Lockheed has an opening for engineers with VAX experience for the F22

https://www.lockheedmartinjobs.com/job/california/f-22-avionics-systems-engineer-senior/694/8842471

by killjoywashere • 7 years ago

241 312 7 years ago

lockheedmartinjobs.com

aosmith2• 7 years ago

Here's the backstory: http://web.archive.org/web/20100310163744/http://www.stsc.hi...

stickfigure• 7 years ago

Wow. Reminds me of a joke my dad repeated to me many years ago:

Software saved the aerospace industry. Every other way of adding cost to an airplane also adds weight.

He spent most of his career at Lockheed and Rockwell.

butteroverflow• 7 years ago

I guess storing all those 1's also adds some weight. It costs on the order of antimatter if you think of it. What's it like, $50 million per 1 billionth of a gram, or so?

foobarge• 7 years ago

Contrasts with "Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight." - Bill Gates

dotancohen2• 7 years ago

The way that the fine article was worded, it seems that the engineering team knew that they needed approximately 1.5M LOC before they has started. How could they have known that? Or is it simply poorly worded?

The ATF Team planned to develop approximately 1.5 million source lines of code, across more than 20 software development companies located throughout the U.S., Canada, and Europe.

metaphor6• 7 years ago

System engineers in the defense industry have an insidious infatuation with SLOC metrics. To the detriment of many a development engineer, CMU SEI hasn't developed a better way to keep them preoccupied.

aosmith2• 7 years ago

Also seems pretty low for a team that size. I would love to know their cost per line...

bigiain2• 7 years ago

Somebody had a development budget, they looked up how much software developers cost, and how many lines of code per day they write, and BINGO! we have a contractual business requirement for ((budget + 20%) / dev-day-rate * LOC-per-day) lines of code.

rwallace• 7 years ago

There is a school of thought that says rather than look at the requirements and make your best guess at the amount of work needed to implement them, you will get more accurate results by making your best guess at the number of lines of code required, then using a formula to estimate the amount of work needed to write that many lines of code. I personally am not convinced this is really more accurate, but it does have serious adherents.

Kadin5• 7 years ago

Believe it or not, there are still cost-estimation methodologies that use LOC. You somehow go from the problem, to an estimated number of lines of code that will need to be written, and then you divide and multiply that out by the number of developers per hour and their hourly rate.

Someone decided that the task was about 1.5 MLOC and used that to drive the total contract value.

zild3d• 7 years ago

Used to work in missile defense at LM as a Systems Engineer, and seen similar estimations done for cost, schedule, LOC, FTEs, etc.

To get to the total 1.5M LOC, it's after decomposing the system into lower level black boxes and doing some modeling/simulation.

How many lines of code has it taken in the past to build our navigation systems, radios, weapon system A, weapon system B, etc. How much integration work is there? If its a CAN bus, the last project had X LOC for the bus architecture. Add em up, and add a big fudging factor.

stcredzero4• 7 years ago

The way that the fine article was worded, it seems that the engineering team knew that they needed approximately 1.5M LOC before they has started

It's possible, with highly detailed design documents. You could use something like "cyclomatic complexity" which is an older estimation methodology which is just a laundry list of small granularity features with point values attached. You add those up, while multiplying some weighted numbers together to account for interlinked complexity, then use a figure for the implementation language to come up with an estimated LOC figure. Error bars on that kind of thing are something like +/- 100%/50%. (I'm pulling numbers out of my @ss here, but I'm talking about a highly ritualized and systematized way of doing just that.)

You can get better estimates, usually by asking shops that have written the same sort of product many times before.

touisteur• 7 years ago

Not a bad way to evaluate effort, if you believe in COCOMO (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/COCOMO). Some (most?) big defense groups maintain some metrics for past projects. LOC/man-month, complexity/cost. LOCs from COCOMO is a way to check your estimation within an order of magnitude.

IndrekR• 7 years ago

Development of F22 started in 1980's. Last VAX machines were manufactured in 2005. There is quite a lot of VME bus based legacy (but speciallized and working) measurement and test equipment still around. I have no involvement in the project, so can not tell for sure; yet would be surprised if any of this is part of the flight hardware.

lallysingh• 7 years ago

Up until the mid 1990s similar machines (TurboChannel DECs) were required as personal workstations for my university.

ncmncm8• 7 years ago

Apple used to use VME bus, I think. It was Advanced, then. Now it's, technically, Retarded.

kalmes• 7 years ago

Wow. It takes tens of system engineers writing hundreds of requirements to do something as crazy as write a new 1.5 Mloc software system on VAX in the 90s. Any smaller team wouldn’t have considered it.

eccbits• 7 years ago

This is surely about VME industrial bus, not about VAX processors or computers.

metaphor6• 7 years ago

The only mention of VAX/VME from the job post:

Experience with troubleshooting equipment such as Pass1000/5000 1553 bus monitor, fiber-optic test equipment, digital storage oscilloscopes, and familiarization with the VAX/VME based computing environment.

Seems apparent to me that the context is development+ATE environment; VME is likely VXI interface to ATE instrumentation. In any case, the VMS and/or VME angle to this job post is the least of any prospect's concerns.

Taniwha• 7 years ago

I wondered if that was a typo and they meant VAX/VMS (DEC's OS that ran on the Vax)

snowwindwaves• 7 years ago

Do the job requirements really need to list ms excel and office three times?

gumby• 7 years ago

"What I tell you three times is true"

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Hunting_of_the_Snark

anilakar• 7 years ago

You better know your pivot tables, son.

audiometry• 7 years ago

And you need to be a "self starter"....

Loughla• 7 years ago

I hate those HR phrases for reasons that I believe are my own, maybe others share them.

Sure, it's a meaningless phrase and no one is going to say, "I'm not a self-starter, I hate figuring out what to do with my time I wish someone would just hand me a list of things". Or maybe very few people are going to do that.

