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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

#221

Post by cmiles74 »

mcguire wrote: post #219
cmiles74 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How often do you rewrite your existing projects?

It's in my best interest to keep moving projects forward so that they continue to build and compile under modern environments and work with modern tools. I believe the cost of sticking with outmoded products or technology is to eat the training cost when onboarding new people (thus increasing the amount of time between hiring and getting them to work). We aren't all as wealthy as Lockheed who can (apparently) pay so much that they are literally talking people out of their retirement!

That said, I'm not flying airplanes over here. It's mostly business software. So there's that.

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

#222

Post by bediger4000 »

ubermonkey wrote: post #193
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…

VMS is widely maligned today, but it really wasn't bad, and as you note the clever, native support of versions was kind of amazing. I can't believe that's not part of a modern OS. VMS' clustering tech was also pretty great, which is the reason my late-90s employer was still on it (though on Alpha hardware at that point, not Vax).

Even in the late 90s, you'd get a lot of pushback on "VMS really wasn't bad". One manager I knew believed that the built-in versioning existed solely for DEC to sell people extra disks. I personally can easily believe that filesystems with version numbers don't exist anymore. I'm going to have to reference "The Hideous Name", Rob Pike and Peter Weinberger: https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~rsc/pike85hideous.pdf

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

#223

Post by jabl »

johncalvinyoung wrote: post #164
jabl wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm quite sure it's this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBJ99bIhAVk

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

#224

Post by TickleSteve »

stcredzero wrote: post #210
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.

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 som…

Cyclomatic complexity is a measure of complexity not an estimation technique (although some people do use it as part of estimation).

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclomatic_complexity)

Calculating this involves working out the number of branches through the code, nothing to do with estimation. It is also very much in use today to analyse codebases, finding hotspots, etc.

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

#225

Post by ytpete »

CharlesColeman wrote: post #218
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 featu…

I'm sure that works reasonably well in most cases, but it is a bit of a fallacy that it take a similar amount of effort to write each LOC.

I think the idea is that, when you're measuring in units of many thousands of LOC, those differences roughly average out.

Whether that's true across widely differing parts of such a huge system I'm not convinced, but within a single more typical software project it seems believable to me.

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

#226

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

CharlesColeman wrote: post #218
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 featu…

I'm sure that works reasonably well in most cases, but it is a bit of a fallacy that it take a similar amount of effort to write each LOC.

You are correct. For reasons of expediency I did not mention that there's a "difficulty" factor which is usually expressed by a variable LOC/hour rate. e.g., Server backend code might be estimated at 100 LOC/day whereas code for an 8-bit embedded controller might be 10 LOC/day.

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

#227

Post by foobarge »

stickfigure wrote: post #8
aosmith wrote: post #2

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

Wow. Reminds me of a joke my dad repeated to me many years ago: Software saved the aerospace industry. Every other way of adding cost to an airplane also adds weight. He spent most of his career at Lockheed and Rockwell.

Contrasts with "Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight." - Bill Gates

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

#228

Post by touisteur »

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.

Not a bad way to evaluate effort, if you believe in COCOMO (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/COCOMO). Some (most?) big defense groups maintain some metrics for past projects. LOC/man-month, complexity/cost. LOCs from COCOMO is a way to check your estimation within an order of magnitude.

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

#229

Post by icedchai »

pjc50 wrote: post #189
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…

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! Exactl…

I knew guys who ran VMS systems out of their homes, back in the 90's. It was fairly accessible.

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

#230

Post by evancich »

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.

You are 1000% wrong. Pay scales are "owned" by the DMCA. https://www.dcma.mil/DCMA-Pricing-Support/

A PhD with 20 years of experience = this pay band

You can pay your people whatever you want, but the gov will only pay your people what the DCMA says they are worth. If you pay higher, it comes out of profit (which is also metered by the DCMA) or some other source.

Source: A own a R&D engineering company that works for the DoD and IC.

I can pay a EE PhD $400k/year but the DoD will "only" pay me back around $175k for this person's time. I have to make up the difference.

Hence, for defense contractors, we "only" pay what the DCMA will let us charge.

In order, what matters are: tickets, experience, degrees, certs

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