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Lockheed has an opening for engineers with VAX experience for the F22
- aosmith 7y agoHere's the backstory: http://web.archive.org/web/20100310163744/http://www.stsc.hill.af.mil/crosstalk/2000/05/moody.html http://web.archive.org/web/20100310163744/http://www.stsc.hi...
- stickfigure 7y agoWow. Reminds me of a joke my dad repeated to me many years ago: Software saved the aerospace industry. Every other way of adding cost to an airplane also adds weight. He spent most of his career at Lockheed and Rockwell.
- butteroverflow 7y agoI guess storing all those 1's also adds some weight. It costs on the order of antimatter if you think of it. What's it like, $50 million per 1 billionth of a gram, or so?
- anyfoo 7y agoThe only storage medium I can spontaneously think of where 1s are heavier than 0s is punch cards. I hope that is not the current primary storage method in the aerospace industry.
- rudolph9 7y agoNo but it’s a good... punch... line haha
- sgillen 7y agoWell... technically most hard drives should change weight depending on their contents: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/31326/is-a-hard-drive-heavier-when-it-is-full https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/31326/is-a-hard-...
- anyfoo 7y agoOh wow. And now that I read this, it dawned on me that any memory technology that is based on storing charge (like DRAM) will have actual, albeit also very very theoretical, mass differences depending on bit value as well...
- lwansbrough 7y agoThe internet weighs about 50 grams: https://youtu.be/WaUzu-iksi8 https://youtu.be/WaUzu-iksi8
- mrob 7y agoHard disks use a run-length limited encoding, so the number of magnetic 1s and 0s remains roughly constant no matter what logical 1s and 0s you store. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run-length_limited https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run-length_limited
- wumms 7y agoNit-pick: 0s (no hole) are heavier than 1s (hole). http://www.punctum.com/interest/punch/index.en.html http://www.punctum.com/interest/punch/index.en.html
- anyfoo 7y agoTrue, I should have said “weight difference”.
- DrStalker 7y agoSome storage systems work by holding a charge, and electrons have mass. In practical terms it night as well be 0 but in silly discussions on the internet terms it's a very small non-zero value.
- taurath 7y agoNow you've got me thinking about a hash checking algorithm by weighing the punch cards hah
- stillworks 7y agoInteresting thought. Weighing can add an extra level of indirection ! Thinking a bit more... the same can be done in software too ?
- dmurray 7y agoWeighing would only be slightly better than a simple parity check (a one-bit hash). It misses common errors like transposing two adjacent characters. However, you can get any number of additional bits by suspending the punch card from various locations along its perimeter, and measuring the angle at which it hangs.
- throw0101a 7y ago> punch cards Is hanging chad a 0 or a 1?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- phkahler 7y agoThey're in superposition.
- throw0101a 7y agoSchrödinger's bit.
- dougmwne 7y agoIs there any kind of energy, (and thus mass) associated with the decreased entropy of structured data files on a data storage device vs random noise? I don't recall the thermodynamics of data storage being covered during my college physics class.
- ineedasername 7y agoThis is why I always advocate for the use of specialized negative binary using 0 and -1 for weight-sensitive embedded products. For optimum weight characteristics you flip all unused storage space to -1. Careful though, too much empty space formated this way will result in negative gravitational pull and something like an Arduino with a high capacity SD card will float away.
- foobarge 7y agoContrasts with "Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight." - Bill Gates
- dotancohen 7y agoThe way that the fine article was worded, it seems that the engineering team knew that they needed approximately 1.5M LOC before they has started. How could they have known that? Or is it simply poorly worded? > The ATF Team planned to develop approximately 1.5 million source lines of code, across more than 20 software development companies located throughout the U.S., Canada, and Europe.
- metaphor 7y agoSystem engineers in the defense industry have an insidious infatuation with SLOC metrics. To the detriment of many a development engineer, CMU SEI hasn't developed a better way to keep them preoccupied.
- aosmith 7y agoAlso seems pretty low for a team that size. I would love to know their cost per line...
- stcredzero 7y agoIn aerospace, a hyphen might well be worth $80 million. https://priceonomics.com/the-typo-that-destroyed-a-space-shuttle/ https://priceonomics.com/the-typo-that-destroyed-a-space-shu...