What upsets me the most about phrases like 'self-starter' or 'motivated' or all that other HR shit, is that somewhere, someone (or more likely several someones) sat in a room and decided, consciously, that if they didn't say those words, that if they didn't flat out state that they wanted a self-starter, then the outcome would logically be they would only get lazy applicants.

Phrases like that are treating the world like it is full of people who would swallow their own socks, on accident, if only we were given the chance.

proy24• 7 years ago

I think all engineers with VAX experience are extinct ...or retired.

metaphor6• 7 years ago

Hope you're prepared to swallow; I can think of several dozen young engineers across 5 states (California, Indiana, Florida, North Carolina, and New Jersey) with VAX/OpenVMS domain expertise, myself included. Legacy systems with 30-year lifecycles are a thing...they're just not what most of commercial industry is accustomed to supporting. If you think LM would have an issue filling this position internally (for the right price), you'd be mistaken.

dvdbloc2• 7 years ago

So a couple of the comments here have been mentioning the high pay of people with specialties like this in the context of LM and other defense contractors. My impression from Glassdoor and general conversation with software developers has been the DCs pay pretty low for software in general compared to FAANG or even other engineering companies. Is it true that people with obscure specialties at places like LM can command high salaries? Or have I been misled that LM pay is on the lower side? Or is it all relative?

raverbashing2• 7 years ago

But I'm sure some would agree to the job. At $500/h

caymanjim• 7 years ago

I'm 46, and my first real job was as a computer operator (sysadmin-lite) for VAX/VMS systems back in 1991. At the time, VAX/VMS systems were computing powerhouses. In comparison, almost all Unix-based systems outside of AT&T were toys or performed light computing work (even DEC's own VAX/Ultrix). VAX systems were still high-end mainframe computers well into the 90s. VMS had some great features back then which Unix only adopted later.

linker3000• 7 years ago

Similar story - I'm 53 and was a VAX/VMS sysadmin during my apprenticeship years working for a flight simulator company in the UK; that would be around 1984. I miss my 11/750.

bigiain2• 7 years ago

Or very much not admitting to it ever. Like their Cobol experience. cough

(I write Pascal for an obsolete VAX11/780 in around 1985... I wrote COBOL in a WANG VS in the mid 1990s. No _way_ am I ever gonna let recruiters or employers know any of that...)

joncrane• 7 years ago

One day you might respond to an ad like this but insist on a corp-to-corp and/or 1099 arrangement and charge $350 per hour.

If you have the right specialty, attitude, and connections in Federal Government contracting, you can make FAANG money. Only with good w/l balance.

stunthamsterio• 7 years ago

Well, I'm forty and sadly not yet able to retire and spent some considerable time working on VMS clusters. I even run one at home for fun, very civilised operating system.

drdeadringer• 7 years ago

My first job out of college and I was put on assignment using a VAX -- this was 2005 in Cambridge, MA.

It's a weird feeling when you are in your early 30s and encounter a personally familiar piece of hardware in a history museum.

rutthenut• 7 years ago

I also have VAX experience, but definitely not in recent decades, and I am neither extinct nor retired. Still look back at how some aspects of VAX/VMS were so much better than what followed. Aware that Windows NT was written by Dave Cutler as a (poor) clone of VMS. Also looked up some stuff about running VMS cluster nodes on a Raspberry PI setup, interesting view of how things were.

jki27512• 7 years ago

Nope. I don't have much, but my first language was FORTRAN 77 on a PDP 11/70.

cicero• 7 years ago

I'm 56, and my first job out of college was at General Dynamics Fort Worth Division, which is now part of Lockheed Martin. I did not work on the F-22, aka Advanced Tactical Fighter, but I did work on avionics software for the A-12, aka Advanced Tactical Aircraft, which got cancelled by Dick Cheney in January 1990. I had some contact with ATF engineers because at that time (I can't speak for later), ATF and ATA both used IBM's Common Module computing hardware and the Ada '83 language. We used MicroVAX workstations for our Ada compiler as well as our CASE (Computer-Aided Software Engineering) and documentation software. I was not on the program when the software tools decisions were made. I do know that other programs at General Dynamics used Apollo and Sun workstations, which were Unix based. I can only assume that either someone thought the VAX environment was better, or DEC made them an offer they could not refuse. I was a Unix fan at the time and would have preferred Sun, but the VAX was not a bad system.

ncmncm8• 7 years ago

A-12 is super hard-core.

Cheney has plenty else to rot in hell for, but canceling A-12 has to count more per unit victim.

But Apollos at the time would not have been running Unix. They had Aegis, which was much better. In some ways. (It took inspiration from Multics.) Some excellent features of Aegis have still not been mainstreamed. But Dragonfly BSD finally got variable expansion in symbolic links! Sort-of.

ubermonkey3• 7 years ago

Not remotely, assuming you mean VMS and not VAX (ie vs. Alpha).

Lots of places were using them into the 20th century, so folks with VMS experience don't even need to be especially old. I have a friend here in Houston who works at $BigNameOilCorp, and they had VMS in production until 2005 or 2006.

walshemj4• 7 years ago

I have PDP experience and that predates VAXEN

urban_winter• 7 years ago

I started my career working for British Aerospace in 1989. We used VAX/VMS as our development platform (Code was CORAL 66 and then ADA). I spent some time supporting the Sea Harrier flight test operations - so I would have fitted this job perfectly about 28 years ago!).

I'd like to say that I'm astonished that modern aircraft still use the 1553 bus, but nothing surprises me when it comes to the use of stone-age tech in military hardware. For example, the other Harrier I worked on in the early 90s (GR-7 - same as US AV8B) still used core memory.

Phlarp• 7 years ago

That's insane. A 3d matrix of ferrite rings suspended by wire would seem (to me) somewhat sensitive to vibrations or gforces.

