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

201–210 of 330 posts

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

#201

Post by euler_angles »

keeganjw wrote: post #117
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.

The F-35? Being wasteful? They wouldn't dare...

The program knows it's being wasteful. It is just limited in what it can do about it. Mainly because the same kinds of thinking used to get the program into this mess are what's being tried to get the program out of this mess. Einstein had the definitive quote on how well that works.

"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."

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

#202

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

rwallace wrote: post #54
dotancohen wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is a school of thought that says rather than look at the requirements and make your best guess at the amount of work needed to implement them, you will get more accurate results by making your best guess at the number of lines of code required, then using a formula to estimate the amount of work needed to write that many lines of code. I personally am not convinced this is really more accurate, but it does have…

The variation I was taught (and it works rather well), is to look at the Requirements and estimate them in terms of T-Shirt sizes of LOC (Small, Medium, Large, XL). Then baseline your S/M/L/XL sizes into LOC. e.g., Small is 20 LOC, Large is 750, etc. From that, use your historical data (you have been tracking closely how long it takes to implement a feature vs its LOC size, right?) to estimate that say, a Small feature (20 LOC) will take 2 days at a rate of 10 LOC/Day.

It takes a lot of discipline and planning, but in the end it's the most accurate method of size and time estimation I've ever seen.

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

#203

Post by euler_angles »

vonmoltke wrote: post #173
sizzzzlerz wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pa…

> Obviously that only goes so far, but generally there is less tribal knowledge within a DOD program than in most commercial engineering efforts.

Within a well run DoD program. Most of the larger programs are not well run, in my personal experience. And DoD did this silly thing where it let contractors keep the rights to their engineering data until relatively recently, meaning that US taxpayer dollars are funding the purchase of hardware the government by definition can't understand, because the government isn't allowed to know about or look at much of the engineering data. So there's a HUGE amount of tribal knowledge in some of these programs because there's nothing else to reference.

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

#204

Post by inetsee »

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.

When we retired my wife and I fled Atlanta at top speed. I don't know if the job is in Marietta, GA or Ft. Worth (the job listing seems to have disappeared) but I doubt if even an insanely high salary could get us to move to either of those locations.

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

#205

Post by magduf »

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…

The military-industrial complex will throw money at things, but only in stupid ways. Are they creating jobs paying $500k for engineers to work in this sector and keep them interested in this kind of work and these ancient technologies? Of course not. So where do you think they're going to find the talent needed?

Feel free to apply for some jobs in the defense sector to find out how much they pay. You'll make more money working at FAANG companies, and you don't have to wait years for a security clearance to be approved. Jobs in aerospace, in particular, are pretty lousy paying compared to what engineers are getting elsewhere.

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

#206

Post by wil421 »

somatic wrote: post #186
euler_angles wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Companies do this all the time for all levels. It was basically an early retirement buyout. There’s a big Lockheed plant in my area and I’m pretty sure all managers, engineers, plant workers, etc were all offered buyouts. Everyone with 3 or so years until retirement.

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

#207

Post by magduf »

inetsee wrote: post #204
magduf wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

When we retired my wife and I fled Atlanta at top speed. I don't know if the job is in Marietta, GA or Ft. Worth (the job listing seems to have disappeared) but I doubt if even an insanely high salary could get us to move to either of those locations.

Well, what I was thinking is that you live in an AirBnB or other short-term rental for 6 months and then quit. Some consultants work this way: only working for 3-6 months on a gig, getting paid a fortune (plus extra for living expenses because they're not relocating, just living there temporarily), and then leaving.

If the company really needs the work done that badly and there's no qualified help willing to take it full-time, then this is a viable option. If there's no qualified help and they're not willing to go for a deal like this, then the work just doesn't get done.

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

#208

Post by an_d_rew »

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…

Thank you for that comment, @cmiles, I couldn't agree more!

I think that it's important to remember that there are both direct and indirect costs to "not changing something that's working".

If you don't keep abreast of change, then you're unable to be nimble enough to change when change is hugely advantageous.

Locking yourself into design decisions is usually cost-effective for the short term, but may be ultimately very harmful in the long-term.

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

#209

Post by xeeeeeeeeeeenu »

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…

>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)

OpenVMS x86-64 port is a work in progress: https://www.vmssoftware.com/updates_port.html

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

#210

Post by stcredzero »

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.

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

It's possible, with highly detailed design documents. You could use something like "cyclomatic complexity" which is an older estimation methodology which is just a laundry list of small granularity features with point values attached. You add those up, while multiplying some weighted numbers together to account for interlinked complexity, then use a figure for the implementation language to come up with an estimated LOC figure. Error bars on that kind of thing are something like +/- 100%/50%. (I'm pulling numbers out of my @ss here, but I'm talking about a highly ritualized and systematized way of doing just that.)

You can get better estimates, usually by asking shops that have written the same sort of product many times before.

Post reply on HN