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My years working on black programs
- knob 7y agoThat was an awesome read. Thanks for sharing!
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- chrisweekly 7y agoContext: secret US aerospace programs in the late 1950's and early 60's
- gnat 7y ago"My supervisor observed that I was anxious to learn new things. He assigned me to the Discoverer project to develop system schematics, interconnection diagrams, and wire harness definition. I was working for the Electrical Systems engineer. His was a very responsible and highly visible position. And like most engineers working in this new field, he was in his early 20’s, just three years older than me. There were senior engineers in management positions, but there were no senior spacecraft engineers. Everyone was learning on the job." Parallels to Silicon Valley are easy to find. It's a valid career path: if you want to progress fast, find a hot young area where there are no senior experts and work hard to keep up.
- markus_zhang 7y agoI'd assume nowadays it could be Cloud, AI? But thinking through, they do have some history.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- garmaine 7y agoNo, there are plenty of experts in those fields. Think things more like bitcoin.
- zatkin 7y agoQuantum information science, but I think this field is predicated on having a PhD.
- winter_blue 7y agoQuantum information science seems like something that will take many many years before it amounts to something. I remember reading that a quantum revolution in computing was just around the corner 12 years (in 2007), and only a month ago has any sort of "breakthrough" happened (referring to Google's "quantum supremacy/breakthrough[0]"). Considering this glacial track record, I'm very skeptical. [0] https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/10/29/20937930/google-quantum-supremacy-computer-physics-reset-podcast https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/10/29/20937930/google-quantu...
- Whirl 7y agoThis is becoming less true. The field is still very PhD heavy, but some employers definitely hire people right out of an undergraduate Physics or ECE degree. They end up effectively completing a PhD program on the job, but don’t get the fancy title. On the bright side, they get paid probably 3-4x more than the average grad student stipend. I think you’ll start to see more demand for non-PhDs as the various competing QIS players begin to standardize their architectures and practices.
- adrianN 7y agoQuantum computers seem to be barely out of the "we just invented a transistor" stage of development. No non-toy general purpose examples exist.
- BurningFrog 7y agoThat was 5-10 years ago. It needs to be something I've never/barely heard of.
- markus_zhang 7y agoDamn so it's basically luck...I mean even bitcoin was 10 years ago I think? Also nowadays you probably need to be a PHD to work on something really interesting.
- zarq 7y agoA lot of well-known, early programmers had PhD. Not all though.
- markus_zhang 7y agoMakes sense. But computers have a lot of interesting applications so maybe something will come out. For example gaming in the beginning, in 70s and 80s still attracted a lot of teenagers.
- PinkMilkshake 7y agoMaybe AR. I mean, look at Jeri Ellsworth, self taught and probably has the most plausibly commercial AR solution (Tilt Five) so far.
- samstave 7y agoim just amazed that Jared Lanier has found new-founded relevance. the first i read of him was ~1988 or so in Mondo 2000.... Now he is popping up all over...
- Animats 7y agoThat's clever. Nobody can draw dark in AR, which means overlays on the world have to be too bright and shiny. Ellsworth came up with a use case where the AR images always have a grey background, the blank game board. So this is much more workable than the more elaborate AR schemes. Cheaper, too, at $299.
- gen220 7y agoFrom where I’m sitting, it seems like most of the money to be made in the next 10 years won’t come from high tech, but rather from applying bang average tech (Python, React, Go, and standard AWS infra) to industries where the most experienced specialists have no concept of what those words mean (e.g. healthcare, agriculture, finance). There are huge opportunities to make these industries more efficient, and make money along the way.
- lifeisstillgood 7y agoPlease do expand - I agree with you but as usual am missing the extra connection?
- caro_douglos 7y agoI can’t speak for this person but it appears they’re making the case that a lot of value comes from giving some computer love to industries that gets no love but could benefit from a little tlc.
- gen220 7y agoI work at a company that intersects finance and healthcare. Our competitors to dominance through smart acquisitions, but this came at a fixed linear or super-linear operating cost per unit of growth. We are growing by identifying abstractions, and incorporating the new markets into existing ones. Their method was the best way to quickly grow a company to a national scale in the 60s, but it comes at the monotonically-increasing costs of internal coordination and duplicate work. Software allows you to grow gracefully, while avoiding those problems as they appear. As an example, we analyze inbound calls by volume every quarter to identify how we can anticipate user needs, and solve them ahead of time, without requiring a phone call (thereby improving the client's UX and saving operating cost). Every year, we reduce our call volume while simultaneously increasing our client headcount and improving the tools that are at our team's disposal. That kind of iterative optimization isn't possible at the big conglomerates. Look for industries that haven't figured this out yet, those are the ones where the money will be made; Stripe is a good example of this playing out in finance.