Military gonna military I guess.

anyfoo4• 7 years ago

The same technology was very successfully used to fly to the moon. Cores aren’t so much suspended when they are wholly embedded in epoxy.

dvdkhlng• 7 years ago

But on the other hand core memory is very resilient against EMP and hard radiation :)

alex_hitchins• 7 years ago

I seem to recall something along the lines of large bombers running valves as they were less prone to effects of EMP around nuclear blasts. Not sure if this perhaps something similar?

tirpen• 7 years ago

For airplanes flying at high altitudes with modern computers, random bit flips from comsmic radiation is actually a very real threat that has to be considered. IIRC there's about a factor of about 300x more radiation at 30000 ft and 900x at 60000 ft.

Core memory is a lot less sensitive to this than most memory types, so it makes some sense to store the most flight critical data in such a memory.

metaphor6• 7 years ago

I'd like to say that I'm astonished that modern aircraft still use the 1553 bus...

What's wrong with 1553? It's reliable, battle-tested, and the latest revision C was published 28-Feb-2018. In contrast, the RS-232 PHY dates back to 1960, yet it's quite alive and well in modern commercial devices. As a consolation, be glad you've never had to deal with the monster that is STANAG 5516/MIL-STD-6016...if there was such a thing as a "modern" interface standard whose sheer page count (11,410 pages!) would make any sensible engineer reconsider future career prospects.

euler_angles11• 7 years ago

As someone who has read all of 6016, doing so cost me a good chunk of my sanity.

Never mind the fact that many areas of the standard don't matter because the manufacturers of equipment that use those areas made up their own way of doing things that isn't 6016 compliant. So you can comply to the standard, or you can actually work with platforms in the real world, but you can't do both.

euler_angles11• 7 years ago

The 1553 bus is ancient, but it's electrically and logically simple. The concepts necessary to use and incorporate 1553 into designs is easily acquired by a fresh engineer (I should know, I first used 1553 in a design as a 24 year old straight out of grad school) and it's already incorporated into all kinds of avionics and weapons. Why not use it?

wrp• 7 years ago

What was your experience switching from Coral 66 to Ada? An equivalent language in the USA at the time was JOVIAL. I heard from some old JOVIAL programmers that they thought Ada was an inferior tool for the job. When I looked at Coral 66, it seemed to be rather less polished than JOVIAL, so I have wondered whether British programmers might have welcomed the switch to Ada.

3xblah• 7 years ago

[oops]

Rebelgecko• 7 years ago

It looks like the opening was posted in 2018

dagenix• 7 years ago

From right at the top of the article, in the easiest place to find: "Date posted: Jul. 31, 2018"

chrisco255• 7 years ago

Basic Qualifications: • Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Computer Science or related technical focus.

• Experience in COMM and Navigation.

• Avionics experience

• Experience with aircraft operations.

• Microsoft Office

I love the MS Office req at the end. "Yes, we see you've got a BS in engineering, you're an expert at avionics and COMM control systems, but do you know anything about MS Word?"

makach• 7 years ago

I, absolutely, positively reacted to that requirement as well! What a wonderful addition to the qualification requirements!

Maybe 1/5 is enough for someone to apply? Makes you wonder what superhuman will get the job.

metaphor6• 7 years ago

You're reading the job description all wrong...you've got to think like a hiring manager in the defense industry to make any sense of it, i.e. reverse qualification priorities and the actual job you'll be hired to perform will become crystal clear.

lokimedes• 7 years ago

AS a Systems Engineer in the Defense industry I completely agree. It is only because we talk about a maintenance role that DOORS doesn’t come on the list with Word.

0x445442• 7 years ago

Exactly, if you really want to work on the engineering bits you'll get hired by one of Lockheed's sub contractors.

cm2187• 7 years ago

Perhaps the F22 runs on VBA

avar• 7 years ago

More like: "We ended up hiring the guy most competent at MS Word at the expense of everything else, because out of the five requirements it was the only one the managers doing the interview knew anything about".

"Johnson! We're promoting you to head technical flight operations. We can't believe the level of your MS Word skills!"

"Senator, we have no idea why the F-22 inexplicably crashed. That software was designed by the best people we could find!".

hef198983• 7 years ago

It's funny because it's true. It's also sad because it's true.

godzillabrennus• 7 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle

cbm-vic-20• 7 years ago

"I see you're trying to shoot down an Irani F-14. Would you like help with that?" [Yes] [No] [Cancel]

challenger22• 7 years ago

More like:

The guy that designed the flight control surfaces of the F-22 did so using an elaborate Excel spreadsheet powered by 4,000 lines of uncommented VBA filled with aerodynamics equations, and he retired 3 years ago.

wlesieutre• 7 years ago

They're also concerned about your PowerPoint skills

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ywq5zy/the-pentagon-has-t...

bdowling• 7 years ago

If his resume didn’t say anything about MS Office, then he’d be screened out by HR and the managers would never get to consider him. So, that conversation would never happen.

mxcrossb• 7 years ago

Knowing to put ms office on your resume to get by HR’s stupidity is exactly the kind of skills needed to work in a big company

7952• 7 years ago

I don't see much point in asking for an office package in a job advert. But a lot of jobs do require use of these packages and the level of skill can be terrible in otherwise highly trained people. If you use the apps a lot you should learn how to use them properly, and a lot of people just can't be bothered.

ProxCoques3• 7 years ago

I know it's kinda trivial, but I strongly agree with this. For example, inheriting a set of Word/Google docs where all the formatting is applied locally without the use of styles. So I can't turn on the outliner or generate a table of contents. Or not including a proper footer with page numbers in n/nn format so that if I print them out and drop them I know how to put them back together. Or having decent metadata in so you can find them on file system searches. Ugh.

