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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

#231

Post by zentiggr »

vaxman wrote: post #139
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VMS had some really nice features - mostly forgotten now that it's all 'nix, all the time.

Not totally ;) https://www.rs-online.com/designspark/a-raspberry-pi-vax-clu... You know, I should apply for that Lockheed job just to get shutdown for being in my 50s and not having touched a VAX since my 30s (because, you know, it's changed so much since then rofl)

I was a data wrangler for a large retail company that put a microVAX in each store for pricing and stock tracking, about the same time as scan guns were first introduced.

It helped me get that job that my dad had worked at DEC for years and I had an RT-11 system sitting on my bedroom desk for years. Knew VAX ops fairly well then. Also about 30 years ago.

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

#232

Post by atribecalledqst »

euler_angles wrote: post #97
metaphor wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd like to say that I'm astonished that modern aircraft still use the 1553 bus... What's wrong with 1553? It's reliable, battle-tested, and the latest revision C was published 28-Feb-2018. In contrast, the RS-232 PHY dates back to 1960, yet it's quite alive and well in modern commercial devices. As a consolation, be glad you've never had to deal with the monster that is STANAG 5516/MIL-STD-6016...if there was such…

As someone who has read all of 6016, doing so cost me a good chunk of my sanity. Never mind the fact that many areas of the standard don't matter because the manufacturers of equipment that use those areas made up their own way of doing things that isn't 6016 compliant. So you can comply to the standard, or you can actually work with platforms in the real world, but you can't do both.

I've read and nearly memorized large portions of 6016 as well and I can commiserate with you. I feel a bit of pride mixed with shame at the fact that I know how to quickly jump around in the document and follow all the threads of logic. On the whole I think it's an interesting read, though. And I'm sure knowing it so well doesn't hurt my employability in the industry.

Technically I think platforms are supposed to document the areas where they're noncompliant with 6016 and submit it for approval. The name of the process escapes me at the moment. Not sure if anybody ever does it, though.

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

#233

Post by bediger4000 »

icedchai wrote: post #229
pjc50 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How many of them had the manuals? Very few. The famous "Orange Wall of Manuals" was often secreted away, for the wizards to consult, but not for the masses to enlighten themselves with.

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

#234

Post by walshemj »

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…

Would not using a Gateway (in osi speak) have been a solution?

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

#235

Post by walshemj »

euler_angles wrote: post #197
somatic wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not fired, that would indicate termination for cause. This was an early buyout. Engineers at those levels were offered a severance package that included some number of weeks of pay per years spent with the company (up to a maximum of 6 months of pay) and a base amount on top of that. This was the precursor to layoffs -- LM hoped to avoid layoffs by offering buyouts to these engineers. The wisdom of all of this... I d…

Only 6 months max - that's cheap BT in the UK used back in the day get up to 18 months tax free and 6.5 years on your pension.

Hence a lot of experienced Mobile engineers took the buy out and went to work with the competition and got a pay rise to boot in their new jobs

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

#236

Post by walshemj »

noneeeed wrote: post #75

Reminds me of my first job out of uni, 18 years ago. I was working on the SPARK toolset, and one of our customers was the Eurofighter, who still used VAX VMS for their development. We had to maintain an old Micro VAX box in the office to periodically test that the toolset still worked on it. I seem to remember that the massive regression test suite that would run in a few hours every night on a PC would take days on…

You should have left it on 24/7 this is what we did for our Pr!mes (a VAX competitor) disk drives.

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

#238

Post by icedchai »

bediger4000 wrote: post #233
icedchai wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How many of them had the manuals? Very few. The famous "Orange Wall of Manuals" was often secreted away, for the wizards to consult, but not for the masses to enlighten themselves with.

One guy, at least, had manuals. VMS also had an excellent help facility.

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

#239

Post by commandlinefan »

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.

Actually I'd be surprised if they're even paying market rate for these developers, regardless of how difficult or impossible it is to find them. COBOL programmers still make about $70,000/year or so (https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/cobol-programmer-salary-S...) even though the entire world is going to collapse if they disappear. It would seem that the laws of supply and demand don't apply here.

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

#240

Post by wrp »

urban_winter wrote: post #18

I started my career working for British Aerospace in 1989. We used VAX/VMS as our development platform (Code was CORAL 66 and then ADA). I spent some time supporting the Sea Harrier flight test operations - so I would have fitted this job perfectly about 28 years ago!). I'd like to say that I'm astonished that modern aircraft still use the 1553 bus, but nothing surprises me when it comes to the use of stone-age tech…

What was your experience switching from Coral 66 to Ada? An equivalent language in the USA at the time was JOVIAL. I heard from some old JOVIAL programmers that they thought Ada was an inferior tool for the job. When I looked at Coral 66, it seemed to be rather less polished than JOVIAL, so I have wondered whether British programmers might have welcomed the switch to Ada.
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