
Lockheed has an opening for engineers with VAX experience for the F22 - killjoywashere
https://www.lockheedmartinjobs.com/job/california/f-22-avionics-systems-engineer-senior/694/8842471
======
inetsee
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.

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

~~~
inetsee
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.

~~~
magduf
Well, what I was thinking is that you live in an AirBnB or other short-term
rental for 6 months and then quit. Some consultants work this way: only
working for 3-6 months on a gig, getting paid a fortune (plus extra for living
expenses because they're not relocating, just living there temporarily), and
then leaving.

If the company really needs the work done that badly and there's no qualified
help willing to take it full-time, then this is a viable option. If there's no
qualified help and they're not willing to go for a deal like this, then the
work just doesn't get done.

------
urban_winter
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
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.

~~~
alex_hitchins
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?

~~~
jabl
In one of the documentaries about the Vulcan raid on the Falklands (1982), one
of the pilots interviewed remarked that somebody flying Avro Lancasters in
WWII would have felt right at home in the cockpit of the Avro Vulcan. E.g. the
navigator used mechanical clocks to keep track of when to turn, and so on.

Not sure if this was a conscious decision wrt EMP, or was it just that they
were in a hurry to develop a jet bomber for delivering nukes and they reused
existing stuff as much as possible.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
Not in the least surprising. The Vulcan prototype, the 707, first flew in
1949. They even had a mount for the old Lancaster bomb sight - though that was
mostly used for a camera.

Flight engineer and radar operator in the seats behind would have got the
fancy new (for the early 50s) electronic things.

~~~
mhh__
The Lancaster was loaded with the technology of the time by the end up the war
e.g. they had radar navigation, radio navigation, (when it worked) a 'lock'
detector for German night fighter radar

------
nabla9
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.

~~~
cmiles74
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
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.

~~~
Frost1x
Bingo.

The current hiring model of "hit-the-ground-sprinting day 1" I suspect is
largely the problem here and stems across many industries complaining about
hiring difficulties.

Since this "best existing skillset match" hiring model businesses have widely
chosen to adopt provide little-to-no on the job training, people will
inherently focus on learning the most widely adopted skills of their target
market(s) to increase their odds of finding a position in the labor market.
Even niche skills will typically target larger proven successful niches and
not target risky niches.

As a result, your business better follow industry and technology trends as
they shift or you better start investing in your employees and maintain a
positive relationship so you don't lose your knowledge assets that are likely
undervalued by your business.

Even if Lockheed pays me double, even triple, my current rate, it's likely not
worth it for me me wasting my time investing months to years in their specific
architecture and fairly non-transferable skills acquired doing so since
employer/employee relationships and loyalty are dead. That's a hefty
investment on my side with little investment on theirs.

No thanks. It can sit empty and their project can fail for all I care.

~~~
jammygit
I was recently considering learning the SAS data stack and decided against it
for exactly this reason. However, I’m not completely convinced it was the
right choice. Does anyone else have experience that could shed light on this
situation?

------
dvdbloc
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? (Reposting at the top
level because it makes more sense to hopefully get more discussion)

~~~
jki275
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.

~~~
jhawk28
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.

~~~
evancich
You are 1000% wrong. Pay scales are "owned" by the DMCA.
[https://www.dcma.mil/DCMA-Pricing-Support/](https://www.dcma.mil/DCMA-
Pricing-Support/)

A PhD with 20 years of experience = this pay band

You can pay your people whatever you want, but the gov will only pay your
people what the DCMA says they are worth. If you pay higher, it comes out of
profit (which is also metered by the DCMA) or some other source.

Source: A own a R&D engineering company that works for the DoD and IC.

I can pay a EE PhD $400k/year but the DoD will "only" pay me back around $175k
for this person's time. I have to make up the difference.

Hence, for defense contractors, we "only" pay what the DCMA will let us
charge.

In order, what matters are: tickets, experience, degrees, certs

~~~
thfuran
Tickets?

~~~
euler_angles
Accesses to special programs.

------
oldsklgdfth
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.

~~~
vaxman
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.

~~~
pjc50
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.

~~~
icedchai
I knew guys who ran VMS systems out of their homes, back in the 90's. It was
fairly accessible.

~~~
bediger4000
How many of them had the manuals? Very few. The famous "Orange Wall of
Manuals" was often secreted away, for the wizards to consult, but not for the
masses to enlighten themselves with.

~~~
icedchai
One guy, at least, had manuals. VMS also had an excellent help facility.

~~~
bediger4000
Oh, sure. What was the format of an executable file?

Nostalgia is a trap. Wallowing in the idealized "good old days" blinds you to
the true scope of history and cuts you off from progress.

~~~
icedchai
Hah. I've forgotten.

