well yes you need to keep the aerospace and engineering pipelines full if you ever need to actually go to war. So boeing and all the other chumps making gravy is part of the deal in downtime
That is asinine, what do you think happens to those institutions when incompetence is what gets rewarded. The real threat to the US military is not the lack of weapons, or that the F35 is not as good or as cheap as it could have been, it's because it is a lumbering bureaucracy full of people who couldn't get better jobs elsewhere.
The most qualified candidates for what? 100% of people in the military have passed the ASVAB. And the most capable people in the military are EXTREMELY intelligent.
The problem is unlocking that brilliance in an organization which has LOTS of office politics, cross currents, uncoordinated long term goals, too many interests who get to requirements to every project, etc.
And the biggest problem is that everything the US military decides long term needs sign off by Congress, so there is always a political dimension to every project approval. Congress laughs at the F35 as the “world’s largest jobs program” with components built in just about every member’s district. The A10 is unlikable because Congress wants to keep it around, even though the AirForce thinks it’s cheaper (logistically) and safer to use other aircraft for the role. Not everybody is thinking about the same factors.
These capabilities don't stick around for free. A corporation isn't going to keep around design staff doing nothing. Even if you move the design staff to the military stuff, you still need to give them work or their skills atrophy.
Incentives matter and incentivizing bugs in software is a very bad idea, it’s how you forget how to write software without so many bugs. And what was the point of it all, it was obvious even back then that the future was cheap missiles / drones.
> it's because it is a lumbering bureaucracy full of people who couldn't get better jobs elsewhere.
I don’t think that they exploit the military industrial complex for personal job security and fortune makes it likely that they’re incompetent. In fact, as a society we seem to praise those who are exceedingly successful at such exploitation, and even elect them to the highest levels of government and hang onto every word they say.
I work at a small consulting firm that focuses on business software. My best consultants are not programmers by trade. Some worked up from help desk to IT Manager or CTO, some were accountants and learned enough about ERP imports they took a leap. A good way to do this is to work at a consulting firm. You will learn within a few years how to deal with dozens to hundreds of clients, how to keep an organized client file, manage quoting, billing or delivery of projects from end to end. How do deal with upset customers, how to close a sales call, you will do it all and you will be constantly learning. You will implement a client at one company that works and call up another company and pitch them the same idea, software or tool (I have clients doing AI.....) or whatever it is.
You will become tool agnostic. you will see to the end. you will find tools to do it.
So a good way to go independent is to go into a consultancy based business - you will get a feel for AR, AP, contracts and so forth in a way that you won't really often see at a service provider, ISP, software company or SaaS tech company.
This is not new either. Most of numpy and pandas and other stuff you use the Python C interface and pass arrays in and get data back. You can write small embeddable C libraries pretty easily for real crunching and you get the ease of writing python (basically comprehensible to researchers who understand The MATLAB )
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