Vets Who Code

Tangent: I would love to see the US gov and military take coding seriously internally. It's nearly all outsourced to contractors, and the software is usually slow and buggy. I built some tools while in, but it was all bro-level.

The military could fix this internally if they wanted to. There are plenty of people who can write good code and don't mind doing push-ups and going to the range as well.

Dotgov is a lot harder. Salaries are artificially capped very low, and even one of these horrific contracting body shops will pay you 30% more than you'd make in the government, and you don't need to deal with all the bullshit that comes with working for the government.

The trouble is that outside things like CYBERCOM and the NSA, it's hard to pitch a use case for people in uniform to be slinging code. If anything, that just makes cybersecurity/counterintelligence harder, because you have a bunch of those bro-level apps running around, potentially poorly-built and secured by amateur coders. There's not much more justification for people in uniform building software tools than there is having them design and build artillery guns or transport jets. Better to buy those from industry and train folks in uniform to use them.

I don't disagree with how horrible a lot of DOD software is, but that's more an artifact of the broken military procurement process combined with the often-childish attitudes people in tech have about working with the military.

People in the military have normal jobs, not everyone is out in the field sending rounds downrange all the time.

There is no reason that one of those jobs can't be "software engineer." There is nothing intrinsic about the military that would make them "amateur coders."

It’s all part of an ideological attempt to stymie the ability of government to work effectively and then point to how government doesn’t work effectively to justify funneling money to politically connected contractors. It’s the modern version of patronage except that instead of getting jobs for the people in your clan, you get massive contracts for your donors which can be structured so that they’ll still be making money even if you don’t win re-election.

I'm well aware that not everyone is a trigger-puller; I had a twenty-year active and reserve career. Sure, you could technically have a software development MOS/NEC/AFSC. The Navy recently stood up a "robotics warfare specialist" rating.

My point is that, having spent a full career in, the "buy vs. build" calculus for military software tends to fall on the side of "buy" for any number of reasons. Those people who aren't "out in the field sending rounds downrange" are still doing plenty of other things in their assigned fields other than writing software. If you think there needs to be a software development career track in uniform, you need to be able to justify it outside the obvious places like CYBERCOM or the NSA.

I'll be honest this "conservatives hate the government so they don't fund it then they point to how bad it is as an excuse to cut it further" seems tautological and pretty intellectually lazy.

I've contracted onsite for both state and federal governments. Government employees have a reputation for... let's just say not hardest working. That didn't come out of nowhere.

Of course there are some people like that, but if what you say were true I would expect to see wages go up significantly under the Blue Team and then fall back to low levels under the Red Team, yet that doesn't tend to happen. My whole life it's been consistently true that government salaries are much lower, but some people take them because they offer a lot of stability, great benefits, and often a pretty easy/laidback job compared to private industry.

Oh they definitely have, and likely continue to re-evaluate periodically. They've even done a lot of tests and such to determine feasibility. Unfortunately the costs tend to balloon when done internally, and the quality is not necessarily better.

> There's not much more justification for people in uniform building software tools than there is having them design and build artillery guns or transport jets.

Yes exactly. I don't have much to add but that was such a great point I wanted to emphasize it.

Also important to consider that as wasteful and expensive as it is to have contractors build stuff, there's at least important market functions in there doing some things and the contractor can be held accountable.

A friend of mine was a uniformed programmer back when the Marine Corps had an MOS for that. He got out shortly after 9/11 and went on to become a Software Architect in the federal government. He actually has a very negative opinion of the concept of service member software engineers. I think his perspective is colored by his experience working for a Staff Sergeant who lat-moved into their MOS and was just completely useless as a programmer and by extension as a Team Lead or "Senior" Software Engineer. But the Marine Corps is notorious for abysmal Talent Management so YMMV...

Alas, the democrats have largely ceded the idea the idea that the government can do things as well and they fail to do things like fight for civil service wages that can attract the best employees.

My brother works in industry and has hired lots of Veterans. From what he says, the military tends to have paradigms that don't translate well to civilian work - like electricians. So I'd assume 'vets who code' have Perl 6 as their modern language.