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The DoD could certainly use some technical help, and the leadership from ex (or current reserve/national guard aka "R/NG") officers and NCOs in tech jobs benefi

The DoD could certainly use some technical help, and the leadership from ex (or current reserve/national guard aka "R/NG") officers and NCOs in tech jobs benefits the tech industry. The issue is this - the American military Reserve/NG is not very truthful, in my experience, with the time commitments. The marketing slogan is "a weekend a month, two weeks a summer" of time commitment, or something to that effect. In reality, as a National Guard member you'll see commonly see month-long "activations" to go supplement active duty military training in Louisiana in February. You'll see 9 month deployments as R/NG are in fact part of the military and will deploy, and you'll go over there with a fraction of the training, funding and equipment but the same mission requirements as the funded, trained, and equipped active duty unit you replaced. This is somewhat akin to a FAANG hiring a suite of contractors and subbing them in to take over Google Search for a quarter or two. When your R/NG Soldier has domestic issues, you as the R/NG are on the hook to go help them quite literally. The list goes on... All for pretty bad pay, so-so healthcare, and a civilian employer who starts having an aneurism about the lack of managed expectations from you as it's not a weekend a month and some summer vacation time. To bring this back to tech - the situation above is very well known, and it coincides with the military's efforts to heavily ramp up its technical expertise via "software factories," civilian corps, direct-commissions into elevated ranks at higher pay if you're a technical SME like the military does with civilian doctors, and reserve units focusing on cyber or software development. Unless the military is able to fix that above, which anyone who has spent a shred of time in active duty military can confirm exists in one form or the other, the upside-down logic of R/NG service will keep good technical hires out... unless they really need the healthcare. The talented ex-military who go into tech stay out of R/NG efforts because of this, as serving actively would damage their career. I hope it is different in the UK! Edit - I will put a hopeful ending to this: the PLA's (CN mil) hackers go to "work" in an officer tower in a city, wearing civilian clothes, and (at the risk of speculation I don't enough about probably) work a 9-5 or if they're up late, it's for a mission. I say this with some background in the US version of ex-mil in tech: the moment the DoD and Federal agencies enable its technical hires to go to work in NY, Seattle, or SF in a fiber-equipped office building (or really just not rural West Virginia/North Carolina/Alabama/Mass), can meet at least 60% of private sector pay with some tax benefits perhaps, and gets sane about past civilian marijuana use re: getting a security clearance, they will have more technical patriots signing up than they can handle processing. It's really just this simple. The FBI was trying to hire talented CS students out of college with a great opportunity to go work in their brand new facility for tech that they built in.... Huntsville, Alabama.

akamia 5y ago
This is spot on. I had a coworker who was in the reserves and the commitment was significantly more than what they say in the brochures. He was often gone for weeks at a time. This made it really difficult for him to progress because he was never able to start AND finish any major projects. Our manager really tried to support him but going through a promo process without any good examples of execution is nearly impossible. Even raises and bonuses were tough because our company's policy in these circumstances was to default their rating to "meets expectations". The company didn't want to penalize people for their service but it also meant he usually didn't get anything above the average rating. Middle of the road salary adjustments and bonuses. Not bad but not great.
- dogman144 5y ago
  Ya, it's a real organizational management and national service tragedy. So much of the technical modernization is getting pushed towards the R/NG units, and you can just see how that will go short/mid term. This is paired with a common refrain from vets in tech that the pay and lifestyle is great but the work is pretty empty, so they'd look to do something else. But, they also know the meaningless silliness they'd sign up for by going back into the R/NG, let alone active duty. So, they land in defense contractors or SV startups doing defense tech, and straddle a middle ground that's not much better. The good ones won't go to the big defense contractors either. Therefore, given that the recruitment target is a populace that has lived fairly simple lives in duty stations around the US, are happy earning something over $100k and calling it a day, and have pretty firm moral views on the importance and value of service the inability to capture this population back into public service due to the lack of any form of sane incentives is maddening to watch. Even discussing the pay is hard - the general populace and their representatives in congress (I say this reading OPEDs via them, although it is def anecdotal) can't believe that $70k is too low pay for an engineer to leave private sector. I'll stop this rant here, but my dream is someone in power finally starts understanding it's only (1) pay, (2) work geography matching modern tech centers, (3) drug policies from the 1950's keeping the talent out in aggregate.
Upgrayyed_U 5y ago
Thank you for posting this. I'm a USAF vet and former reservist and guardsmen. Most of the rest of the comments here are FUD, but this one actually captures one of the biggest challenges of balancing military service with a developing career. Here's the actual reality on the ground, from someone who's been in and around the military for ~ 20 years: - A surprisingly high percentage of military personnel share views that would fit right in with the HN crowd. They are largely anti-war and anti-interventionists but continue to serve for a variety of other reasons. What you see on TV and TikTok is often a gross mischaracterization of who military people are and what they think. - The military is an amazing escalator for the poor and lower middle-class. I know plenty of folks who started out as junior airmen making less than $25k a year in their early 20s who are solidly upper-middle class/rich millionaires in their 40s. Sure tech affords you the same opportunities these days, but that wasn't necessarily the case when the folks were getting started 20 years ago. - As a rule, you generally have a lot of freedom when deciding which assignments to take as a reservist or guardsman, at least on the Air Force side. There are usually more volunteers for missions than their are slots available for people to go into. From my understanding, this is much less true on the Army side, where they will often deploy an entire unit on a mission. Anyone assigned to the unit most go, with few exceptions. - The benefits are generally better than what the HN crowd are representing here. It's pretty easy to get a 4-year degree from a good (and occasionally great) school with little or no out-of-pocket expenses. You can also buy a house up to $650,000 in most areas (with adjustments for even higher cost-of-living areas) with $0 down and no PMI payment. You've captured most of the downsides here. But for me, the biggest downside was that the military (at least during the time I served) has an extremely poor record of properly recognizing talent within its ranks. I worked with a lot of folks who could and often did land cushy jobs in SV. But back in their military jobs, they often were tasked with menial jobs that failed to take advantage of their talents. Yes, there are leaders that can and do recognize talent in their ranks. And the Air Force isn't nearly as hierarchical and directive as folks here would have you think. But rank still matters. I left when the delta between my "rank" in my civilian career and my military rank became to big to bear.

