8 ms·

I worked for Sandia. Pay is pretty good by almost any standards except FAANG. The glory days where every staff member got a real office with a real door are ove

by floren 4y ago

I worked for Sandia. Pay is pretty good by almost any standards except FAANG. The glory days where every staff member got a real office with a real door are over (shared offices are the norm) but it's still a pretty decent work environment. Things don't move fast, as another commenter said. In my area of work, projects tended to last 1-3 years and you'd be on several projects at any given time. In general, it is ICs rather than managers who run the projects. Your manager might say "Bob over in 9876 has a neat project that could use somebody like you, send him an email if you're interested". You have to acknowledge that the core mission of the DOE National Labs is nuclear weapons. You might not ever come in contact with the mission, but it is there. They have strong HPC programs--because HPC as we know it is basically driven by the need to simulate nuclear weapons. Some people have moral objections to this, and that's fine! I thought it was a good place to work, all in all. Edit: I'd like to stress that probably the biggest advantage of the labs is the opportunity for self-directed work. If you can convince somebody (external sponsors, internal R&D funding committees) to give you money, you can work on just about anything. If you can't get funding of your own, you are still more or less able to choose what you work on. Your work environment will depend highly on which group you're in. Some groups look like a university department without the students: you work in the unclassified area, you publish papers, you can even open-source software (with some effort). Other people spend their whole day in a windowless SCIF working on very sensitive stuff which they can never, ever discuss outside of a SCIF -- but while their public visibility is nil, their impact is arguably greater.

