SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Sen. John McCain pens an opinion piece on Wired:
America's military technological advantage is eroding—and fast.
For the past decade, our adversaries have invested heavily in rapidly improving their militaries to counter our unique advantages. At the same time, the speed of globalization and commercialization means that advanced disruptive technologies are now—and increasingly will be—available to less sophisticated militaries, terrorist groups, and other non-state actors.
Maintaining our military technological advantage is about much more than a larger defense budget or a better fighter or submarine. These things are important, but to give our military the capabilities it needs to defend the nation, the Department of Defense must be able to access innovation in areas such as cyber, robotics, data analytics, miniaturization, and autonomy, innovation that is much more likely to come from Silicon Valley, Austin, or Mesa than Washington.
[...] There are those who say that even with changes like these, our nation's innovators simply aren't interested in doing business with the Pentagon. And after spending much of my career in Washington scrutinizing Pentagon business practices, I am not exactly surprised to hear such sentiments. But in the final analysis, I believe the brightest minds will always be driven to solve the world's toughest problems. These are the problems our military confronts every day. And these are the problems we can solve if we create an acquisition system that enables the Department of Defense to take advantage of the best minds, firms, and technologies that America and the world have to offer.
Original Submission
(Score: 4, Interesting) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Thursday June 11 2015, @03:56PM
You're right. Not only that, but ... even if you got a job, it would be a crappy temp job with a contractor. The contractor would skim a huge chunk of your salary, plus you'd only have a job for 6 or 12 months. You couldn't have a career. The military doesn't hire anyone themselves, at least not many people. They contract everything out.
Any intelligent person would look at (1) having to live in the DC area (VA, MD, etc) which is crowded and high cost of living, (2) have a series of temp jobs, and (3) have a contractor skim off the top of their pay, and ... probably not be interested.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 3, Informative) by Grishnakh on Friday June 12 2015, @01:25AM
This isn't interesting, this is horribly misinformed and even dumb.
First off, the DC area isn't remotely as expensive as Silicon Valley, but countless engineers have no problem living there. DC isn't any more expensive than NYC either (quite a bit cheaper in fact, especially in Northern Virginia), and again, lots of engineers and IT people live in or near NYC (usually working in finance, and lots in web development and advertising. So the DC area is a complete red herring.
Second, government contracting jobs are not temp jobs, they're usually permanent. They're also usually very stable jobs. Government contracts go on for years. And they're pretty safe, because you don't have to worry about H1-B competition. As for "skimming", as a salaried contractor you're paid a salary, just like any other permanent job. If the offer sounds good, what do you care about "skimming"? That difference is what the company gets for coordinating projects, bidding on them, and of course all the other overhead any normal employer does for you: equipment, IT systems, etc. Being a government contractor is nothing like being a "contractor" (an employee who has a limited-duration work term, usually 6 or 12 months, and does not get benefits usually). You're a regular employee; it's your employer which is contracted to the government.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 12 2015, @03:37AM
I feel I must correct this: defense contracting is a cyclical industry. When we're in the middle of a war, times are good. When we are winding one down, contracts do not get renewed. Those multiyear govt contracts (for most of us) have basically gone away at this point and much of it is 3 months of work at a time which may or may not get renewed for another three, and even if it does, some govt bureaucratic snafu can mean the renewal gets "held up" for a month, for no discernable reason...
Whatever it is, it is not stable.
Even though you hold a "full time, salaried" position at your defense contracting company, you only have a job so long as your company's govt contract (by nature, something that is temporary) is in effect and the govt is paying. So you kind of are a temp worker.