- dotancohen 7y agoWhy is the URL referring to a space shuttle, when the vehicle lost was an expendable Venus probe (Mariner I)? It wasn't even the probe that failed, but rather the Agena (second stage on top of the Atlas) that failed.
- bigiain 7y agoSomebody had a development budget, they looked up how much software developers cost, and how many lines of code per day they write, and BINGO! we have a contractual business requirement for ((budget + 20%) / dev-day-rate * LOC-per-day) lines of code.
- 7y ago
- IloveHN84 7y agoWhat about Antivaxxers? /S end of sarcasm
- IndrekR 7y agoDevelopment of F22 started in 1980's. Last VAX machines were manufactured in 2005. There is quite a lot of VME bus based legacy (but speciallized and working) measurement and test equipment still around. I have no involvement in the project, so can not tell for sure; yet would be surprised if any of this is part of the flight hardware.
- lallysingh 7y agoUp until the mid 1990s similar machines (TurboChannel DECs) were required as personal workstations for my university.
- ncmncm 7y agoApple used to use VME bus, I think. It was Advanced, then. Now it's, technically, Retarded.
- kalmes 7y agoWow. It takes tens of system engineers writing hundreds of requirements to do something as crazy as write a new 1.5 Mloc software system on VAX in the 90s. Any smaller team wouldn’t have considered it.
- eccbits 7y agoThis is surely about VME industrial bus, not about VAX processors or computers.
- metaphor 7y agoThe only mention of VAX/VME from the job post: > Experience with troubleshooting equipment such as Pass1000/5000 1553 bus monitor, fiber-optic test equipment, digital storage oscilloscopes, and familiarization with the VAX/VME based computing environment. Seems apparent to me that the context is development+ATE environment; VME is likely VXI interface to ATE instrumentation. In any case, the VMS and/or VME angle to this job post is the least of any prospect's concerns.
- Taniwha 7y agoI wondered if that was a typo and they meant VAX/VMS (DEC's OS that ran on the Vax)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- snowwindwaves 7y agoDo the job requirements really need to list ms excel and office three times?
- gumby 7y ago"What I tell you three times is true" https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Hunting_of_the_Snark https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Hunting_of_the_Snark
- anilakar 7y agoYou better know your pivot tables, son.
- audiometry 7y agoAnd you need to be a "self starter"....
- Loughla 7y agoI hate those HR phrases for reasons that I believe are my own, maybe others share them. Sure, it's a meaningless phrase and no one is going to say, "I'm not a self-starter, I hate figuring out what to do with my time I wish someone would just hand me a list of things". Or maybe very few people are going to do that. What upsets me the most about phrases like 'self-starter' or 'motivated' or all that other HR shit, is that somewhere, someone (or more likely several someones) sat in a room and decided, consciously, that if they didn't say those words, that if they didn't flat out state that they wanted a self-starter, then the outcome would logically be they would only get lazy applicants. Phrases like that are treating the world like it is full of people who would swallow their own socks, on accident, if only we were given the chance.
- carlmr 7y ago>Phrases like that are treating the world like it is full of people who would swallow their own socks, on accident, if only we were given the chance. I'm guessing those people went into HR and are projecting.
- proy24 7y agoI think all engineers with VAX experience are extinct ...or retired.
- metaphor 7y agoHope you're prepared to swallow; I can think of several dozen young engineers across 5 states (California, Indiana, Florida, North Carolina, and New Jersey) with VAX/OpenVMS domain expertise, myself included. Legacy systems with 30-year lifecycles are a thing...they're just not what most of commercial industry is accustomed to supporting. If you think LM would have an issue filling this position internally (for the right price), you'd be mistaken.
- dvdbloc 7y agoSo a couple of the comments here have been mentioning the high pay of people with specialties like this in the context of LM and other defense contractors. My impression from Glassdoor and general conversation with software developers has been the DCs pay pretty low for software in general compared to FAANG or even other engineering companies. Is it true that people with obscure specialties at places like LM can command high salaries? Or have I been misled that LM pay is on the lower side? Or is it all relative?