akamia 5y ago

This is spot on. I had a coworker who was in the reserves and the commitment was significantly more than what they say in the brochures. He was often gone for weeks at a time. This made it really difficult for him to progress because he was never able to start AND finish any major projects. Our manager really tried to support him but going through a promo process without any good examples of execution is nearly impossible. Even raises and bonuses were tough because our company's policy in these circumstances was to default their rating to "meets expectations". The company didn't want to penalize people for their service but it also meant he usually didn't get anything above the average rating. Middle of the road salary adjustments and bonuses. Not bad but not great.

dogman144 5y ago
Ya, it's a real organizational management and national service tragedy. So much of the technical modernization is getting pushed towards the R/NG units, and you can just see how that will go short/mid term. This is paired with a common refrain from vets in tech that the pay and lifestyle is great but the work is pretty empty, so they'd look to do something else. But, they also know the meaningless silliness they'd sign up for by going back into the R/NG, let alone active duty. So, they land in defense contractors or SV startups doing defense tech, and straddle a middle ground that's not much better. The good ones won't go to the big defense contractors either. Therefore, given that the recruitment target is a populace that has lived fairly simple lives in duty stations around the US, are happy earning something over $100k and calling it a day, and have pretty firm moral views on the importance and value of service the inability to capture this population back into public service due to the lack of any form of sane incentives is maddening to watch. Even discussing the pay is hard - the general populace and their representatives in congress (I say this reading OPEDs via them, although it is def anecdotal) can't believe that $70k is too low pay for an engineer to leave private sector. I'll stop this rant here, but my dream is someone in power finally starts understanding it's only (1) pay, (2) work geography matching modern tech centers, (3) drug policies from the 1950's keeping the talent out in aggregate.

Upgrayyed_U 5y ago

Thank you for posting this. I'm a USAF vet and former reservist and guardsmen. Most of the rest of the comments here are FUD, but this one actually captures one of the biggest challenges of balancing military service with a developing career. Here's the actual reality on the ground, from someone who's been in and around the military for ~ 20 years: - A surprisingly high percentage of military personnel share views that would fit right in with the HN crowd. They are largely anti-war and anti-interventionists but continue to serve for a variety of other reasons. What you see on TV and TikTok is often a gross mischaracterization of who military people are and what they think. - The military is an amazing escalator for the poor and lower middle-class. I know plenty of folks who started out as junior airmen making less than $25k a year in their early 20s who are solidly upper-middle class/rich millionaires in their 40s. Sure tech affords you the same opportunities these days, but that wasn't necessarily the case when the folks were getting started 20 years ago. - As a rule, you generally have a lot of freedom when deciding which assignments to take as a reservist or guardsman, at least on the Air Force side. There are usually more volunteers for missions than their are slots available for people to go into. From my understanding, this is much less true on the Army side, where they will often deploy an entire unit on a mission. Anyone assigned to the unit most go, with few exceptions. - The benefits are generally better than what the HN crowd are representing here. It's pretty easy to get a 4-year degree from a good (and occasionally great) school with little or no out-of-pocket expenses. You can also buy a house up to $650,000 in most areas (with adjustments for even higher cost-of-living areas) with $0 down and no PMI payment. You've captured most of the downsides here. But for me, the biggest downside was that the military (at least during the time I served) has an extremely poor record of properly recognizing talent within its ranks. I worked with a lot of folks who could and often did land cushy jobs in SV. But back in their military jobs, they often were tasked with menial jobs that failed to take advantage of their talents. Yes, there are leaders that can and do recognize talent in their ranks. And the Air Force isn't nearly as hierarchical and directive as folks here would have you think. But rank still matters. I left when the delta between my "rank" in my civilian career and my military rank became to big to bear.