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I think the issue here is more about finding someone with security clearance (labor shortage) rather than the know how. I would assume a company like Raytheon
by vsskanth 3y ago
I think the issue here is more about finding someone with security clearance (labor shortage) rather than the know how.
I would assume a company like Raytheon has all their processes documented and can quickly spin up a new manufacturing line for a legacy product.
- mozman 3y agoDid you just make that up or do you have supporting evidence?
- brianwawok 3y agoLike most hacker news it is are chair opinions presented as facts.
- VoodooJuJu 3y agoThe man gave his informed opinion and assumption. He did not present it as fact. Take it for what it's worth, and don't project anything onto it that's not there.
- colpabar 3y agoUm, do you have a peer reviewed study to back up your claims?
- Y_Y 3y agoI think Raytheon makes great chairs.
- lightedman 3y agoMy father did the radar guidance system for the Harpoon and Tomahawk missiles - for Raytheon. Yes, they're having problems with getting cleared people. It isn't the top-paying gig it used to be.
- sadhorse 3y agoNeat. My uncle worked on nuke stuff at Lawrence Livermore. He used to sleep talk incoherent phrases. I never made sense of anything but it was fun to guess. Stuff like "no, the crosstalk will ruin in" or "it's too close to the physics pack they will not approve".
- kortilla 3y agoI’ve always wondered if “known sleep talker” could put clearance at risk. Or you commit to always sleep in a SCIF…
- astura 3y agoI am a sleep talker, at least for me it would be very difficult to disclose classified information in my sleep because my sleep talking is mostly babbling, not words. The few times I have said actual words it's very simple sentences like "let's go."
- ultrahax 3y ago“Physics package” is usually a phrase meaning the explodey bits of a nuclear weapon, so that lines up.
- hotpotamus 3y agoOne of the interesting quirks of living in America is how expensive everything is while seemingly paying little to the workers who provide it.
- throw9away6 3y agoWhy would you assume that. Have you ever worked in a low volume manufacturing facility? Is not like building legos despite what executives would claim
- RhodesianHunter 3y agoJobs with security clearances don't pay like they used to. People with technical backgrounds have little incentive to go down that path.
- formulathree 3y agoYeah, most people nowadays spend their time and energy on making serving html websites more and more complex. Complex missile systems? That's nothing compared to my vm running kube, running docker, running nextjs react emulating x86 and running kube again. Layers of more software surrounding software is the next big thing. Also microservices and LLMs.
- hotpotamus 3y agoYou know, I always thought a lot of the abstractions we add were just pure resume-driven nonsense too, but I guess it is better than having engineering minded people think up better ways to liquify other humans.
- bigbillheck 3y agoIt's easy to complain about all those incredibly talented people selling ads, but it's also important to remember that it could be much worse.
- formulathree 3y agoIronically Liquification is just a deterrent. Yeah all that brain power is deployed to create technology that is barely used ever. It's just there to scare other people away. That's the current state of technology right now. On one hand in defense you have people cooking up technology that will never be used. On the other hand you have the entire IT industry cooking up technology to make simple things 1000000x more complex. It's like humanity has run out of shit to do and the money is being directed towards useless busy work.
- CoastalCoder 3y agoHaving worked in defense, I don't recall anyone who was gleeful about killing others. It was all about keeping our families and neighbors safe. If you're arguing against defense work in general, please consider the consequences of unilaterally disarming ourselves. I want world peace. Unfortunately others seem to prefer expansion / exploitation of other nations.
- IlikeMadison 3y ago[flagged]
- alexawarrior 3y ago“I would assume a company like Raytheon has all their processes documented and can quickly spin up a new manufacturing line for a legacy product.” As someone who has worked in this field, I almost spewed coffee out my nose. Thanks for the chuckles.
- jki275 3y agoAgreed, it's a silly notion based in no facts whatsoever. Also, if the government isn't paying for it anymore, there's no reason to put overhead money towards keeping those manufacturing lines open anymore.
- baseballdork 3y agoOh c'mon. I worked at RMS in Tucson. We had tons of this. Hell, in one lab we found test procedures for the Phoenix missile for our HWIL, which hasn't had a Phoenix in there for decades.
- LeifCarrotson 3y agoSame. I got a call literally last week Tuesday because one of the usual operators had left his position at one of the top 5 US aerospace and defense contractors (other than Raytheon), and they didn't know how to reset the sequence for the machine my employer had built for them less than 10 years ago. Sure, any controls engineer worth their Ethernet cable would be able to read the PLC code and reverse-engineer it, but the user manual for that machine is about 8 pages of mostly boilerplate and would take an intern about 15 minutes to generate. It would take 50 times as many pages and 500 times as much effort to generate a proper user manual that would guarantee the next operator can read the manuals and fully understand what needs to happen to make good parts.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> I would assume a company like Raytheon has all their processes documented and can quickly spin up a new manufacturing line for a legacy product. Do you assume that they had all of their processes documented 20 years ago, and that they have retained all of that documentation, and that the documentation is appropriate for a 2023 workforce and doesn't make assumptions about the audience that would be invalid today? Because I would bet that that isn’t all true.
- GordonS 3y agoI'd guess it was true. I've worked with engineering companies across Europe, and their documentation is always amazing, with full traceability of every component going back to the 80's. Everything from processes to weld inspections. I'd assume that a company engineering weapons would be the same.
- lo_zamoyski 3y agoBut documentation is only part of it. There's a culture (or tradition) that carries with it the context needed to interpret documentation. You can reduce some of the context, yes, but sola scriptura is wrong for a reason. Otherwise, you're in the business of archeology, a field which itself requires extra-archaeological context to make sense of its own findings.
- mschuster91 3y agoAs I've written in a similar post, this attitude is a bit baffling. In IT we say, a backup ain't a backup until regularly validated to work, and most IT insurances/policies require regular testing for backups. I'd expect the same standard for anything military/involving national security, alone for the fact that should war come, there will be a need to rapidly expand production, to rope in everyone able and willing - and that won't work without complete documentation.
- richk449 3y agoSure, now imagine the backup system was discontinued twenty years ago and not tested since then.
- ochoseis 3y ago> has all their processes documented Even if this is true, a map is not the terrain, and there’s no substitute for experience.
- greedo 3y agoIt's not just Raytheon, but all the subcontractors. Some may have gone out of business or shifted to different industries and lost the institutional knowledge of parts fabrication and assembly.