In goodbye message, Chaillan unloads over DoD’s technology culture, processes
federalnewsnetwork.com> Living in Maryland, I've met several young people who put in a few years at the agency (including TAO) who then left for industry. Millenials don't care about a government pension, especially when you're in a windowless SCIF hacking Perl.
> The US Government as a whole has a massive talent retention problem. Only the mediocre will stay at NSA / CIA now and we'll probably see more of these leaks / hacks.
That's a verbatim comment I made on this site back in 2017 and it's still relevant. I don't mean to toot my own horn as much as to highlight the braindrain out of DoD / the alphabet soup agencies and into other sectors. It HAS and WILL CONTINUE to bite the United States in the ass.
The US Government doesn't believe that inflation exists and also doesn't believe that a software engineer or similar professional should make more than 170k per year in the DC metro (GS-13) with 10+ years of experience.
This is only 15% higher pay than 10 years ago, meanwhile home prices are up 3x in the DC metro area.
A maxed out GS-13 (step 10) runs 130-140k depending on locality, which is new grad range for private sector tech companies. GS-15 hits the 170k threshold, but it’s rare to find technical, non-management roles at that level. (Source: The OPM pay tables for localities are publicly available, and I was a software engineer for a DoD agency for 10 years.)
170 was for the dc location, which carries a 30% CoL adjustment.
I'm still not sure where you're getting 170. The max base for GS-13 is step 10 at $103,309. Adding 30% is nowhere near 170. At the upper end of GS-13 in San Diego (29.77% locality), I was making low to mid 130s. Are you including recruitment/retention incentives?
Tbf, $170k is also the max that Amazon pays (more or less) in cash. I think the issue here is that the government is overweighting the value of pensions over stock, and underweighting quality of life concerns.
Are they overweighting pensions? Retirement after that salary would be pretty valuable. Not to mention the security.
I guess you can slice it two ways.
1) The expected financial value of a pension. Especially assuming that the millenial in question won’t be willing to tolerate poor quality of life long enough to make it lucrative.
2) Belief that the institution backing the pension will be willing and capable of meeting their obligations in N years.
Personally, I think I’d say that the pension would be close to the value of stock options, but I’d be unwilling to tolerate the crap long enough to actually earn a useful percentage of its theoretical value.
I only had one offer of working at a company with a pension program. The recruiter highlighted that the pension "existed" but was unlikely to pay out for a new employee.
I knew someone who was close to hitting their 20 year pension in the private sector, but the company instead decided they had a performance problem in year 19.
While the federal government has less incentive to play such games, betting on illiquid financial offerings that are contingent on a single entity liking you for N decades and still being around after Y decades is pretty suspect.
Yeah, there’s no way I’d value a private pension as worth more than $0. That requires orders of magnitude more trust in for profit corporations than I actually have.
With the government I’m confident that they’ll pay, I’m just not confident I personally would be willing to deal with it for 2-3 decades.
Who’s getting pensions in government? I thought they were all 401k now.
I don't know of any federal government 401k; everyone gets a "pension", it's called FERS (Federal Employees' Retirement System)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Employees_Retirement_S...
There’s a government program that is similar to a 401k, called the Thrift Savings Plan.
It doesn’t cover as many as you may expect.
USG's bigger problem is that they don't know how to manage software talent or software project ecosystems, than the actual pay.
As long as things continue the way they are you wouldn't be able to convince me to code for USG for any price once I retire in a few years. If anything USG has inspiring enough missions that they should be able to attract and retain talent at a discount, compared to optimizing ad click throughs for companies selling sugar water.
I like the all-caps yellling here, because it simulates someone talking in detail while the other person is not really willing to change no matter what you say.. so the volume increases .. it will ALSO BITE YOU when you treat intelligent people that way COMMANDER
Those SCIF buildings try their best to make it seem like a normal office experience with holiday events and food etc.
DoD jobs are ideal for developers who don’t want to learn anything new and just make money. I’d find a lot of guys close to retirement taking up those roles.
It takes someone who is admittedly done. Otherwise it feels no less life sucking than a retail job.
> IT is a highly skilled and trained job; staff it as such
He's going to be disappointed by the private sector too - I haven't been trained on or even given time to learn anything in at least 20 years. Any learning I (or anybody I've ever worked with) undertake is strictly on personal time only.
"creation of an enterprisewide DevSecOps managed service featuring more than 800 hardened containers for software development"
An infosec manager/exec/director that made software solutions rather than a bunch of policy and powerpoint drivel?
AND he was in the federal government?
I can't believe it. My #1 complaint about practically all infosec orgs in large corporations is that they set policies and review barriers, but don't offer solutions.
> There are 100,000 software developers in the DoD. We are the largest software organization on the planet,
Tata Consultancy Services, India employs more than 500,000 people. They manage the IT stack of companies from Walgreens to Ferrari. I'm not the person to nitpick, But I'm particularly proud of TCS's employment figures because I've personally witnessed many move from being poor to wealthy(by Indian standards) after being employed by them(often the first degree holder in the family).
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/15/economy/tcs-india-it-remo...
I attended an interview with them once. (I think it was for one of their clients; American Express). It started in a large conference room, where I was one of about 200 other people. Weirdest interview ever, and also totally inappropriate for my skillset - due to the recruiter not giving a crap, apparently.
Yes, Head count > Quality in this type of companies. Don't expect FAANG level work here although they do handle projects from FAANG as well(B2B front-end type work).