Retrocomputing is just a hobby of mind. It's fun to play around with those old
systems.

~~~
bediger4000
As near as I could ever find, the format of a VMS executable file did not
appear in the DEC manuals. I meant that as a commentary on the "VMS had great
docs" sentiment.

At one point, I was convinced that understanding the format of an executable
file (a.out, COFF, XCOFF, Mach-O, ELF, .com, .exe, PE, etc) was important to
understanding the operating system itself. I spent a fair amount of effort and
some money buying books trying to find the VMS executable file format.
Couldn't find a hint.

~~~
vaxman
It did, sigh. It was in the LINK'ER documentation. RSX/VMS was all about
object modules being shared between concurrently running applications in
separate user spaces (because RAM was crazy expensive and DISK was crazy slow
and expensive).

The format for runtime libraries, executables and memory-mapped sections in
general descended from the PDP11 a bit and I believe it changed radically (for
the first time in decades) with the introduction of the 64-bit Alpha
architecture under "Open"VMS.

~~~
bediger4000
Alas, the LINKER documentation
([https://www.itec.suny.edu/scsys/vms/ovmsdoc073/v73/4548/4548...](https://www.itec.suny.edu/scsys/vms/ovmsdoc073/v73/4548/4548pro_contents.html))
I can find only includes a description of the "object language" for VAX
([https://www.itec.suny.edu/scsys/vms/ovmsdoc073/v73/4548/4548...](https://www.itec.suny.edu/scsys/vms/ovmsdoc073/v73/4548/4548pro_contents_001.html#toc_appendix_a))
and Alpha
([https://www.itec.suny.edu/scsys/vms/ovmsdoc073/v73/4548/4548...](https://www.itec.suny.edu/scsys/vms/ovmsdoc073/v73/4548/4548pro_contents_002.html#toc_appendix_b)).
It does say that Itanium VMS used ELF format executables. So I think it's
still an open question as to whether VAX/VMS or Alpha/VMS executable file
format ever had documentation.

How did ELF format files play in VMS' idea of process-as-elaborate-address-
sapce, where running a command involved reading or mapping in an executable,
and then jumping to the entry point? Or did I64 VMS abandon the unusual VMS
process model?

------
aosmith
Here's the backstory:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20100310163744/http://www.stsc.hi...](http://web.archive.org/web/20100310163744/http://www.stsc.hill.af.mil/crosstalk/2000/05/moody.html)

~~~
dotancohen
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.

~~~
rwallace
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.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
The variation I was taught (and it works rather well), is to look at the
Requirements and estimate them in terms of T-Shirt sizes of LOC (Small,
Medium, Large, XL). Then baseline your S/M/L/XL sizes into LOC. e.g., Small is
20 LOC, Large is 750, etc. From that, use your historical data (you _have_
been tracking closely how long it takes to implement a feature vs its LOC
size, right?) to estimate that say, a Small feature (20 LOC) will take 2 days
at a rate of 10 LOC/Day.

It takes a lot of discipline and planning, but in the end it's the most
accurate method of size and time estimation I've ever seen.

~~~
CharlesColeman
I'm sure that works reasonably well in most cases, but it is a bit of a
fallacy that it take a similar amount of effort to write each LOC.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
You are correct. For reasons of expediency I did not mention that there's a
"difficulty" factor which is usually expressed by a variable LOC/hour rate.
e.g., Server backend code might be estimated at 100 LOC/day whereas code for
an 8-bit embedded controller might be 10 LOC/day.

------
noneeeed
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.

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

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

------
ch_123
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).

~~~
vonmoltke
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
"I Seem To Recall"

~~~
rtkwe
Huh never seen that before. Seems like a upmarket version of the more common
(to me) IIRC (If I Recall Correctly).

------
Damogran6
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.

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

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

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

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

Oh yeah ...

------
chrisco255
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?"

~~~
avar
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!".

~~~
challenger22
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.

~~~
PaulHoule
I've seen non-professional programmers write the most amazing things in VBA.

------
g00s3_caLL_x2
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.

------
bhaavan
Security through obfuscation. Lockheed, good morning!

------
kalmes
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.

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

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

~~~
Loughla
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.

~~~
carlmr
>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.

I'm guessing those people went into HR and are projecting.

------
3xblah
[oops]

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

------
proy24
I think all engineers with VAX experience are extinct ...or retired.

~~~
metaphor
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.

~~~
dvdbloc
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?

~~~
Spooky23
I don’t work in the space or DC, but have worked with people who are in this
industry. It’s a career job usually, and many of these folks work in out of
the way places. If you’re pulling down $120k in some suburb of Omaha, you’re
doing very well.

The career path and security is important as well. A FAANG won’t hire a 45
year old technical SME.

There’s also an academic/industry connection. You may wear multiple hats if
you're affiliated with the university, a lab, or a company. I met at least one
person who was a professor at a major school, did work at a sponsored lab or
think tank (ie. MITRE, RAND Corp, etc), and did some work over a sabbatical
for a big name-brand defense contractor.

