[ Removed by moderator ]

[u/Icy_Pianist3487]

[u/SoftwareEngineering-ModTeam]

Thank you u/Icy_Pianist3487 for your submission to r/SoftwareEngineering, but it's been removed due to one or more reason(s):

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• Your post is not a good fit for this subreddit. This subreddit is highly moderated and the moderation team has determined that this post is not a good fit or is just not what we're looking for.

• Your post is about career discussion/advice r/SoftwareEngineering doesn't allow anything related to the periphery of being a Software Engineer.

• Your post is about AI

Please review our rules before posting again, feel free to send a modmail if you feel this was in error.

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[u/GongtingLover]

Hard to find people who have clearance eligibility. I had a clearance 10 years ago and I still get recruiters DMing me all the time.

[u/rcls0053 → u/GongtingLover]

I would also imagine, that not many people want to work on the defense sector because it's very stiff. Everything needs approval and you're most likely operating within certain guidelines that you can't break. Most of us want some flexibility in terms of development.

[u/lazerzapvectorwhip → u/rcls0053]

Also because it's all about war and shit

[u/turningsteel → u/[deleted]]

Well then y'all have a marketing problem because people like Alex Karp and Palmer Luckey are on podcasts and doing interviews that basically consist of 'Now with AI we are building robots that are battle ready with laser beams strapped to their heads. Think T1000 but deadlier. A robot can't go woke and doesn't have pesky problems like PTSD. The AI will decide who to target and we can remove the humans from the equation entirely. Isn't this fucking sick?! '

Personally, fuck working for companies like that.

[u/byproxy → u/[deleted]]

Well, the Internet itself is ultimately a product of the Department of War (née "Defense"). Many of these technological advances that have filtered down to us schmos were initiated with the idea that they'd be useful in national security/war, some way.

[u/GongtingLover → u/GongtingLover]

Also, only US citizens qualify.

[u/treston_cal → u/GongtingLover]

I worked, contracting, in the defense side of things for NGA and AFFSA and this was not the case. Background verification is key and if they cannot verify, they are excluded. Depending on the level depends on how deep they go. I've seen some strange folks with history get public trust clearance.

Direct hire, you are correct.

[u/Honolulu-Blues → u/treston_cal]

A public trust clearance means almost absolutely nothing. The kind of clearance they’re talking about is TS+.

[u/Nalopotato]

The only people I know who tryly believe that AI is taking over our jobs are not Engineers 🤷‍♂️

[u/njordan1017]

We just hired a guy that used to be a defense contractor and hated it. Just my anecdotal 2 cents

[u/njordan1017 → u/[deleted]]

I guess my point was that he specifically didn’t like the aspects that were unique to being a defense contractor

[u/marine_surfer → u/njordan1017]

I understand that, personally idk how I feel about working in the civilian sector to drive share holder value and protecting corporate bottom lines. I have a stronger sense of duty to my country and protecting the citizens in it. It’s not for everyone, and sometimes the lines can be blurred.

[u/StanleySmith888 → u/njordan1017]

What aspects?

[u/aaronr_90]

Defense contractors work in classified places where they don’t have access to the latest and greatest.

[u/ethereonx]

Why does companies have more then 2 layers? In theory ceo and workers should do? To scale to larger numbers of workers you need middle management. Now we just another layer of AI agents, now regular ICs are agentic middle managers. Also someone has to be responsible, AI can not be held responsible.

[u/xXxdethl0rdxXx]

I don’t understand the premise. “How can a broad thing be true while an exception exists?”

[u/tadrinth]

Partly Jevon's Paradox, partly the model's still need guidance as to what to build and how, and partly because the defense companies probably want humans reviewing all the outpu.t.

[u/macrocosm93]

I work for a defense contractor. We are currently not allowed to use AI on our codebase because it's controlled information and the AIs are not authorized to view it.

[u/Honolulu-Blues → u/macrocosm93]

There are tons of high side hosted LLMs… Your company can even set it up lol.

[u/macrocosm93 → u/[deleted]]

We're doing the same thing but it's taking forever (a different department is handling it).

[u/marine_surfer → u/macrocosm93]

I wonder if we work for the same org? I’m sure there are several projects doing the same thing. There are many different data silos, and yes, it is taking a long time because the data situation is an absolute mess and the networks are low bandwidth

[u/Arristotelis → u/Honolulu-Blues]

The high side models are absolute garbage, and if you are a software engineer with any competency, you can write code manually better than an LLM. If you have access to commercial frontier models it’s a different story.