- hermitdev 7y agoI sort of started my career in finance like this. Never sought or intended to be on finance, but I could identify and solve problems the firm(s) I worked for that they didnt even know they had. Used to quip "when I'm doing my job well, noone knows that I exist. The moment I fuck up, everyone knows so exist."
- samstave 7y agoApropos username.
- youeseh 7y agoHow does billing / incentive / value based compensation work when you're invisible?
- smabie 7y agoYou often can get a lot of money I’d you threaten to leave. But in my experience, it’s a lot more profitable to work in the front office and have people know exactly how much money you have made for the firm.
- mcguire 7y agoPoorly. Unless you game the system, that is. If you ever see a "hero", they're either incompetent but putting in extra effort or setting up the events.
- walrus01 7y agoThis is sort of parallel to very young network engineers and NOC staff, in like 1996, discovering for the first time what an ASN is, what BGP4 is, etc. And the commercial growth of the modern Internet.
- edge17 7y agoWhat would those be in todays context?
- simonbyrne 7y agoDeep learning is the obvious answer: 10 years ago it was largely confined to a small number of research groups and niche conferences.
- friendlybus 7y agoMachine learning's hot moment was back in 2012, is there still low hanging fruit that google can't wipe out?
- marcoseliziario 7y agoEnterprises. Too many people doing this on startups already. But lots of money to be done with training and consulting in the corporate world.
- burning_hamster 7y agoThe behemoths don't (and can't) care about markets with a value below a certain threshold.
- strictnein 7y agoAreas in cyber security. Ex: Automating simple but highly repetitive tasks for incident responders will win you lots of friends and generate lots more opportunities if you want it.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- xouse 7y agoI think applications of AI to creating 3d modeling assets for videogames. Gaming is a >100 billion dollar industry and art can be as much as half of costs for AAA games. It seems to me like it's the lowest hanging fruit of AI in terms of difficulty vs potential revenue.
- vonmoltke 7y agoWow, if I'd had a situation like this when I was in defense I might still be there. Instead, I had managers old enough to be my father, no upward path until I "put in my time", and an attitude that wanting to move around within the company was "disloyal" to my current management.
- tnel77 7y agoI’m sorry to hear that. The defense companies I’ve worked for, big and small, have fought to retain employees. Whether it be the end of a contract or just wanting to change the type of work you are doing, these companies fought to find you another position versus taking your clearance to a competitor.
- JustSomeNobody 7y agoI hope people don't fixate on this and see this as the issue: > Instead, I had managers old enough to be my father... This... > ... an attitude that wanting to move around within the company was "disloyal" to my current management. ... is bad management and bad company culture and are the reasons you get older managers who are inflexible and just riding out a paycheck. Those are the areas to fixate on and if you see it, leave. Nobody should have to work under those conditions. Working for an older manager shouldn't (and rarely is), in and of itself, be a red flag.
- wcunning 7y agoI think it's slightly more complicated. Having an older manager/supervisor is not a bad thing. Working in a department where you need to have put in 12 years to become a supervisor is a problem. The old automotive company I work for released a "strongly recommended" schedule of different responsibilities that an engineer should have held for what time to be considered a strong candidate for promotion. There was a similar document I heard about for going from supervisor to manager. Combined these schedules said that no one would ever work their way up from entry level to department head. Ever. Therefore the only way to get there is outside of the official system via office politics, and not being honest about that is pretty dysfunctional on its own. That said, a symptom of that is the number of supervisors and managers who have 30+ years in...
- IvyMike 7y agoA while back, I watched and enjoyed a documentary about the Corona program mentioned in the article. I believe this is it: https://www.c-span.org/video/?321255-1/discussion-cias-corona-satellite-program https://www.c-span.org/video/?321255-1/discussion-cias-coron...
- madengr 7y agoThis is a good, lite technical read for those interested in stealth. https://www.amazon.com/Radar-Man-Personal-History-Stealth/dp/1450248020/ref=nodl_ https://www.amazon.com/Radar-Man-Personal-History-Stealth/dp...
- ElMono 7y agoThat looks interesting; adding that to my to-read list. Related to stealth, but less technical, is Ben Rich's "Skunk Works": https://www.amazon.com/dp/0751515035/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/0751515035/
- leroy_masochist 7y ago> "One of my early assignments was to lay out a printed circuit board. My electrical engineer gave me a schematic and identified each part type, be it a TO5 transistor, carbon resistor, tantalum foil capacitor, et cetera. My task was to fit all the components on a fixed size board and connect them according to the schematic with copper circuit runs on the back of the board." This sounds like it would be an incredibly satisfying job, especially given that there was constant variation in what he had to build
- pinewurst 7y agoIt’s interesting that things weren’t so siloed then, that a draftsman could be an ad hoc PCB designer.