One time, I was given an Excel doc with a bunch of numbers and totals and averages in. I updated some values, only to find none of the calculations changed. The creator simply hadn't used any formulas, or had pasted it all in as plain text from some other place!

NikolaeVarius4• 7 years ago

Knowing word and excel REALLY well brings tons of value in the Aero industry. There is a reason that, in general, excel runs the world.

Angostura• 7 years ago

They are probably just sick of having photos in documents that have been stretched horizontally, or documents with bloody manually created tables of contents because the last person didn't know how to use heading styles.

twitch<

hef198983• 7 years ago

What kind of impression that leaves with your customer when your studies are so badly formated? And you need a lot of people to properly format the thousands upon thousands of documents...

CapricornNoble• 7 years ago

I actually had a phone interview (for a government-contract IT support position....basic call center/help desk type stuff, I just needed a job) that went pretty much just like that.

I explained to the recruiter "while working on my Masters I did some General-Purpose GPU coding using CUDA, as well as software-defined radio systems using GNU Radio". I could tell she had no clue what any of that meant. She then asked me to revise and resubmit my resume because it didn't list 6 years of experience with MS Office. -_-

EDIT: My resume had my experience as a commissioned officer on it, and any DoD recruiter worth a damn should know that all officers are Black Belts in PowerPoint Slideology.

roedog• 7 years ago

It indicates that writing and editing thousands of pages of documentation will be contractually required. Word proficiency can save a lot of pain for everyone on that team.

Merrill• 7 years ago

An acquaintance who worked in QA for a foundry producing alloy castings for the aerospace industry swore they shipped a greater weight of paper than metal.

i_am_proteus• 7 years ago

Also:

• Matlab and MS Excel experience is a plus.

The req has been open since July of last year.

dvdbloc2• 7 years ago

structural• 7 years ago

Defense contractors are similar to other companies that (strongly) do not believe that software is their product and do not value it any further than that it is a small component in the large system they are delivering. There's a lot of old-school attitudes still present: for example, I've heard software developers referred to as "software typists" a number of times.

Basically there are two entirely different paths here. For example, the person who writes all the software to drive the cockpit displays is probably called something like a "cockpit avionics engineer" and is organizationally in the department that's responsible for building such things. These people can get paid very well.

On the other hand, a "software developer" is much more likely to be a support function. Lots of maintenance of legacy stuff more than anything, and what actual development work exists might be nothing more than taking an algorithm directly from a standard and implementing it in whatever language is required by the project. These roles are not particularly well-paid and have a lot of turnover.

It is a very different world.

vonmoltke6• 7 years ago

Basically there are two entirely different paths here. For example, the person who writes all the software to drive the cockpit displays is probably called something like a "cockpit avionics engineer" and is organizationally in the department that's responsible for building such things.

I don't know how Lockheed organizes, but I assume it is similar to Raytheon. Raytheon had a matrix organization where the rows are functional groups (e.g., software engineering, digital electronics engineering, RF engineering) and the columns are program teams (e.g., radar power supply, radar antenna, radar signal processor). The title you describe would align with a program group, but your "official" title would come from your functional group (which would be software engineering in this case).

These people can get paid very well.

In the absolute. For software engineers, it's pretty average. I was writing some pretty cutting-edge embedded signal processing software when I left Raytheon in 2012, and I was getting paid $85,000/year with 9.5 years of experience. Based on my trajectory, I would have been at around $120,000 now had I stayed. This was in Dallas, so it was good money compared to the COL, but I could have made slightly more at just about any other larg-ish employer in the area. That said, I both sucked at and hated the internal political games at Raytheon, so perhaps I could have done better if those weren't true.

galangalalgol• 7 years ago

If you just look at salary comparison websites you will think the two have comparable salaries. 10 years of dev experience will put you in the 130k range before cost of living bumps. But FANG gives a lot or even most of the compensation as something besides salary.

jki27512• 7 years ago

Defense contractors don't pay FAANG salaries. They can't, in general, because they're bound by labor categories and salaries set by the government, and the government isn't paying software engineers above what their GS software engineers get (max of about 128k in the DC area in general, if you're curious). There are a few jobs that can go a bit higher, but even they are capped around 150k as I recall.

I don't know what LM is going to pay for the skillset they ask for in that job announcement, I would bet that it's 150k or less, but the person w/ the skillset to answer it may be able to command a bit more as there aren't very many of us left.

apexalpha• 7 years ago

Defense contractors don't pay FAANG salaries.

This is also a self asnwering question of sorts. If, let's say Lockheed would pay 'FAANG' salaries then it would be 'FLAANG' since the abbreviation is meant to encompass the top paying salaries.

sesteel6• 7 years ago

Defense contractors set their own payscales but also compete on price. I know software engineers right now earning north of 150K. Also, overtime is paid and billed in defense. Thus, if you do work overtime, your defense contractor wants to bill it and you get paid for it. My first year out of school I made nearly 100K on a 67K salary because of billed overtime. This was in 2003.

There is also the fact that finding ways to get more ads in front of people is not inherently motivating for some engineers when compared to building space systems or solving other interesting problems like deconflicting telescope laser alignment with satellite orbits.

jhawk28• 7 years ago

Not true. Billable labor rates are negotiated with the customer. The actual pay that an employee gets is based on market rates and the perceived value of the employee. The one may influence the other.

sesteel6• 7 years ago

It should be noted:

Amazon is a defense contractor. Google is/was a defense contractor. Apple is a defense contractor. Microsoft is a defense contractor. SpaceX is a defense contractor. IBM is a defense contractor. ...

devonkim3• 7 years ago

The larger defense contractors have issues paying software engineers remotely close to private industry nowadays. In certain regions of the US the software market is dominated by defense though.

Back in the early 2000s I know of some J2EE architects that pulled $200k as defense contractors once they got a Sun certification. The certification and diploma mill market in the US is driven squarely by big federally funded institutions that value paper over experience because they don’t know how to measure ability any better than SV Leetcode questions would assess.