kbarros 4y ago
I'm a computational physicist at Los Alamos and would echo these sentiments. Note that there are two main types of DOE labs: NNSA (Sandia, Los Alamos, Livermore) and Office of Science (Brookhaven, Berkeley, Oak Ridge, Argonne, ...). Although the former is more focused on "nuclear weapons stockpile stewardship", there is still much basic science at all DOE labs, especially where computer science meets physics and other domain sciences. Perhaps relevant to HN, I would mention the Applied Computer Science group at Los Alamos, which is in hiring mode (https://www.lanl.gov/org/ddste/aldsc/computer-computational-statistical-sciences/applied-computer-science/index.php https://www.lanl.gov/org/ddste/aldsc/computer-computational-...). Besides supporting computational physicists in code development efforts, this group does a variety of researchy things like designing programming model, doing compiler development, building ML models, especially with an eye towards large scale scientific computing. The pay at a DOE lab is less than FAANG (PhD student interns might be around $80k/yr and starting staff scientists maybe $130k/yr), but the tradeoff for some people would be the research-flavor of the work, and the flexibility. Many of the LANL codes being developed are open source, for example. Other DOE labs have similar computer science divisions. For example, Oak Ridge, Argonne, and Berkeley all have "leadership computing" facilities.
- shrimpx 4y ago
  Curious, is there room at LANL for a senior full-stack generalist engineer who hasn't necessarily been doing published research work? I've looked at LANL Careers and can't gauge how biased you guys are toward research backgrounds.
  - manimino 4y ago
    LANL definitely needs and uses generalist engineers. I interned there as one, many years back. Standard CRUD-app stuff to help the lab do its main goal of nuclear stockpile stewardship. But it will help if you enjoy research culture. The location is rather isolated and you will probably be friends / co-workers with people doing research. (I say this because not everyone likes being around PhDs; I've met several people in software who disdain academics.)
- fooker 4y ago
  Do you have an insight into the career trajectory in the labs for international students with a PhD from an US university? I have heard it’s easy to get fixed term positions and incredibly difficult to get a permanent one.
- graderjs 4y ago
  But you can only work for these labs if you're a US citizen, am I right? :) Also are there any such labs or outposts in Hawaii? Would be a great beautiful place to live
  - helsinkiandrew 4y ago
    You need to get security clearance for most roles - even a joint citizenship may be problematic: Sandia is required by DOE to conduct a pre-employment drug test and background review that includes checks of personal references, credit, law enforcement records, and employment/education verifications. Applicants for employment need to be able to obtain and maintain a DOE Q-level security clearance, which requires U.S. citizenship. If you hold more than one citizenship (i.e., of the U.S. and another country), your ability to obtain a security clearance may be impacted. Applicants offered employment with Sandia are subject to a federal background investigation to meet the requirements for access to classified information or matter if the duties of the position require a DOE security clearance. Substance abuse or illegal drug use, falsification of information, criminal activity, serious misconduct or other indicators of untrustworthiness can cause a clearance to be denied or terminated by DOE, resulting in the inability to perform the duties assigned and subsequent termination of employment.
rcpt 4y ago
My friends who worked there say that the job was great but living in a remote science outpost made dating unbelievably difficult
- kbarros 4y ago
  The town of Los Alamos is beautiful, but it's small. It can be a great place if you already a have family that enjoys outdoors activities. Many people prefer to commute from Santa Fe (45 min drive with mountain views, negligible traffic). Certain groups allow a flexible hybrid home/office working mode. https://www.usnews.com/news/healthiest-communities/articles/2020-09-22/the-healthiest-county-in-america-los-alamos-new-mexico https://www.usnews.com/news/healthiest-communities/articles/...
  - neltnerb 4y ago
    I was only a guest scientist at LBL, but LBL is practically in Berkeley. But yeah, generally I assume this is true, though you may just find that you need a car and that if you have one it's not so bad. For instance, NREL (where I was also briefly a guest scientist) is in an incredibly gorgeous area near Golden which isn't super small but everything is still very spread out and it'd take a while to walk anywhere for sure. I guess it also depends on your definition of "middle of nowhere" I suppose. Golden is hardly Oakland, but I am pretty sure I could find people to date as long as I included Denver... and if you have a car in Colorado you will find that Denver is considered close to a lot of things you might not at first consider it close to. It's only an hour drive from Boulder (where I lived and drove to NREL as needed).
    - worthless-trash 4y ago
      Guest Scientist makes you sound like a celebrity, that kinda tickles a part of my brain that makes me smile.
      - neltnerb 4y ago
        In this case it just meant I was being paid by someone else and convinced them to let me do stuff on their campus. But glad it made your smile ;-)
screwturner68 4y ago
I've worked at a few DOE sites albeit as a consultant not an FTE, Fermi, Los Alamos and a couple others. You are correct that the work is interesting and a like academic atmosphere, it was the academic atmosphere part that I found off putting. Where I worked there was very much a hierarchy and if you didn't have a PHD your opinion didn't matter much, you just did what you were told. Having a couple of decades of experience and being brought in to spin them up on their system and being talked down to on a daily basis like I was a Sophomore in college was really annoying -that said I'm a consultant so I get paid to be annoyed by the people who hire me. Aside from that I liked working there, the tech was cool, as far as the moral issues I don't ask nor do I want to know about what I'm working on -I don't have a need to know.
- neilv 4y ago
