Vets Who Code

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."

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.

> 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.

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.