- Spooky23 7y agoI don’t work in the space or DC, but have worked with people who are in this industry. It’s a career job usually, and many of these folks work in out of the way places. If you’re pulling down $120k in some suburb of Omaha, you’re doing very well. The career path and security is important as well. A FAANG won’t hire a 45 year old technical SME. There’s also an academic/industry connection. You may wear multiple hats if you're affiliated with the university, a lab, or a company. I met at least one person who was a professor at a major school, did work at a sponsored lab or think tank (ie. MITRE, RAND Corp, etc), and did some work over a sabbatical for a big name-brand defense contractor.
- raverbashing 7y ago
- keyle 7y agoI had a VAX class for a year. All I remember from it was the smoking teacher, non stop, who's beard was sort of white, sort of orange, from the nicotine. Oh, and the retarded VAX implementation. I went into design after that.
- urban_winter 7y agoI started my career working for British Aerospace in 1989. We used VAX/VMS as our development platform (Code was CORAL 66 and then ADA). I spent some time supporting the Sea Harrier flight test operations - so I would have fitted this job perfectly about 28 years ago!). I'd like to say that I'm astonished that modern aircraft still use the 1553 bus, but nothing surprises me when it comes to the use of stone-age tech in military hardware. For example, the other Harrier I worked on in the early 90s (GR-7 - same as US AV8B) still used core memory.
- Phlarp 7y agoThat's insane. A 3d matrix of ferrite rings suspended by wire would seem (to me) somewhat sensitive to vibrations or gforces. Military gonna military I guess.
- anyfoo 7y agoThe same technology was very successfully used to fly to the moon. Cores aren’t so much suspended when they are wholly embedded in epoxy.
- jackfraser 7y agoStupid question, but the cores don't physically flip, do they? It's a purely electrical thing?
- muzika 7y agoYes
- gattilorenz 7y agoIt's the magnetic field that flips, the ferrite cores remain in place
- m463 7y agoI think it's just clockwise vs counterclockwise.
- 3xblah 7y ago[oops]
- Rebelgecko 7y agoIt looks like the opening was posted in 2018
- dagenix 7y agoFrom right at the top of the article, in the easiest place to find: "Date posted: Jul. 31, 2018"
- chrisco255 7y agoBasic Qualifications: • Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Computer Science or related technical focus. • Experience in COMM and Navigation. • Avionics experience • Experience with aircraft operations. • Microsoft Office I love the MS Office req at the end. "Yes, we see you've got a BS in engineering, you're an expert at avionics and COMM control systems, but do you know anything about MS Word?"
- roedog 7y agoIt indicates that writing and editing thousands of pages of documentation will be contractually required. Word proficiency can save a lot of pain for everyone on that team.
- Merrill 7y agoAn acquaintance who worked in QA for a foundry producing alloy castings for the aerospace industry swore they shipped a greater weight of paper than metal.
- makach 7y agoI, absolutely, positively reacted to that requirement as well! What a wonderful addition to the qualification requirements! Maybe 1/5 is enough for someone to apply? Makes you wonder what superhuman will get the job.
- metaphor 7y agoYou're reading the job description all wrong...you've got to think like a hiring manager in the defense industry to make any sense of it, i.e. reverse qualification priorities and the actual job you'll be hired to perform will become crystal clear.
- lokimedes 7y agoAS a Systems Engineer in the Defense industry I completely agree. It is only because we talk about a maintenance role that DOORS doesn’t come on the list with Word.
- dvdbloc 7y agoSo a couple of the comments here have been mentioning the high pay of people with specialties like this in the context of LM and other defense contractors. My impression from Glassdoor and general conversation with software developers has been the DCs pay pretty low for software in general compared to FAANG or even other engineering companies. Is it true that people with obscure specialties at places like LM can command high salaries? Or have I been misled that LM pay is on the lower side? Or is it all relative? (Reposting at the top level because it makes more sense to hopefully get more discussion)
- structural 7y agoDefense contractors are similar to other companies that (strongly) do not believe that software is their product and do not value it any further than that it is a small component in the large system they are delivering. There's a lot of old-school attitudes still present: for example, I've heard software developers referred to as "software typists" a number of times. Basically there are two entirely different paths here. For example, the person who writes all the software to drive the cockpit displays is probably called something like a "cockpit avionics engineer" and is organizationally in the department that's responsible for building such things. These people can get paid very well. On the other hand, a "software developer" is much more likely to be a support function. Lots of maintenance of legacy stuff more than anything, and what actual development work exists might be nothing more than taking an algorithm directly from a standard and implementing it in whatever language is required by the project. These roles are not particularly well-paid and have a lot of turnover. It is a very different world.