  Sounds similar to what I mentioned in comments a couple months ago, about science organizations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33673259 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33673259 (I'm not familiar with DoE sites. And I actually had a good experience (other than the pay), as a high-end federal consultant doing challenging technical work, reporting to operations research PhDs at the Director level, who respected what I could do. Where I've seen and heard of problems is other places.)
- randcraw 4y ago
  Having worked in R&D at a big pharma for 17 years and in university HPC groups for 10, I echo these comments. I've found that corporate R&D is essentially investigative (rather than production driven), and as an IC computational scientist (or data scientist) you will move from project to project over the years, usually working solo 95% of the time. You will have some opportunity to propose projects, especially in partnership with scientists (in pharma, those are chemists or biologists or work to improve manufacturing). But without a PhD, advancement along the technical track will be limited. If you're not embedded in a science R&D group, you will be lumped in with general IT staff where tech support, database management, or software development of products are prized by management, but tackling individual R&D questions is not (though it is tolerated by IT brass since they know investigation is critical to finding & improving drugs). I found the same limitations when I worked in R&D-based military contracting (or for US gov't FFRDCs for various agencies). There it's more important to develop a strong relationship with the gov't client, irrespective of the academic degree you have.
MadVikingGod 4y ago
I worked, as a civilian, for part of the R&D arm of the Navy, but it has a very similar feel to what you have posted. I would 100% agree with everything you have said, except the pay. One thing I will add is getting tools and resources to do the work you want to do can be a challenge. There can be times when getting through the process to buy a $75 multimeter can be more difficult then the $16,000 signal generator.
- sthu11182 4y ago
  I also worked as a civilian for the Navy as an EE (b.s.). I think my pay was ~50k (in the mid 2000s). I don't know about the national labs, but my experience working for the navy was that funding was a fight, especially everything being siphoned off for the Afghanistan war. The equipment was pretty up to date (the computers were not the latest, but decent), the furniture was a mismatch collection of liquated stuff, lab reports were published to a confidential library, and we were on flex time, which made the hours great.
  - thewildginger 4y ago
    The greatest secret of government work is the hours. With the federal holidays, work celebrations at restaurants or bars, long lunches, you already work 30 hours a week.
dqpb 4y ago
Is there a lot of work left in nuclear weapons?
- exmadscientist 4y ago
  Plenty! Among other things, they literally decay over time, and that's fundamental to and completely inseparable from the way they work. Plus for some reason people always want them to be smaller and cheaper and more reliable.
  - floren 4y ago
    Plus, we're not allowed to actually blow them up to test any more, so they do all that in simulation on the world's biggest supercomputers. This leads to work in HPC system software, kernels, compilers, programming languages, HPC libraries, and so on.
    - xxpor 4y ago
      ZFS-on-Linux (now OpenZFS) comes out of LLNL, for example.
    - Barrin92 4y ago
      probabl a lot of that stuff is very sensitive but are there any good books people can recommend on that type of work at the intersection of programming/ (nuclear) weapons development?
scheme271 4y ago
Not all DOE national labs do weapons stuff. For example, Fermilab (FNAL) is pretty much all open science research. FNAL doesn't even have fences and the guard booth just checks to make sure you have a drivers license if you're driving. Argonne and Brookhaven are a bit more on the defensey side but not as much as say oak ridge or sandia.
- acidburnNSA 4y ago
  Idaho National Lab and Oak Ridge National Lab are pretty focused on power reactors these days. I have a lots of friends at Argonne National Lab, and some of them work on entirely open source exascale reactor projects like: https://github.com/openmc-dev/openmc https://github.com/openmc-dev/openmc (ANL) https://mooseframework.inl.gov/ https://mooseframework.inl.gov/ (INL) https://www.anl.gov/mcs/nek5000-computational-fluid-dynamics-code https://www.anl.gov/mcs/nek5000-computational-fluid-dynamics... (ANL) Cool shit.
- ocdtrekkie 4y ago
  Having spent some time inside Fermilab's campus, I got the impression a large portion of their purposes in watching visitors was for their own safety more than the security of the facility.
funajoy 4y ago
Worked at Sandia National Laboratories from 1990-2013 in ABQ/NM, after 10 years in the Silicon Valley (CA Bay Area). I was recruited as a PM in Nuclear Energy to lead joint, cost-shared programs with the US Power Industry. Worked in tech. leadership roles in many areas including Homeland security, Intelligence, Nuclear Deterrence and Emergency Response Readiness, Global Security and Leading a remote test site within a USAF Base. All Missions of National Importance. Had opportunity to help shape national policy and strategy, team with allies and work with some of the smartest technical minds. Great R&D resources and funding. It's world's largest engineering R&D organization with current annual budget of >$4 billion and a workforce of ~15,000 professionals. Having a MS or Ph. D. from top ten schools used to be requirement for entry. Salary is competitive, with excellent benefits including 10% 401K match since they no longer offer pension. No stock options, profit-sharing and other tech industry perks. However, excellent work-life balance, stability, working in different tech. areas with best minds w/o having to relocate and start over again, and wonderful quality of life, especially in NM if you love outdoors. Employees are not government employees. It's a government owned contractor operated (GOCO) FFRDC, a non-profit. Like any big organization, there is a fair amount of beaurocracy and people issues to deal with. Having a team of former "A" students and ranking them is not conducive to teamwork although for all large projects or initiatives, it's a must. Multi-displinary teams range in size from a few to 100's and are spread out in many locations around the country. Opportunity to interact with Wasington lawmakers and agency e ecutives. Recommend exploring opportunities at Sandia.gov
- ActorNightly 4y ago
  >Salary is competitive Competitive to the rest of government, sure. Its a joke given the total industry standards though.