- knolax 7y agoTBF a lot of what he did sounds like work that would be done by the autorouter on most electronics CAD today.
- rcxdude 7y agoAutorouting is still not generally used very much in PCB design. I suspect it could be used more than it currently is, but generally you spend a lot more time specifying design rules and the results are often quite poor.
- raverbashing 7y agos/siloed/high speed At today's circuits number of layers, speeds and frequencies it's impossible to do it by hand. Sure, you could train your average engineer to use Cadence/Mentor, etc but it's usually the design engineer that does capture and PCB routing.
- _wzsf 7y agoSlow != impossible.
- 7y ago
- pugworthy 7y agoI got in a conversation with my brother in law's uncle a few years back, and found out he spent a lot of time "back when" working out how to de-orbit the old Skylab station. Calculating drag based on how it was oriented (and how to orient it) to encourage de-orbiting just so. Still kind of amazing to think about how he did that. It's like trying to line up just the right bowling ball shot on a 1000' long lane. Remotely.
- audiometry 7y ago"After my clearance was granted, I moved into the main drafting room with about sixty other draftsmen, designers, and lofts men. (A loftsman develops full scale patterns, or drawings, of complex shapes.)" What does "develop full scale patterns, or drawings, of complex shapes" mean in the context that this is different from drawing blueprints like the draftsmen?
- inetsee 7y agoI believe loftsmen prepare full size drawings or patterns at 1 to 1 scale, whereas a blueprint may be at a reduced scale. I.e. a blueprint fits on a drafting table; the pattern created by a loftsman would go on a factory floor.
- NegativeLatency 7y agoComes from the ship building industry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lofting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lofting
- rwmurrayVT 7y agoNow it is common to use a laser tracker to take measurements and create full-size drawings. Spacial Analyzer really changed the game. NNSY has over 90 API laser trackers that they use.
- kilpikaarna 7y agoThe patterns would be for things like copy milling or cutting out complex pieces of sheet metal. Blueprints are schematic representations of parts/assemblies.
- inetsee 7y agoFor more recent information on a similar topic: https://www.americaspace.com/2012/06/06/top-secret-kh-11-spysat-design-revealed-by-nros-twin-telescope-gift-to-nasa/ https://www.americaspace.com/2012/06/06/top-secret-kh-11-spy...
- walrus01 7y agoConsidering that some individual NRO launches have had budgetary costs of $900m to $1.1bn for a single satellite and launch vehicle, it would be fascinating to know what kind of technology they're dealing with today. Lots of rumors about KH-11s and Misty, not much concrete info, for obvious reasons (it's all TS and codeword and higher). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_Kennen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_Kennen A few years back an unused mirror assembly that was near identical to Hubble was declassified. https://www.americaspace.com/2012/06/06/top-secret-kh-11-spysat-design-revealed-by-nros-twin-telescope-gift-to-nasa/ https://www.americaspace.com/2012/06/06/top-secret-kh-11-spy...
- throwaway2048 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_Office_space_telescope_donation_to_NASA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_O... Consider that the NRO very likely has at least a dozen superior to Hubble spy satellites orbiting as we speak.
- 2rsf 7y agoWhat capabilities will those (supposedly) satellites have ? read the small handwriting on the shopping list I have made through the apartment window at night ?
- marsRoverDev 7y agoPerhaps SAR with very high resolution too - allowing them to image at night and through cloud cover.
- habnds 7y agoI saw something once that explained how the powerful magnification seems silly until you account for the angles that things are at. The example they used was that license plates are vertical so to read them the satellite can't be directly above the car so it's actually a much further distance and greater magnification is necessary because of the atmosphere and the distortion of reading something at an angle.
- vincentmarle 7y ago> He told me that what I was about to learn, I could not discuss with anyone who was not also cleared for this information. I could not talk about this with family, friends, or other GE employees forever. I wonder if forever still applies...
- bluGill 7y agoYes. If you haven't been debriefed on the topic you haven't been told what parts of what you know are still public. I know a few ex-top secret people who will admit they worked with projects that we now know a lot of information on - but they refuse to say more than they worked on the project. They haven't been debriefed, so they won't even read a newpaper out loud if it touches their old project because they legally cannot talk about it even public information lest they leak something that hasn't been made public yet.
