it was called "UCX"...

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

#188

Post by vajrabum » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 4:01 PM UTC

cmiles74 wrote: post #161

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 j…

The point is the F-22 is old technology. The testing and other tooling has been in production for a long time. And yes, it's hard to recruit people with the right skillsets to support legacy hardware and software.

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

#189

Post by pjc50 » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 4:06 PM UTC

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…

Hard to detect sarcasm or parody here, but this is a great example of someone condemning the systems which were cheap (or license-free), widely available, worked well enough for most people, and provided huge benefits to millions, because it doesn't comply with his own narrow view of how it should be done.

> If you weren't a computer scientist (or college student) you weren't even getting a job working on one!

Exactly. A system whose priority is preventing people from ever using it.

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

#190

Post by solotronics » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 4:09 PM UTC

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…

5. This brings up something interesting, I wonder how many other good systems/designs/code were killed because they were proprietary and got steamrolled by something open source? It's like in nature, survival of the fittest is a lie, it is survival of those who ended up reproducing.