- graderjs 4y ago
  I found this whole thread really interesting. Maybe I have no idea but I’m wondering about interlab collaboration culture: is there like competition and maybe some lack of cooperation or grudging cooperation between labs? Sort of in the same sense that you get that stereotypical lack of information sharing between different government departments in other fields? Or it’s much more collaborative than the government bureau analogy (modulo classification/ project restrictions)?
sytelus 4y ago
Are you allowed to publish papers (for non-sensitive basic science/CS)? Do you have to relocate?
- floren 4y ago
  I published papers and I published open-source software, but not everybody does. Depending on your work, you may have to relocate; if you are doing any classified work, you should count on it. I also think there's a much clearer path to starting on-site and then after a few years transitioning to a fully-remote position -- one problem is that it's not 100% clear where you're going to end up when you first hire on, whether you're going to work on classified or unclassified projects etc.
gorgonical 4y ago
I did an internship at Sandia this past summer, specifically on the HPC programs. Being a PhD student, the pay for that internship was excellent, and the cost of living in ABQ is low. I lived somewhere that I could bike to my office. My manager was excellent and a technical staff member and really understood how to manage other technical staff; no pointless meetings, hands-off, and tried at every turn to shield us from boring administrative non-sense. The work was interesting, though my experience was very skewed as I was working on a solo project. I met weekly with my "mentor" to discuss where I was and if I needed support, but I was working nearly entirely solo. Like the parent comment here says, from what I learned the norm is that you work on many projects -- my mentor certainly was. Even in the department meetings it was clear that while we were unified under a general theme, each person in the department was working on their own, many projects. My work was entirely unclassified, and my understanding is that most of the people in my department worked on projects with similar levels of classification. My office building looked like every other building and infosec and opsec requirements were pretty mild; wear your badge, don't photograph things, don't tell people any specifics about what you do. I was offered to stay on as a full-time intern as part of the hiring pipeline and if it weren't for that it's in ABQ I would have strongly considered it -- the work was very interesting and also like the parent comment says, you are largely in control of what you do there. It's a lab first, not a defense weapons company, so research is the name of the game for the department I worked in.
- floren 4y ago
  > I was offered to stay on as a full-time intern as part of the hiring pipeline This is a big deal and it's something people currently in school should consider: At least at Sandia, we loved the internship programs because it was a really well-defined way to do a trial-run with potential employees. After 3 or 6 months, we'd have some idea if the intern was actually any good, and they'd know if they liked the environment or not. This is important because hiring sucks and firing really sucks. So if you're in school and you're looking for an internship, consider the labs. Also consider that, in my experience in a CS group at Sandia, startups and FAANGs really liked to hire Sandians away, so it can be a good springboard even if you only spend a couple years there. Also look into the Scholarship For Service program.
inasio 4y ago
NetworkX came out of LANL circa 2004, it probably is still being developed from there
jongjong 4y ago
Disappointing that it's so rare for knowledge workers to get their own offices nowadays. About 7 years ago, I did a 6 months contract where I had my own office and it was great. Nowadays, knowledge workers are treated like cattle. There's just so many of us. Knowledge and intelligence used to be precious, now they're treated as cheap commodities. Also, there are a lot of people who are working in knowledge fields who have no curiosity at all - They seem to be doing it entirely for money and/or status - These people are absolutely awful to deal with if you care about the work. They couldn't care less for the work and are all too happy to throw the project under the bus to protect their status and keep playing the role of the big boss in a bad movie. Stakeholders couldn't care less either; so long as they can keep finding investors to pour money into their pointless projects, they don't care if the project leaders are incompetent.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  >Also, there are a lot of people who are working in knowledge fields who have no curiosity at all - They seem to be doing it entirely for money and/or status What's wrong with doing something for money? You make it sound like a bad thing. Do you think the janitor cleans your toilet because they find the work so intellectually stimulating? The work needs to get done, and most people would rather watch TV or go on a walk or play a sport or read a book or countless other things instead of slaving away at someone else's project, so society uses money to motivate them to devote their time and attention to that thing. You sound like one of those people who think that knowledge workers should work for peanuts just because the work is so interesting.
  - jongjong 4y ago
    Nothing wrong doing certain things only for money. We've all been there. But if someone pursues knowledge for the sole purpose of getting money or power, their knowledge ends up being corrupted because they are driven by self-interest and not by truth. You can't see the truth if you are overly focused on your personal self-interests as the two often don't align. It creates a bias and corrupts your knowledge. Then later you will teach your corrupted knowledge to others...
dclowd9901 4y ago
Is there a scientific arm of research I could go into as a software engineer that, by its nature, can’t be transmogrified into murdering millions of people?
- thewildginger 4y ago
  At national labs they need software engineers to build internal tools for scientists in different fields. DOE labs are not all murder building machines, in fact most aren't. They do all kinds of research depending on the location. DOE national labs are a big tent.
- Theory42 4y ago
  Where's the fun in that?
- robotresearcher 4y ago
  Medicine generally has the opposite objective, and has plenty of funding and impact.