- lifeisstillgood 7y ago>>> But what about those people in the monkey lab? They believed this spacecraft was for their payloads. And they will never find out they are just a cover for the CORONA program. That as much as anything here seemed ... wasteful? cruel? Unlikely to fool anyone?
- Animats 7y agoThat was one of the more interesting black programs. Some of them are really boring. There are times when you get through all the security checks and see the thing, and see "they still have one of those running?" The famous Blue Cube in Sunnyvale, the USAF's satellite control center, was running 1960s technology well into the late 1980s. Now it's a parking lot for Google buses.
- DrScump 7y agoThe famous Blue Cube in Sunnyvale, the USAF's satellite control center I just got off westbound 237 at Mathilda an hour ago for the first time in years. It's so strange to see that entire side of the road leveled in the background. Blue Cube: gone. Lockheed building 101: gone. Lockheed building 102: gone. Five years of my career without a single physical artifact left.
- StringyBob 7y agoIf you liked this, here’s a talk by an engineer who worked on the camera systems of the next generation black program, after corona, hexagon: https://youtu.be/GtmtYlcPYYA https://youtu.be/GtmtYlcPYYA
- atlgator 7y agoDuring the Iraq War, everyone marveled at the great new technology behind the Predator drone to conduct surveillance and deliver ordnance during strike operations. Then it leaked that the Predator had been developed 15 years earlier and used successfully in Desert Storm. Cut to 2011 when we learned that the SEAL team that killed Osama Bin Laden used a stealth helicopter, something that no one in the world had any public success toward achieving, and we not only achieved it but were running classified missions with it. Based on those two examples alone, I estimate that the most secretive programs are 15 years more technologically advanced than we are in the public domain. AI and Quantum Computing come to mind as likely focus areas in addition to those already mentioned.
- wjnc 7y agoThe most interesting thing for me is: how do you keep all those bright minds with enough knowledge and experience from striking out on their own either in academia or in business? At the end of the day creating new tech is hard, replicating 'easy'. Or is it that the "15 yr ahead" simultaneously suggests it's about 15 yrs of work on your own to replicate? Perhaps they work with great compartmentalization? But compartmentalization suggests you don't need great minds, but just very good minds with good structure. That goes against what I think I know about innovation. It's quite fun fantasizing about a world within a world with better technology.
- batmenace 7y agoOn this subject, there is a very interesting new book about Jim Simmons, the founder of Renaissance Technologies, who used to work as a codebreaker in the US. I think for many of the people in these programs, the attraction is getting to solve problems beyond anyone else's reach, with tools beyond anyone else's reach.
- killjoywashere 7y ago> getting to solve problems beyond anyone else's reach more this, and less "tools beyond anyone else's reach". A fair number of people go to work with these groups to "check the box" that they've done it. They know who's at NSA, or CIA, or DARPA. Because they spent 2-5 years with them inside the box. There's a tremendous amount of self-confidence that comes out of a successful turn at one of these places. You know you know.
- rburhum 7y agoI love stories like this and have read several books around these topics, but always love to ask for recommendations when something like this gets posted in HNs. What is your favorite book around this topic?
- ThinkBeat 7y agoAs a person who has held various clearances through my career I wonder about this guy telling his story. It is interesting to read for sure,but he does say in that he promised not to talk about "forever". I have been given similar talks. Even if part of what you work on is declassified, it does not release you from the "forever" clause. I assume he has requested and been given permisson to talk freely about it.
- varjag 7y ago2019 in late 1950s was approximately "forever". Remember, Space Odyssey filmed 10 years later was taking place in 2001, already 18 years ago. We are that far in the future.
- 0xffff2 7y agoThat is absolutely not how the United States government thinks or operates.
- varjag 7y agoThe programs he worked on are declassified, so it absolutely does.
- 0xffff2 7y agoThat has nothing to do with your comment, but regardless it absolutely doesn't. Just because other people may be allowed to talk about it doesn't mean that you are.
- DrScump 7y agoNot every element of a declassified program is declassified, as there can be technologies shared with extant programs.
- acqq 7y ago> I assume he has requested and been given permisson to talk freely about it. I don't assume he has to be, and it's good that people who are that old aren't afraid to talk about what they did then. It's 50 years ago. To compare, General Groves was the military leader of a whole Manhattan Project published a whole book with the comparable amount of detail not even 20 years after the project, in 1962 ''Now It Can Be Told'': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Groves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Groves
- throw0101a 7y agoThe photograph: dat sliderule tho. Good tutorial on using one from a channel that focuses on the subject: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAGCDTtIahY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAGCDTtIahY