from Hacker News

In goodbye message, Chaillan unloads over DoD’s technology culture, processes

by mmhsieh on 9/3/21, 5:50 PM with 35 comments

  • by Wonnk13 on 9/3/21, 8:13 PM

    > Living in Maryland, I've met several young people who put in a few years at the agency (including TAO) who then left for industry. Millenials don't care about a government pension, especially when you're in a windowless SCIF hacking Perl.

    > The US Government as a whole has a massive talent retention problem. Only the mediocre will stay at NSA / CIA now and we'll probably see more of these leaks / hacks.

    That's a verbatim comment I made on this site back in 2017 and it's still relevant. I don't mean to toot my own horn as much as to highlight the braindrain out of DoD / the alphabet soup agencies and into other sectors. It HAS and WILL CONTINUE to bite the United States in the ass.

  • by commandlinefan on 9/3/21, 7:57 PM

    > IT is a highly skilled and trained job; staff it as such

    He's going to be disappointed by the private sector too - I haven't been trained on or even given time to learn anything in at least 20 years. Any learning I (or anybody I've ever worked with) undertake is strictly on personal time only.

  • by AtlasBarfed on 9/3/21, 10:30 PM

    "creation of an enterprisewide DevSecOps managed service featuring more than 800 hardened containers for software development"

    An infosec manager/exec/director that made software solutions rather than a bunch of policy and powerpoint drivel?

    AND he was in the federal government?

    I can't believe it. My #1 complaint about practically all infosec orgs in large corporations is that they set policies and review barriers, but don't offer solutions.

  • by Abishek_Muthian on 9/4/21, 2:15 PM

    > There are 100,000 software developers in the DoD. We are the largest software organization on the planet,

    Tata Consultancy Services, India employs more than 500,000 people. They manage the IT stack of companies from Walgreens to Ferrari. I'm not the person to nitpick, But I'm particularly proud of TCS's employment figures because I've personally witnessed many move from being poor to wealthy(by Indian standards) after being employed by them(often the first degree holder in the family).

    [1] https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/15/economy/tcs-india-it-remo...

  • by wolverine876 on 9/3/21, 10:10 PM

  • by jrochkind1 on 9/3/21, 8:12 PM

    > Chaillan added that DoD remains stuck in the outdated water-agile-fall acquisition processes...

    Wait what?

  • by eeiac928 on 9/4/21, 6:21 AM

    If engineering made more money than lawyering would the outcomes be better?