by floren 4y ago

kbarros 4y ago

I'm a computational physicist at Los Alamos and would echo these sentiments. Note that there are two main types of DOE labs: NNSA (Sandia, Los Alamos, Livermore) and Office of Science (Brookhaven, Berkeley, Oak Ridge, Argonne, ...). Although the former is more focused on "nuclear weapons stockpile stewardship", there is still much basic science at all DOE labs, especially where computer science meets physics and other domain sciences. Perhaps relevant to HN, I would mention the Applied Computer Science group at Los Alamos, which is in hiring mode (https://www.lanl.gov/org/ddste/aldsc/computer-computational-statistical-sciences/applied-computer-science/index.php https://www.lanl.gov/org/ddste/aldsc/computer-computational-...). Besides supporting computational physicists in code development efforts, this group does a variety of researchy things like designing programming model, doing compiler development, building ML models, especially with an eye towards large scale scientific computing. The pay at a DOE lab is less than FAANG (PhD student interns might be around $80k/yr and starting staff scientists maybe $130k/yr), but the tradeoff for some people would be the research-flavor of the work, and the flexibility. Many of the LANL codes being developed are open source, for example. Other DOE labs have similar computer science divisions. For example, Oak Ridge, Argonne, and Berkeley all have "leadership computing" facilities.

shrimpx 4y ago
Curious, is there room at LANL for a senior full-stack generalist engineer who hasn't necessarily been doing published research work? I've looked at LANL Careers and can't gauge how biased you guys are toward research backgrounds.
- manimino 4y ago
  LANL definitely needs and uses generalist engineers. I interned there as one, many years back. Standard CRUD-app stuff to help the lab do its main goal of nuclear stockpile stewardship. But it will help if you enjoy research culture. The location is rather isolated and you will probably be friends / co-workers with people doing research. (I say this because not everyone likes being around PhDs; I've met several people in software who disdain academics.)
fooker 4y ago
Do you have an insight into the career trajectory in the labs for international students with a PhD from an US university? I have heard it’s easy to get fixed term positions and incredibly difficult to get a permanent one.
graderjs 4y ago
But you can only work for these labs if you're a US citizen, am I right? :) Also are there any such labs or outposts in Hawaii? Would be a great beautiful place to live
- helsinkiandrew 4y ago
  You need to get security clearance for most roles - even a joint citizenship may be problematic: Sandia is required by DOE to conduct a pre-employment drug test and background review that includes checks of personal references, credit, law enforcement records, and employment/education verifications. Applicants for employment need to be able to obtain and maintain a DOE Q-level security clearance, which requires U.S. citizenship. If you hold more than one citizenship (i.e., of the U.S. and another country), your ability to obtain a security clearance may be impacted. Applicants offered employment with Sandia are subject to a federal background investigation to meet the requirements for access to classified information or matter if the duties of the position require a DOE security clearance. Substance abuse or illegal drug use, falsification of information, criminal activity, serious misconduct or other indicators of untrustworthiness can cause a clearance to be denied or terminated by DOE, resulting in the inability to perform the duties assigned and subsequent termination of employment.

rcpt 4y ago

My friends who worked there say that the job was great but living in a remote science outpost made dating unbelievably difficult

kbarros 4y ago
The town of Los Alamos is beautiful, but it's small. It can be a great place if you already a have family that enjoys outdoors activities. Many people prefer to commute from Santa Fe (45 min drive with mountain views, negligible traffic). Certain groups allow a flexible hybrid home/office working mode. https://www.usnews.com/news/healthiest-communities/articles/2020-09-22/the-healthiest-county-in-america-los-alamos-new-mexico https://www.usnews.com/news/healthiest-communities/articles/...
- neltnerb 4y ago
  I was only a guest scientist at LBL, but LBL is practically in Berkeley. But yeah, generally I assume this is true, though you may just find that you need a car and that if you have one it's not so bad. For instance, NREL (where I was also briefly a guest scientist) is in an incredibly gorgeous area near Golden which isn't super small but everything is still very spread out and it'd take a while to walk anywhere for sure. I guess it also depends on your definition of "middle of nowhere" I suppose. Golden is hardly Oakland, but I am pretty sure I could find people to date as long as I included Denver... and if you have a car in Colorado you will find that Denver is considered close to a lot of things you might not at first consider it close to. It's only an hour drive from Boulder (where I lived and drove to NREL as needed).
  - worthless-trash 4y ago
    Guest Scientist makes you sound like a celebrity, that kinda tickles a part of my brain that makes me smile.
    - neltnerb 4y ago
      In this case it just meant I was being paid by someone else and convinced them to let me do stuff on their campus. But glad it made your smile ;-)

screwturner68 4y ago

I've worked at a few DOE sites albeit as a consultant not an FTE, Fermi, Los Alamos and a couple others. You are correct that the work is interesting and a like academic atmosphere, it was the academic atmosphere part that I found off putting. Where I worked there was very much a hierarchy and if you didn't have a PHD your opinion didn't matter much, you just did what you were told. Having a couple of decades of experience and being brought in to spin them up on their system and being talked down to on a daily basis like I was a Sophomore in college was really annoying -that said I'm a consultant so I get paid to be annoyed by the people who hire me. Aside from that I liked working there, the tech was cool, as far as the moral issues I don't ask nor do I want to know about what I'm working on -I don't have a need to know.

neilv 4y ago
Sounds similar to what I mentioned in comments a couple months ago, about science organizations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33673259 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33673259 (I'm not familiar with DoE sites. And I actually had a good experience (other than the pay), as a high-end federal consultant doing challenging technical work, reporting to operations research PhDs at the Director level, who respected what I could do. Where I've seen and heard of problems is other places.)
randcraw 4y ago
Having worked in R&D at a big pharma for 17 years and in university HPC groups for 10, I echo these comments. I've found that corporate R&D is essentially investigative (rather than production driven), and as an IC computational scientist (or data scientist) you will move from project to project over the years, usually working solo 95% of the time. You will have some opportunity to propose projects, especially in partnership with scientists (in pharma, those are chemists or biologists or work to improve manufacturing). But without a PhD, advancement along the technical track will be limited. If you're not embedded in a science R&D group, you will be lumped in with general IT staff where tech support, database management, or software development of products are prized by management, but tackling individual R&D questions is not (though it is tolerated by IT brass since they know investigation is critical to finding & improving drugs). I found the same limitations when I worked in R&D-based military contracting (or for US gov't FFRDCs for various agencies). There it's more important to develop a strong relationship with the gov't client, irrespective of the academic degree you have.

MadVikingGod 4y ago

I worked, as a civilian, for part of the R&D arm of the Navy, but it has a very similar feel to what you have posted. I would 100% agree with everything you have said, except the pay. One thing I will add is getting tools and resources to do the work you want to do can be a challenge. There can be times when getting through the process to buy a $75 multimeter can be more difficult then the $16,000 signal generator.

sthu11182 4y ago
I also worked as a civilian for the Navy as an EE (b.s.). I think my pay was ~50k (in the mid 2000s). I don't know about the national labs, but my experience working for the navy was that funding was a fight, especially everything being siphoned off for the Afghanistan war. The equipment was pretty up to date (the computers were not the latest, but decent), the furniture was a mismatch collection of liquated stuff, lab reports were published to a confidential library, and we were on flex time, which made the hours great.
- thewildginger 4y ago
  The greatest secret of government work is the hours. With the federal holidays, work celebrations at restaurants or bars, long lunches, you already work 30 hours a week.

dqpb 4y ago

Is there a lot of work left in nuclear weapons?