- vonmoltke 7y ago> Basically there are two entirely different paths here. For example, the person who writes all the software to drive the cockpit displays is probably called something like a "cockpit avionics engineer" and is organizationally in the department that's responsible for building such things. I don't know how Lockheed organizes, but I assume it is similar to Raytheon. Raytheon had a matrix organization where the rows are functional groups (e.g., software engineering, digital electronics engineering, RF engineering) and the columns are program teams (e.g., radar power supply, radar antenna, radar signal processor). The title you describe would align with a program group, but your "official" title would come from your functional group (which would be software engineering in this case). > These people can get paid very well. In the absolute. For software engineers, it's pretty average. I was writing some pretty cutting-edge embedded signal processing software when I left Raytheon in 2012, and I was getting paid $85,000/year with 9.5 years of experience. Based on my trajectory, I would have been at around $120,000 now had I stayed. This was in Dallas, so it was good money compared to the COL, but I could have made slightly more at just about any other larg-ish employer in the area. That said, I both sucked at and hated the internal political games at Raytheon, so perhaps I could have done better if those weren't true.
- ch_123 7y agoISTR that the avionics code is written in Ada, and runs on top of Intel i960 processors, and that the Ada compiler for that target only runs on VAX/VMS (not even OpenVMS, but specifically VMS on the VAX).
- vonmoltke 7y agoISTR? Anyway, the processors in the F-22A are a mix of different cores. The power supply in the Gen 3 radar used a MIL-STD-1750A processor. The PICC[1] processor modules also used the MIL-STD-1750A originally, but moved to a newer processor in a refresh (if I remember correctly). I don't know what the non-Raytheon components of the plane were using. As for the compiler, you are spot-on. We had a MicroVAX in a vault (it was a cleared computing system) just in case we needed to recompile the embedded software for the power supply controller. [1] Unfortunately, I don't remember what this acronym expands to.
- cushychicken 7y ago"I Seem To Recall"
- rtkwe 7y agoHuh never seen that before. Seems like a upmarket version of the more common (to me) IIRC (If I Recall Correctly).
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Sephr 7y agoPICC stands for Processor, Interface Controller and Communication (PICC) Programs Manager
- jki275 7y agoThey're moving rapidly away from ADA, as the mandate to use it has been rescinded. C++ 11 is the new standard.
- nabla9 7y agoModern is relative. F-22's first flight was 1997. F-35 development started in 1992, first flight of X-35 was 2000 and F-35's first flight was 2006. There is absolutely noting wrong with using old technology. Being modern just for the sake of being modern is wasteful.
- hestefisk 7y agoNo Microservices, no Kubernetes. Lame.
- gibspaulding 7y agoThink how much money we could make back selling skins for the control interfaces to pilots!
- bwilli123 7y agoand for every 'kill' a dancing banana.
- mikeash 7y agorequire(‘left-stick’)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- orf 7y ago`docker pull` after a failure mid engagement
- throwayEngineer 7y agoFaster development time? Lower energy costs? Cooler? Faster?
- akiselev 7y agoIt's a supersonic air superiority jet. The amount of energy needed and heat generated is a rounding error compared to the heat from supersonic flight and the powerplant's output (base fuel burn of thousands of lbs an hour). In the case of war birds, newer technology does not mean faster development time. In order to qualify electronics for a weapon that needs to be stealthy and resistant to electronic warfare you need decades of operational data on all of the major electronics components. Any system that gets upgraded to newer technology has to go through risk assessments and that often requires tons of data collection before you even get started.
- noneeeed 7y agoReminds me of my first job out of uni, 18 years ago. I was working on the SPARK toolset, and one of our customers was the Eurofighter, who still used VAX VMS for their development. We had to maintain an old Micro VAX box in the office to periodically test that the toolset still worked on it. I seem to remember that the massive regression test suite that would run in a few hours every night on a PC would take days on this box. Our main worry was that one day we'd turn it on and the drive would fail to spin up. I seem to remember there being a periodic reminder to just turn the damn thing on and let it boot every so often, then shut it down, just to make sure the drive was still ok.