Of defense contractors I’ve seen pay tables for in the DC area, LM and Raytheon paid worse for senior engineers than slightly smaller, more specialized companies but they certainly had a lot more overhead and administrative positions available that were possible to reach just by having a PhD even if it’s not related to engineering or STEM in general at all (political science obviously makes sense here as valuable, for example).

But under DHS you can hit $200k+ as a contractor for anything that has “cyber” attached to its name these days. But for the most part, the high payout days for software engineers in defense are over which is what led me to leaving the DC area years ago to stick with better pay and work environment with private sector. A TS is a pain and the pay bump is a joke compared to RSUs. I’ll take leetcode grinding for months to get a stack of RSUs and marketable engineering skills over the demonstrably useless charade of the DoD security theater practices with none of the employment benefits besides some smug, self-assured sense of patriotism.

Most of the higher paid contractors in DoD aren’t engineers - they’ve usually been intelligence officer trainers and skilled and experienced warfighters (well past $400k, much of it untaxed).

ncmncm8• 7 years ago

Apparently RSU doesn't mean "real soon unless". It appears to mean, instead, "restricted stock unit", a form of delayed compensation.

souprock• 7 years ago

You can get the pay increase associated with "cyber" in the name without having to live in the costly DC area. That works for me, supporting 12 kids on a single income. The work-life balance is to be appreciated as well, with 40-hour weeks (or paid overtime) and flexible hours.

euler_angles11• 7 years ago

In one of my past jobs I was a Level 3 Electronics Engineer for LM, and I made right at the middle of the pay band. It paid okay, but lower than someone doing my same job at the same place but working for Northrop Grumman made. I saw many people jump from LM to NGC just to get a big pay bump while doing the same work.

But LM is actively trying to reduce its number of Level 5, 6, and 7 engineers (the highest paybands on the technical career track). You would typically find a Level 5 engineer serving as an engineering technical team lead, a Level 6 as a site deputy chief engineer, and a Level 7 as a site chief engineer. A few years ago, LM Aeronautics offered all Level 5 and above engineers an early buyout/retirement and got over 1000 engineers to leave the company that way. Those engineers were largely not replaced, either in skills (hard to replace that level of expertise), billets (those jobs were not re-filled), or promotions (the sudden vacuum at the top end of the technical career pyramid was not filled by promoting large numbers of level 4 engineers to level 5, etc).

somatic2• 7 years ago

So hang on, let me rephrase this: Lockheed has basically fired most of its most highly experienced engineering talent? Is that right?

What did Lockheed hope to accomplish by this move?

Do you know what the total realized effect was?

burfog5• 7 years ago

They pay quite well if you measure that by how many hours of work you must do to pay a mortgage on a nice home. This is because:

1. It's typically a 40-hour week. They legally can't make you work 48 or more without paying overtime, and many will start paying overtime after 40.

2. You don't have to live in an expensive place like San Francisco, Palo Alto, Mountain View, or New York City. The worst cases are usually the DC area and San Diego, but typical locations are far cheaper. Instead of $2,000,000 for a house, you might pay $120,000 for a better house. Everything around you is cheaper too, from food to electricity. Gasoline is half the cost.

The choice is pretty clear if you hope to raise a family.

ch_123• 7 years ago

ISTR that the avionics code is written in Ada, and runs on top of Intel i960 processors, and that the Ada compiler for that target only runs on VAX/VMS (not even OpenVMS, but specifically VMS on the VAX).

vonmoltke6• 7 years ago

ISTR?

Anyway, the processors in the F-22A are a mix of different cores. The power supply in the Gen 3 radar used a MIL-STD-1750A processor. The PICC[1] processor modules also used the MIL-STD-1750A originally, but moved to a newer processor in a refresh (if I remember correctly). I don't know what the non-Raytheon components of the plane were using.

As for the compiler, you are spot-on. We had a MicroVAX in a vault (it was a cleared computing system) just in case we needed to recompile the embedded software for the power supply controller.

[1] Unfortunately, I don't remember what this acronym expands to.

cushychicken• 7 years ago

"I Seem To Recall"

Sephr• 7 years ago

PICC stands for Processor, Interface Controller and Communication (PICC) Programs Manager

jki27512• 7 years ago

They're moving rapidly away from ADA, as the mandate to use it has been rescinded. C++ 11 is the new standard.

ncmncm8• 7 years ago

A particularly miserly subset of C++11.

(Or does "MISRA" stand for something else?)

icedchai6• 7 years ago

Just a nitpick, VAX/VMS was renamed to OpenVMS around version 5.5 right around when they started porting it to Alpha. It still ran on the VAX.

nabla9• 7 years ago

Modern is relative. F-22's first flight was 1997. F-35 development started in 1992, first flight of X-35 was 2000 and F-35's first flight was 2006.

There is absolutely noting wrong with using old technology. Being modern just for the sake of being modern is wasteful.

hestefisk• 7 years ago

No Microservices, no Kubernetes. Lame.

gibspaulding• 7 years ago

Think how much money we could make back selling skins for the control interfaces to pilots!

mikeash2• 7 years ago

    require(‘left-stick’)

orf• 7 years ago

`docker pull` after a failure mid engagement

throwayEngineer• 7 years ago

Faster development time? Lower energy costs? Cooler? Faster?

akiselev3• 7 years ago

It's a supersonic air superiority jet. The amount of energy needed and heat generated is a rounding error compared to the heat from supersonic flight and the powerplant's output (base fuel burn of thousands of lbs an hour).

