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

241–250 of 330 posts

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

#241

Post by tempsolution »

commandlinefan wrote: post #239
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.

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.

Yes it does. If there actually was a bigger demand than there is supply, the salary would raise. The main reason why it doesn't is because a programming language or frameworks are not a barrier for any top developer. Skills usually transfer very well.

The real crux of the matter is that these companies don't want to pay top salaries and thus don't get top developers. As long as there are people who navigate themselves into such niches and are proud of it, the salary for these specialized jobs will stay where it is. Simple as that.

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

#242

Post by 0xffff2 »

devonkim wrote: post #128
akiselev wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ECC doesn't help when you have an EMP caused by an atmospheric nuclear detonation. Those are the kinds of things the design has to consider.

Makes me why we don’t count NASA under DoD similar to DARPA to help with their funding.

In addition to NASA's explicitly non-military nature, we do actually maintain some relationship with our USAF counterparts. When it makes sense to do so, we're happy to work on mutually beneficial projects.

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

#243

Post by stcredzero »

euler_angles wrote: post #217
stcredzero wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is of incompatible time scales. The original studies and requirements for the F-22 were done in the 1980s, Lockheed selected to build the F-22 in the 90s, F-22 entered flight test in 1997, IOC declared in 2005, expected to be in service until the 2040s at least. Iteration time goes down by a lot in wartime. Also, choosing technologies which have much shorter iteration times could be a disruptive game chan…

The technologies may have a shorter iteration time, but can the defense establishment adapt? I am skeptical but hope you are correct.

If I were Taiwan, I would be working with the US to engage in a crash program of developing AI drone mini-subs. Basically, develop the ability to make the waters around Taiwan exceedingly dangerous, even without air superiority.

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

#244

Post by vonmoltke »

euler_angles wrote: post #203
vonmoltke wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

Correct. I ran into my share of shitshows during that portion of my career. It usually depended on what part of the life cycle the program was in.

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

#245

Post by vthriller »

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…

> As the Pentium chip gained momentum, Intel realized it would be more profitable to use the tech to make X86_64 architecture.

...which they didn't make but licensed from AMD, no?

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

#246

Post by devonkim »

sesteel wrote: post #178
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…

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. ...

There’s a huge difference between having your primary business being services projects basically as an extension of the government and your revenue center being unrelated private sector funding. Your corporate structure and business incentives are completely different as a result. I know Lockheed spend many millions of dollars trying to build a DoD-centric IaaS as AWS was being built and it didn’t really matter in the end because so many projects are going to GovCloud. Sure, lots of TS projects are not ever going to be in AWS but boy are people trying. VMware was bought before to try to contain the sheer sprawl of configuration in the Pentagon (your cost is almost entirely around organizational complexities rather than compute / storage cost due to being so heavy on labor costs in most enterprise orgs so the math is fuzzier but usually results in layoffs / workforce optimizations if successful).

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

#247

Post by cryptonector »

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…

Staying fresh has its own costs, and those would have to be made absolutely clear and transparent and clients must pay them. That's actually very difficult to do politically, especially when you have lowest-price bidding schemes.

Code is legacy the moment it's put into production. Keeping technical debt from piling up, and keeping on the bleeding edge to avoid costly maintenance of old systems is extremely expensive. And the costs escalate very quickly when you're talking about airplanes. The cost of dealing with legacy becomes acceptable very quickly.

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

#248

Post by mandevil »

cmiles74 wrote: post #221
mcguire wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Also, unless you can prove that your software is EXACTLY the same after the ground-up rewrite, it will require changes to the voluminous and very detailed training materials, necessary to turn a 19 year old with slightly above average AFOQT scores into someone who can fix a complicated airplane on 4 hours sleep a night.

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

#249

Post by chaostheory »

commandlinefan wrote: post #239
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.

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.

It reminds me of the market for rubber. It's such an essential resource that's being threatened by mold, climate change, and more profitable crops, yet prices don't seem to reflect reality.

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

#250

Post by cududa »

commandlinefan wrote: post #239
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.

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.

I often think about what would happen if all cobol programmers went on strike
Post reply on HN