- walshemj 7y agoYou should have left it on 24/7 this is what we did for our Pr!mes (a VAX competitor) disk drives.
- ProxCoques 7y agoVAX? Like - what? The one introduced on October 25, 1977??
- bhaavan 7y agoSecurity through obfuscation. Lockheed, good morning!
- oldsklgdfth 7y agoI had a job maintaining fortran code on an openVMS OS running on itanium hardware. Itanium was intel's failed attempt at a 64bit architecture and that's the platform VMS decided to port to. That made hardware expensive and as of recently obsolete (i think hp discontinued that integrity line of servers) VMS doesn't natively support TCP/IP, because it predates it. The VMS communication protocol was called decnet. So you can imagine that porting vms-specific fortran code to work on a modern network stack was non trivial. Also, everyone with VMS knowledge was a hacker. No real design or plan, just go in an change a thing here and a thing there and get it working. All that being said, it was interesting to work on an OS that is so different from linux, specifically the file system had versioning.
- TheOtherHobbes 7y agoVMS had some really nice features - mostly forgotten now that it's all 'nix, all the time.
- vaxman 7y agoNot totally ;) https://www.rs-online.com/designspark/a-raspberry-pi-vax-cluster https://www.rs-online.com/designspark/a-raspberry-pi-vax-clu... You know, I should apply for that Lockheed job just to get shutdown for being in my 50s and not having touched a VAX since my 30s (because, you know, it's changed so much since then rofl)
- zentiggr 7y agoI was a data wrangler for a large retail company that put a microVAX in each store for pricing and stock tracking, about the same time as scan guns were first introduced. It helped me get that job that my dad had worked at DEC for years and I had an RT-11 system sitting on my bedroom desk for years. Knew VAX ops fairly well then. Also about 30 years ago.
- vaxman 7y agoThat's outrageous... 1. RE: FORTRAN. VAX FORTRAN was the most awesome implementation of FORTRAN ever. FORTRAN because these systems didn't have much RAM and CPU power was limited. FORTRAN went into the background for a while when the C fad began in the early 1980s; however, academics cringed at C for reasons that the industry would eventually learn "the hard way" and FORTRAN came back along with a government knee-jerk reaction called Ada and a pile of 4GLs starting with DATATRIEVE --up until processors and RAM allowed for more productive use of more powerful "safe" language systems (Java, C#, Python, Swift). 2. RE: ITANIUM. DEC created VAX/VMS for the break-thru 32-bit VAX-11 architecture and then ported it to its break-thru 64-bit Alpha architecture and rebranded it as OpenVMS. The Alpha chip was really powerful, but it was produced only by DEC's Hudson chip plant (which also produced the StrongARM chip whose descendants are in all of the smartphones). To address the customer need for a second supplier for that chip, DEC began to shop around the Alpha architecture to other semiconductor manufacturers. One of those was Intel --which decided not to become a second source and a little while later, announced the Pentium series that revived its ALL BUT DEAD x86 architecture using patented concepts found only in DEC's Alpha chip. There was a lawsuit and the settlement was that Intel would buy the Alpha chip and Hudson plant. This resulted in the Itanium architecture, which the then owner of DEC (HP) decided to embrace for OpenVMS and its other HP operating systems. As the Pentium chip gained momentum, Intel realized it would be more profitable to use the tech to make X86_64 architecture. Meanwhile, Microsoft, which was all but ready to dump the ALL BUT DEAD x86 architecture (in favor of MIPS and PowerPC), pivoted with Windows NT and released full support for X86_64. Considering that Windows NT was developed by the original computer scientists behind VMS and considering the dominance of Windows on the desktop and the low cost of X86_64 hardware (due to economies of scale), it was no surprise that Itanium fell out of favor, and OpenVMS along with it (though there were many heroic efforts to "rescue" OpenVMS from that dead architecture, HP had no real interest --at least not in time). 