> 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.
This is only 15% higher pay than 10 years ago, meanwhile home prices are up 3x in the DC metro area.
As long as things continue the way they are you wouldn't be able to convince me to code for USG for any price once I retire in a few years. If anything USG has inspiring enough missions that they should be able to attract and retain talent at a discount, compared to optimizing ad click throughs for companies selling sugar water.
DoD jobs are ideal for developers who don’t want to learn anything new and just make money. I’d find a lot of guys close to retirement taking up those roles.
It takes someone who is admittedly done. Otherwise it feels no less life sucking than a retail job.
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.
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.
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...
Anyone with full-stack experience(gained outside office work, because IT workers in these companies are typically struck with single programming language/framework) would have already moved on from TCS, Infosys, CTS type companies to a well-funded startup.
Pandemic has increased the highly skilled IT job salaries exponentially in India, DevOps personnel with 8 years experience can earn (1.15Cr INR ~ 157K USD) in India[1].
[1] https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/trends/in-the-wild-world-o...
>TCS Recognized as the #1 Top Employer in the United States for 2020[1]
>more than 327,000 employees were trained on multiple new technologies, and over 404,000 trained on Agile methods.
They recruit thousands every year from Engineering colleges in India specifically for SW role. Have been doing that for at least two decades. Their target for FY22 is 40,000 freshers.
It's late in India otherwise I could get the exact figures of IT employees in TCS as every Engineer here knows someone who is working in TCS be it Computer Science or Civil Engineer or even Bio Tech(All of them go to work in IT there).
[1] https://www.tcs.com/tcs-recognized-as-number-one-top-employe...
[2] https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/tcs-to-hire-40-000-f...
Wait what?
Because "agile" is the new hotness, every DoD office and vendor tries to slap the language of agile onto a waterfall model. See this wonderful report from the Defense Innovation Board on "Detecting Agile BS": https://media.defense.gov/2018/Oct/09/2002049591/-1/-1/0/DIB...
I think most of my experience with "agile" has been: we'll make a vague plan that came from god-knows-where, you'll do lots of releases, testers will test incrementally, you'll update us once a week, and at the end we'll release it and you'll do it all again when the users tell us they don't like it or (more likely) when management goes on a new whim.
It turned out making a huge plan at the start was a mistake. It also turned out that no one wanted to ask the users what they thought.
The entire organizing principle of modern US warfare is as fast and adaptive a battlefield loop as possible for: get information -> adapt strategy -> deliver orders.
I believe it goes back to Napoleon, who basically conquered all of Europe using those principles and superior organization.