Anyone with full-stack experience(gained outside office work, because IT workers in these companies are typically struck with single programming language/framework) would have already moved on from TCS, Infosys, CTS type companies to a well-funded startup.
Pandemic has increased the highly skilled IT job salaries exponentially in India, DevOps personnel with 8 years experience can earn (1.15Cr INR ~ 157K USD) in India[1].
[1] https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/trends/in-the-wild-world-o...
Just to clarify, TCS seems to only have 500,000 people employed, the whole DOD has roughly 2.86 million as of 2018, of them 100,000 are software developers. I don't think that the entirety of TCS is made up of software developers.
Obviously entirety of 500,000 couldn't be SW developers, But definitely >100,000 are in IT and could be in U.S. alone.
>TCS Recognized as the #1 Top Employer in the United States for 2020[1]
>more than 327,000 employees were trained on multiple new technologies, and over 404,000 trained on Agile methods.
They recruit thousands every year from Engineering colleges in India specifically for SW role. Have been doing that for at least two decades. Their target for FY22 is 40,000 freshers.
It's late in India otherwise I could get the exact figures of IT employees in TCS as every Engineer here knows someone who is working in TCS be it Computer Science or Civil Engineer or even Bio Tech(All of them go to work in IT there).
[1] https://www.tcs.com/tcs-recognized-as-number-one-top-employe...
[2] https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/tcs-to-hire-40-000-f...
Larger discussion here:
> Chaillan added that DoD remains stuck in the outdated water-agile-fall acquisition processes...
Wait what?
I can't speak for Chaillan, but as a military member who led an agile software development team similar to his during the same timeframe, I think he's referring to DoD's fondness for buzzwords.
Because "agile" is the new hotness, every DoD office and vendor tries to slap the language of agile onto a waterfall model. See this wonderful report from the Defense Innovation Board on "Detecting Agile BS": https://media.defense.gov/2018/Oct/09/2002049591/-1/-1/0/DIB...
Contracts are written up front for two plus years of work. Waterfall. The DoD and contractors pretend to do agile in the middle by running everything through sprints, even though you can't change the plan. Water-agile-fall
I read it as water-agile-fail at first. Made more sense.
I think most of my experience with "agile" has been: we'll make a vague plan that came from god-knows-where, you'll do lots of releases, testers will test incrementally, you'll update us once a week, and at the end we'll release it and you'll do it all again when the users tell us they don't like it or (more likely) when management goes on a new whim.
It turned out making a huge plan at the start was a mistake. It also turned out that no one wanted to ask the users what they thought.
It would be funny if the DoD is attached to waterfall still.
The entire organizing principle of modern US warfare is as fast and adaptive a battlefield loop as possible for: get information -> adapt strategy -> deliver orders.
I believe it goes back to Napoleon, who basically conquered all of Europe using those principles and superior organization.
> It would be funny if the DoD is attached to waterfall still.
Still? It's been that way for some time, unfortunately.
You're right that the operational military has long been different and much more flexible. Indeed it's quite annoying seeing agile consultants in the private sector refer to the military as examples of agility! Because that's true on the front lines but it is decided not true at the headquarters level.
The whole F-35 is a waterfall project gone horribly, horribly wrong, then eventually shipping without most problems being addressed.
Lockheed called that process "Spiral". (which DOES have some features of Agile; because development is iterative).
Now; aircraft are very different than software. You don't go and manufacture 1000 birds based on a partially completed design. So there's that.
The other important thing to note is the F-35 concept was meant to address the sharply rising costs of building warplanes. By taking advantage of "economies of scale" in manufacturing, to build a multi-purpose plane that all three services could use. (so instead of building say; 100 of one design for the USAF, 100 of a completely different design for the Navy, 100 of a third design for the Marines, they'd build 300 planes - but manufacture variants off the same assembly line.) Adding to that scale was the baked-in "deal" to get NATO partners to commit to buying these planes as well. In that regard, it was kind of a stunning success (that they're actually serviceable; even if all three variants have shortcomings due to engineering trade-offs made for this manufacturing flexibility). At the end of the day, there were flaws that arose in the concept; like, the main central titanium bulkhead, which turned out to be FAR more costly to manufacture than was revealed when they built the prototypes. They just kind of "hoped" that the process for that part would end up being cheaper when scaled. And it wasn't cheaper-enough.
This makes is sufficiently different to the software development process discussion, that I think it's really an apples-to-oranges comparison.
Thanks for the great comment!
I am hard pressed to consider its development spiral (which requires frequent releases, if not as frequent as Agile). With an aircraft you really don't iterate on airframes the way you might even with OS releases.
> This makes is sufficiently different to the software development process discussion, that I think it's really an apples-to-oranges comparison.
Despite the prime's assertion that it was "spiral", really it was in the end a classic waterfall as I said. But you make a better point: is there really any other way with a mechanical device (especially as demanding a one as an aircraft)?
We do see coarse iterations with various adaptations of aircraft that change length, power plant etc (consider all the versions of 747, 737, A350, et al). It's a stretch to try to consider that spiral, much less agile. The iterations are slow, comprehensive (involving much interconnection) and not really back compatible. More like OS/360 releases (which is the origin of the waterfall metaphor).
I do remember the objective of the program, but it wasn't really grasped adequately (composable elements), a point I think you are making. And there was no feedback in the development process; rather the opposite, with Lockheed given essentially a blank check. The Clinton military-industrial-complex restructuring has a lot to answer for.
If engineering made more money than lawyering would the outcomes be better?