exmadscientist 4y ago
Plenty! Among other things, they literally decay over time, and that's fundamental to and completely inseparable from the way they work. Plus for some reason people always want them to be smaller and cheaper and more reliable.
- floren 4y ago
  Plus, we're not allowed to actually blow them up to test any more, so they do all that in simulation on the world's biggest supercomputers. This leads to work in HPC system software, kernels, compilers, programming languages, HPC libraries, and so on.
  - xxpor 4y ago
    ZFS-on-Linux (now OpenZFS) comes out of LLNL, for example.
  - Barrin92 4y ago
    probabl a lot of that stuff is very sensitive but are there any good books people can recommend on that type of work at the intersection of programming/ (nuclear) weapons development?

scheme271 4y ago

Not all DOE national labs do weapons stuff. For example, Fermilab (FNAL) is pretty much all open science research. FNAL doesn't even have fences and the guard booth just checks to make sure you have a drivers license if you're driving. Argonne and Brookhaven are a bit more on the defensey side but not as much as say oak ridge or sandia.

acidburnNSA 4y ago
Idaho National Lab and Oak Ridge National Lab are pretty focused on power reactors these days. I have a lots of friends at Argonne National Lab, and some of them work on entirely open source exascale reactor projects like: https://github.com/openmc-dev/openmc https://github.com/openmc-dev/openmc (ANL) https://mooseframework.inl.gov/ https://mooseframework.inl.gov/ (INL) https://www.anl.gov/mcs/nek5000-computational-fluid-dynamics-code https://www.anl.gov/mcs/nek5000-computational-fluid-dynamics... (ANL) Cool shit.
ocdtrekkie 4y ago
Having spent some time inside Fermilab's campus, I got the impression a large portion of their purposes in watching visitors was for their own safety more than the security of the facility.

funajoy 4y ago

Worked at Sandia National Laboratories from 1990-2013 in ABQ/NM, after 10 years in the Silicon Valley (CA Bay Area). I was recruited as a PM in Nuclear Energy to lead joint, cost-shared programs with the US Power Industry. Worked in tech. leadership roles in many areas including Homeland security, Intelligence, Nuclear Deterrence and Emergency Response Readiness, Global Security and Leading a remote test site within a USAF Base. All Missions of National Importance. Had opportunity to help shape national policy and strategy, team with allies and work with some of the smartest technical minds. Great R&D resources and funding. It's world's largest engineering R&D organization with current annual budget of >$4 billion and a workforce of ~15,000 professionals. Having a MS or Ph. D. from top ten schools used to be requirement for entry. Salary is competitive, with excellent benefits including 10% 401K match since they no longer offer pension. No stock options, profit-sharing and other tech industry perks. However, excellent work-life balance, stability, working in different tech. areas with best minds w/o having to relocate and start over again, and wonderful quality of life, especially in NM if you love outdoors. Employees are not government employees. It's a government owned contractor operated (GOCO) FFRDC, a non-profit. Like any big organization, there is a fair amount of beaurocracy and people issues to deal with. Having a team of former "A" students and ranking them is not conducive to teamwork although for all large projects or initiatives, it's a must. Multi-displinary teams range in size from a few to 100's and are spread out in many locations around the country. Opportunity to interact with Wasington lawmakers and agency e ecutives. Recommend exploring opportunities at Sandia.gov

ActorNightly 4y ago
>Salary is competitive Competitive to the rest of government, sure. Its a joke given the total industry standards though.
graderjs 4y ago
I found this whole thread really interesting. Maybe I have no idea but I’m wondering about interlab collaboration culture: is there like competition and maybe some lack of cooperation or grudging cooperation between labs? Sort of in the same sense that you get that stereotypical lack of information sharing between different government departments in other fields? Or it’s much more collaborative than the government bureau analogy (modulo classification/ project restrictions)?

sytelus 4y ago

Are you allowed to publish papers (for non-sensitive basic science/CS)? Do you have to relocate?

floren 4y ago
I published papers and I published open-source software, but not everybody does. Depending on your work, you may have to relocate; if you are doing any classified work, you should count on it. I also think there's a much clearer path to starting on-site and then after a few years transitioning to a fully-remote position -- one problem is that it's not 100% clear where you're going to end up when you first hire on, whether you're going to work on classified or unclassified projects etc.