3. RE: VMS TCP/IP. This cracked me up. I wrote one of the first TCP/IP stacks for VAX/VMS on a VAX-11/780 using InterLAN hardware. You are correct that VMS pre-dates TCP/IP --but dude it was only by like 1-2 years! VMS was uses with XNS/ITP (upon which TCP/IP was based). TCP/IP is le grand garbage --as the entire planet knows now and DEC had bet heavily on something called OSI to replace DECnet. But some f'n jack head named Vincent Cerf created an async implementation for TCP/IP that allowed the bazillion Windows PC to hop on the Internet (what could go wrong) and that quickly became Microsoft RAS which destroyed the universe quickly. All of the stable and secure networking systems died. Bill Gates was interviewed at one point and responded to a question about what the biggest unexpected development had been with a dumb look saying he had failed to predict the sudden end of distance-and-time based pricing for data communications. So now, dude in St. Petersburg can show off his genetic superiority by hacking the microcode in the Intel Ethernet controllers in your laptop from 8,000 miles away at virtually no cost. Enjoy! 4. VMS knowledge are hackers. This is among the most outrageous comment I've read on the Internet. VMS was all about structure and discipline. If you weren't a computer scientist (or college student) you weren't even getting a job working on one! What you probably observed had nothing to do with VMS but just maintaining legacy code in general. 5. RE: "interesting". VMS was the most powerful operating system ever created well into the modern era. You can imagine that the guys creating Windows NT at Microsoft (who previously developed VMS for DEC back East) were not being allowed to create the true successor to VMS --the idea was to get something working on small cheap PCs that would be sold to all of the small businesses, not on continuing to perfect the product of 30 years of engineering (as VMS descended from their prior RSX11 and RT11 operating systems) as they had been doing first to the 78032 "chip" and later to the Alpha processors. I think around 2015, Windows, Linux and MacOS finally began to pull away from where VMS was (back in 1990). One can only imagine how powerful VMS would have become when run on something like the MacPro 7,1 that Apple announced. In conclusion, true industry leaders, many of whom did not support VMS back in the day (because they were forced to embrace crummy UNIX System 3, V and BSD "hacks" for lack of access to the incredible DEC engineering resources), will tell you that VMS (and TCP/IP) are stories of lost art that severely setback the pace of mankind's development. The reasons are many: Bill Gates' well known BS, Vincent Cerf's destructive efforts to advance PPP, alleged theft of intellectual property by Intel that set off the downward spiral of DEC, skyrocketing memory prices due to market manipulation and Carly "That Face" Fiorina. Consider yoh-self schooled.
- Damogran6 7y agoDid I use DEC and VAX stations? Yes I did. Would I want to relive that period of time? No I would not. Is that muscle on my face twitching due to PTSD? Yes, Yes it is.
- inetsee 7y agoI worked for Lockheed Martin for more than a decade and I have many of the qualifications listed, including VAX experience and a special access clearance. Of course, Lockheed laid me off fourteen years ago and I retired three years ago, so I guess I won't be applying.
- magduf 7y agoYou should apply, and demand an insanely-high salary while pointing out that almost no one has VAX experience now.
- gigatexal 7y agoWhere is the salary listed?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- inetsee 7y agoWhen we retired my wife and I fled Atlanta at top speed. I don't know if the job is in Marietta, GA or Ft. Worth (the job listing seems to have disappeared) but I doubt if even an insanely high salary could get us to move to either of those locations.
- magduf 7y agoWell, what I was thinking is that you live in an AirBnB or other short-term rental for 6 months and then quit. Some consultants work this way: only working for 3-6 months on a gig, getting paid a fortune (plus extra for living expenses because they're not relocating, just living there temporarily), and then leaving. If the company really needs the work done that badly and there's no qualified help willing to take it full-time, then this is a viable option. If there's no qualified help and they're not willing to go for a deal like this, then the work just doesn't get done.
- jfb 7y agoIt's at Edwards.
- Isamu 7y agoHmm, makes me wonder why I let that experience drop off my resume. Oh yeah ...
- g00s3_caLL_x2 7y agoThey claim this is for the F22, but I wonder if some enemy tech has been 'obtained' and they want to backward engineer it? The wiki page shows some stats of a plane that is (publicly) 22-23 years old and VAX is 42 years old. To me, that math does not add up. Just a curious thought.