In the case of war birds, newer technology does not mean faster development time. In order to qualify electronics for a weapon that needs to be stealthy and resistant to electronic warfare you need decades of operational data on all of the major electronics components. Any system that gets upgraded to newer technology has to go through risk assessments and that often requires tons of data collection before you even get started.

keeganjw• 7 years ago

The F-35? Being wasteful? They wouldn't dare...

euler_angles11• 7 years ago

The program knows it's being wasteful. It is just limited in what it can do about it. Mainly because the same kinds of thinking used to get the program into this mess are what's being tried to get the program out of this mess. Einstein had the definitive quote on how well that works.

"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."

jfb2• 7 years ago

It's also the F-22.

sizzzzlerz2• 7 years ago

In general, I would agree. However, the longer that old technology is deployed, the more expensive support costs. Parts become obsolete, engineers retire or move on, IT has to maintain archaic devices, operating systems, and tools.

Kadin5• 7 years ago

However, practical experience suggests that second-system syndrome is very real, and the cost of replacing 'obsolete' systems is often vastly higher than just maintaining them, even taking into account the need to train people in skills that are difficult to hire for.

But there's an entire industry which exists to soothsay away these concerns and get companies to upgrade, whether or not it really makes any sense. Nobody has an interest in encouraging companies to keep using their old gear and do internal training; many companies have an interest in encouraging upgrades.

vonmoltke6• 7 years ago

However, the longer that old technology is deployed, the more expensive support costs.

That's true, but military logistics has adapted to mitigate some of these costs.

Parts become obsolete

There are two ways this is dealt with. The first is an activity called Diminishing Materials Suppliers (DMS). DMS is an ongoing support activity during production where the availability of parts is monitored and alternative parts are selected and evaluated if a manufacturer announces they are stopping or modifying production of a part for which they are the sole supplier.

The second is the lifetime buy. Near the end of a production run, and sometimes earlier, engineering figures out how many of a given part is needed to complete the full production run and provide spares for rework and repair. Purchasing then gets approval under the contract to purchase the entire quantity of materials and the stock goes to a warehouse until it's needed.

engineers retire or move on

Knowledge transfer is one of the big reasons the defense industry is so big on systems engineering and mountains of documentation. Obviously that only goes so far, but generally there is less tribal knowledge within a DOD program than in most commercial engineering efforts.

IT has to maintain archaic devices, operating systems, and tools

In general, IT doesn't go anywhere near the software and equipment used to program, test, and troubleshoot hardware and embedded software. Those pieces are owned by specific engineering teams on the program.

cmiles742• 7 years ago

I see the "there's nothing wrong with old technology" comment a lot, and in this case I disagree. There's a good chunk of this thread pointing out how hard it is to hire for this position because practically no one is familiar with these technologies. This, to me, illustrates that there absolutely is something wrong with using old technology, especially in this instance.

I will grant that there are some things that just keep working and I also would be tempted to leave them in place. But if their functioning is critical then we either need to cultivate the necessary knowledge in our organization to ensure we can manage them adequately or replace them with something that the current market of people will be somewhat familiar.

toast0• 7 years ago

That it's (now) uncommon technology is only a small part of the hiring problem. Anyway, what's the alternative here? It is almost certainly not worth the effort to rewrite everything in today's common environment 30 years into the service life of the jet; whatever you do now is going to be uncommon again.

A bigger part of the hiring problem is aerospace software, specifically military aerospace software is a difficult field to hire for. Clearance requirements limits your pool. Building weapons of war limits your pool. Low salary compared to other software job limits your pool. Very high level of process / low velocity of shipping limits your pool. If you require experience in the environment, rather than training otherwise appropriate candidates, that's going to be a limit too, but if you work in a specialized environment, you really have to accept that you will need to train people.

vajrabum• 7 years ago

The point is the F-22 is old technology. The testing and other tooling has been in production for a long time. And yes, it's hard to recruit people with the right skillsets to support legacy hardware and software.

an_d_rew• 7 years ago

Thank you for that comment, @cmiles, I couldn't agree more!

I think that it's important to remember that there are both direct and indirect costs to "not changing something that's working".

If you don't keep abreast of change, then you're unable to be nimble enough to change when change is hugely advantageous.

Locking yourself into design decisions is usually cost-effective for the short term, but may be ultimately very harmful in the long-term.

euler_angles11• 7 years ago

The problem is of incompatible time scales. The original studies and requirements for the F-22 were done in the 1980s, Lockheed selected to build the F-22 in the 90s, F-22 entered flight test in 1997, IOC declared in 2005, expected to be in service until the 2040s at least. And in that time the world went from the original IBM PC to iPads and graphics cards that do real time ray-tracing.

And re-doing all the avionics would be a probably decade-plus effort costing billions of dollars. Cheaper to hire some old VAX guys as consultants, pay them exorbitant rates, and have them train up a new generation of VAX people.

mcguire• 7 years ago

How often do you rewrite your existing projects?

cryptonector• 7 years ago

Staying fresh has its own costs, and those would have to be made absolutely clear and transparent and clients must pay them. That's actually very difficult to do politically, especially when you have lowest-price bidding schemes.

Code is legacy the moment it's put into production. Keeping technical debt from piling up, and keeping on the bleeding edge to avoid costly maintenance of old systems is extremely expensive. And the costs escalate very quickly when you're talking about airplanes. The cost of dealing with legacy becomes acceptable very quickly.

m4634• 7 years ago

I wouldn't mind having a low mileage used F-16. F-4 is too old though and and is a gas guzzler.

noneeeed• 7 years ago

Reminds me of my first job out of uni, 18 years ago. I was working on the SPARK toolset, and one of our customers was the Eurofighter, who still used VAX VMS for their development.

We had to maintain an old Micro VAX box in the office to periodically test that the toolset still worked on it. I seem to remember that the massive regression test suite that would run in a few hours every night on a PC would take days on this box.