gorgonical 4y ago

I did an internship at Sandia this past summer, specifically on the HPC programs. Being a PhD student, the pay for that internship was excellent, and the cost of living in ABQ is low. I lived somewhere that I could bike to my office. My manager was excellent and a technical staff member and really understood how to manage other technical staff; no pointless meetings, hands-off, and tried at every turn to shield us from boring administrative non-sense. The work was interesting, though my experience was very skewed as I was working on a solo project. I met weekly with my "mentor" to discuss where I was and if I needed support, but I was working nearly entirely solo. Like the parent comment here says, from what I learned the norm is that you work on many projects -- my mentor certainly was. Even in the department meetings it was clear that while we were unified under a general theme, each person in the department was working on their own, many projects. My work was entirely unclassified, and my understanding is that most of the people in my department worked on projects with similar levels of classification. My office building looked like every other building and infosec and opsec requirements were pretty mild; wear your badge, don't photograph things, don't tell people any specifics about what you do. I was offered to stay on as a full-time intern as part of the hiring pipeline and if it weren't for that it's in ABQ I would have strongly considered it -- the work was very interesting and also like the parent comment says, you are largely in control of what you do there. It's a lab first, not a defense weapons company, so research is the name of the game for the department I worked in.

floren 4y ago
> I was offered to stay on as a full-time intern as part of the hiring pipeline This is a big deal and it's something people currently in school should consider: At least at Sandia, we loved the internship programs because it was a really well-defined way to do a trial-run with potential employees. After 3 or 6 months, we'd have some idea if the intern was actually any good, and they'd know if they liked the environment or not. This is important because hiring sucks and firing really sucks. So if you're in school and you're looking for an internship, consider the labs. Also consider that, in my experience in a CS group at Sandia, startups and FAANGs really liked to hire Sandians away, so it can be a good springboard even if you only spend a couple years there. Also look into the Scholarship For Service program.

inasio 4y ago

NetworkX came out of LANL circa 2004, it probably is still being developed from there

jongjong 4y ago

Disappointing that it's so rare for knowledge workers to get their own offices nowadays. About 7 years ago, I did a 6 months contract where I had my own office and it was great. Nowadays, knowledge workers are treated like cattle. There's just so many of us. Knowledge and intelligence used to be precious, now they're treated as cheap commodities. Also, there are a lot of people who are working in knowledge fields who have no curiosity at all - They seem to be doing it entirely for money and/or status - These people are absolutely awful to deal with if you care about the work. They couldn't care less for the work and are all too happy to throw the project under the bus to protect their status and keep playing the role of the big boss in a bad movie. Stakeholders couldn't care less either; so long as they can keep finding investors to pour money into their pointless projects, they don't care if the project leaders are incompetent.

midoridensha 4y ago
>Also, there are a lot of people who are working in knowledge fields who have no curiosity at all - They seem to be doing it entirely for money and/or status What's wrong with doing something for money? You make it sound like a bad thing. Do you think the janitor cleans your toilet because they find the work so intellectually stimulating? The work needs to get done, and most people would rather watch TV or go on a walk or play a sport or read a book or countless other things instead of slaving away at someone else's project, so society uses money to motivate them to devote their time and attention to that thing. You sound like one of those people who think that knowledge workers should work for peanuts just because the work is so interesting.
- jongjong 4y ago
  Nothing wrong doing certain things only for money. We've all been there. But if someone pursues knowledge for the sole purpose of getting money or power, their knowledge ends up being corrupted because they are driven by self-interest and not by truth. You can't see the truth if you are overly focused on your personal self-interests as the two often don't align. It creates a bias and corrupts your knowledge. Then later you will teach your corrupted knowledge to others...

dclowd9901 4y ago

Is there a scientific arm of research I could go into as a software engineer that, by its nature, can’t be transmogrified into murdering millions of people?

thewildginger 4y ago
At national labs they need software engineers to build internal tools for scientists in different fields. DOE labs are not all murder building machines, in fact most aren't. They do all kinds of research depending on the location. DOE national labs are a big tent.
Theory42 4y ago
Where's the fun in that?
robotresearcher 4y ago
Medicine generally has the opposite objective, and has plenty of funding and impact.