Our main worry was that one day we'd turn it on and the drive would fail to spin up. I seem to remember there being a periodic reminder to just turn the damn thing on and let it boot every so often, then shut it down, just to make sure the drive was still ok.

walshemj4• 7 years ago

You should have left it on 24/7 this is what we did for our Pr!mes (a VAX competitor) disk drives.

ProxCoques3• 7 years ago

VAX? Like - what? The one introduced on October 25, 1977??

bhaavan• 7 years ago

Security through obfuscation. Lockheed, good morning!

oldsklgdfth2• 7 years ago

I had a job maintaining fortran code on an openVMS OS running on itanium hardware.

Itanium was intel's failed attempt at a 64bit architecture and that's the platform VMS decided to port to. That made hardware expensive and as of recently obsolete (i think hp discontinued that integrity line of servers)

VMS doesn't natively support TCP/IP, because it predates it. The VMS communication protocol was called decnet. So you can imagine that porting vms-specific fortran code to work on a modern network stack was non trivial.

Also, everyone with VMS knowledge was a hacker. No real design or plan, just go in an change a thing here and a thing there and get it working.

All that being said, it was interesting to work on an OS that is so different from linux, specifically the file system had versioning.

TheOtherHobbes• 7 years ago

VMS had some really nice features - mostly forgotten now that it's all 'nix, all the time.

vaxman7• 7 years ago

Not totally ;) https://www.rs-online.com/designspark/a-raspberry-pi-vax-clu...

You know, I should apply for that Lockheed job just to get shutdown for being in my 50s and not having touched a VAX since my 30s (because, you know, it's changed so much since then rofl)

vaxman7• 7 years ago

That's outrageous...

1. RE: FORTRAN. VAX FORTRAN was the most awesome implementation of FORTRAN ever. FORTRAN because these systems didn't have much RAM and CPU power was limited. FORTRAN went into the background for a while when the C fad began in the early 1980s; however, academics cringed at C for reasons that the industry would eventually learn "the hard way" and FORTRAN came back along with a government knee-jerk reaction called Ada and a pile of 4GLs starting with DATATRIEVE --up until processors and RAM allowed for more productive use of more powerful "safe" language systems (Java, C#, Python, Swift).

2. RE: ITANIUM. DEC created VAX/VMS for the break-thru 32-bit VAX-11 architecture and then ported it to its break-thru 64-bit Alpha architecture and rebranded it as OpenVMS. The Alpha chip was really powerful, but it was produced only by DEC's Hudson chip plant (which also produced the StrongARM chip whose descendants are in all of the smartphones). To address the customer need for a second supplier for that chip, DEC began to shop around the Alpha architecture to other semiconductor manufacturers. One of those was Intel --which decided not to become a second source and a little while later, announced the Pentium series that revived its ALL BUT DEAD x86 architecture using patented concepts found only in DEC's Alpha chip. There was a lawsuit and the settlement was that Intel would buy the Alpha chip and Hudson plant. This resulted in the Itanium architecture, which the then owner of DEC (HP) decided to embrace for OpenVMS and its other HP operating systems. As the Pentium chip gained momentum, Intel realized it would be more profitable to use the tech to make X86_64 architecture. Meanwhile, Microsoft, which was all but ready to dump the ALL BUT DEAD x86 architecture (in favor of MIPS and PowerPC), pivoted with Windows NT and released full support for X86_64. Considering that Windows NT was developed by the original computer scientists behind VMS and considering the dominance of Windows on the desktop and the low cost of X86_64 hardware (due to economies of scale), it was no surprise that Itanium fell out of favor, and OpenVMS along with it (though there were many heroic efforts to "rescue" OpenVMS from that dead architecture, HP had no real interest --at least not in time).

3. RE: VMS TCP/IP. This cracked me up. I wrote one of the first TCP/IP stacks for VAX/VMS on a VAX-11/780 using InterLAN hardware. You are correct that VMS pre-dates TCP/IP --but dude it was only by like 1-2 years! VMS was uses with XNS/ITP (upon which TCP/IP was based). TCP/IP is le grand garbage --as the entire planet knows now and DEC had bet heavily on something called OSI to replace DECnet. But some f'n jack head named Vincent Cerf created an async implementation for TCP/IP that allowed the bazillion Windows PC to hop on the Internet (what could go wrong) and that quickly became Microsoft RAS which destroyed the universe quickly. All of the stable and secure networking systems died. Bill Gates was interviewed at one point and responded to a question about what the biggest unexpected development had been with a dumb look saying he had failed to predict the sudden end of distance-and-time based pricing for data communications. So now, dude in St. Petersburg can show off his genetic superiority by hacking the microcode in the Intel Ethernet controllers in your laptop from 8,000 miles away at virtually no cost. Enjoy!

4. VMS knowledge are hackers. This is among the most outrageous comment I've read on the Internet. VMS was all about structure and discipline. If you weren't a computer scientist (or college student) you weren't even getting a job working on one! What you probably observed had nothing to do with VMS but just maintaining legacy code in general.

5. RE: "interesting". VMS was the most powerful operating system ever created well into the modern era. You can imagine that the guys creating Windows NT at Microsoft (who previously developed VMS for DEC back East) were not being allowed to create the true successor to VMS --the idea was to get something working on small cheap PCs that would be sold to all of the small businesses, not on continuing to perfect the product of 30 years of engineering (as VMS descended from their prior RSX11 and RT11 operating systems) as they had been doing first to the 78032 "chip" and later to the Alpha processors. I think around 2015, Windows, Linux and MacOS finally began to pull away from where VMS was (back in 1990). One can only imagine how powerful VMS would have become when run on something like the MacPro 7,1 that Apple announced.

In conclusion, true industry leaders, many of whom did not support VMS back in the day (because they were forced to embrace crummy UNIX System 3, V and BSD "hacks" for lack of access to the incredible DEC engineering resources), will tell you that VMS (and TCP/IP) are stories of lost art that severely setback the pace of mankind's development. The reasons are many: Bill Gates' well known BS, Vincent Cerf's destructive efforts to advance PPP, alleged theft of intellectual property by Intel that set off the downward spiral of DEC, skyrocketing memory prices due to market manipulation and Carly "That Face" Fiorina.

Consider yoh-self schooled.

oldsklgdfth2• 7 years ago

You sound a lot like some of the people I worked with, hey Tim :).

1. The codebase that I was working on was not awesome, it was a mix of Fortran (while i am a fan of and would much rather use that than C for scientific code) and DCL. Lots of stuff that was clearly a design afterthought, but with decades of momentum and an attitude of "just keep it working"

2. There's a lot of history in VMS, but unfortunately it's primarily used to support legacy projects, and with intel not making anymore itanium doesn't seem like there is a future. I couldn't even get a working version of the netbeans plugin to work with it. Basically I got the plugin with no support, despite having a service contract, because there was no engineering supporting fixes.

3. Could have been that the way we wrote out networking was a mess, but I do believe that TCP/IP was an add-on feature that was not part of the kernel.

4. That statement was exclusive to the people i worked with. They were not CS guys, they were support people that had enough experience with the system to get a spot in engineering. They knew how "that" system worked, but not how to solve problems without relying on legacy code that was based on obsolete ideas. I shit you not there were delays in the code because the network was "too fast" and the process couldn't handle it.

5. Solaris is the bomb too.

Take a chill pill, boo

linksnapzz2• 7 years ago

Bless Your Heart.

BTW, this will give you the warm fuzzies:

https://www.vmssoftware.com/updates_port.html

pjc50• 7 years ago

Hard to detect sarcasm or parody here, but this is a great example of someone condemning the systems which were cheap (or license-free), widely available, worked well enough for most people, and provided huge benefits to millions, because it doesn't comply with his own narrow view of how it should be done.

If you weren't a computer scientist (or college student) you weren't even getting a job working on one!

Exactly. A system whose priority is preventing people from ever using it.

solotronics• 7 years ago

5. This brings up something interesting, I wonder how many other good systems/designs/code were killed because they were proprietary and got steamrolled by something open source? It's like in nature, survival of the fittest is a lie, it is survival of those who ended up reproducing.

ubermonkey3• 7 years ago

If you weren't a computer scientist (or college student) you weren't even getting a job working on one!

This isn't remotely true.

vthriller• 7 years ago

As the Pentium chip gained momentum, Intel realized it would be more profitable to use the tech to make X86_64 architecture.

...which they didn't make but licensed from AMD, no?

hoseja• 7 years ago

Must feel bad to be Betamax.

ubermonkey3• 7 years ago

VMS is widely maligned today, but it really wasn't bad, and as you note the clever, native support of versions was kind of amazing. I can't believe that's not part of a modern OS.

VMS' clustering tech was also pretty great, which is the reason my late-90s employer was still on it (though on Alpha hardware at that point, not Vax).

a_random_name• 7 years ago

ZFS does bring in file system level versioning. Not widely adopted yet though.

bediger40006• 7 years ago

Even in the late 90s, you'd get a lot of pushback on "VMS really wasn't bad". One manager I knew believed that the built-in versioning existed solely for DEC to sell people extra disks. I personally can easily believe that filesystems with version numbers don't exist anymore. I'm going to have to reference "The Hideous Name", Rob Pike and Peter Weinberger: https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~rsc/pike85hideous.pdf

xeeeeeeeeeeenu• 7 years ago

Itanium was intel's failed attempt at a 64bit architecture and that's the platform VMS decided to port to. That made hardware expensive and as of recently obsolete (i think hp discontinued that integrity line of servers)

OpenVMS x86-64 port is a work in progress: https://www.vmssoftware.com/updates_port.html

walshemj4• 7 years ago

Would not using a Gateway (in osi speak) have been a solution?

wbl2• 7 years ago

And IO completion ports!

Damogran6• 7 years ago

Did I use DEC and VAX stations? Yes I did. Would I want to relive that period of time? No I would not.

Is that muscle on my face twitching due to PTSD? Yes, Yes it is.

inetsee2• 7 years ago

I worked for Lockheed Martin for more than a decade and I have many of the qualifications listed, including VAX experience and a special access clearance. Of course, Lockheed laid me off fourteen years ago and I retired three years ago, so I guess I won't be applying.

magduf7• 7 years ago

You should apply, and demand an insanely-high salary while pointing out that almost no one has VAX experience now.

gigatexal• 7 years ago

Where is the salary listed?

inetsee2• 7 years ago

When we retired my wife and I fled Atlanta at top speed. I don't know if the job is in Marietta, GA or Ft. Worth (the job listing seems to have disappeared) but I doubt if even an insanely high salary could get us to move to either of those locations.

commandlinefan• 7 years ago

Actually I'd be surprised if they're even paying market rate for these developers, regardless of how difficult or impossible it is to find them. COBOL programmers still make about $70,000/year or so (https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/cobol-programmer-salary-S...) even though the entire world is going to collapse if they disappear. It would seem that the laws of supply and demand don't apply here.

hinkley• 7 years ago

I knew Boeing people who came back with a raise under similar circumstances. Charge them extra for the honor, and reward yourself with something nice at the end. This is bonus money after all.

The binge-purge cycle at these places is not how I think things should be run, but I expect Congress is somewhat to blame for the cycling.

Isamu• 7 years ago

Hmm, makes me wonder why I let that experience drop off my resume.

Oh yeah ...

g00s3_caLL_x2• 7 years ago

They claim this is for the F22, but I wonder if some enemy tech has been 'obtained' and they want to backward engineer it?

The wiki page shows some stats of a plane that is (publicly) 22-23 years old and VAX is 42 years old. To me, that math does not add up.

Just a curious thought.

Lockheed has an opening for engineers with VAX experience for the F22

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