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And that's before considering things like the probably higher-than-usual rate of neurodiverse workers in software, for whom military cultural issues would often go from merely unpleasant all the way up to fundamentally incompatible.

> go to a boot camp and get hazed by a bunch of jocks

Marine Corps recruit training and Air Force BMT are world’s apart.

I agree, but one oft neglected part of these things is the assumption that military and private companies are the same when we know they aren't.

The pay is one issue, but the social aspects are the much bigger issue.

In bureaucracy where jobs are almost impossible to be fired from for lack of adequate performance there is always an entrenched notion that anyone performing better is making everyone else look bad, and this results in sideband bullying, silencing, and various other forms of coercion which meet a definition of torture.

This is why Academia, and Government have such a hard time finding and keeping qualified people. Structurally, those in charge are the ones promoting negative production value, they may say otherwise but people lie all the time and its only rational to take people by their actions over what words they speak.

There is no amount of money that someone will justify selling/losing their sanity in exchange for money. Money isn't worth anything if you can't spend it.

If you sieve the entry with arbitrary requirements, while also making the job intolerable... of course you aren't going to attract talent.

Its not mainly a matter of money, or for that a matter of culture. Its a matter of structure, and structural failures that incentivize these deficits, they are the same deficits found in central planning.

If you can't relieve people for doing a bad job, you only ever attract parasites which crowd out your productive members, and eventually the reputation gets around and no one even bothers to apply or go down that path if they can avoid it. Couple that with systems which are designed to propagate evils without the individuals alerting to the fact, and who would risk their soul for a job?

The wisest understand that the job you choose can warp and defines you. If you segment and compartmentalize information you'll never know when you commit attrocities, and you'll be equally responsible regardless of that knowing.

Overall, Government job? Academic Job? nope moving on. Sanity, and religious beliefs are valued well above anything so base as money; but there are those types too.

> I'm not sure there's any reasonable amount of money that would make me want to go to a boot camp and get hazed by a bunch of jocks.

This sounds like it’s more a problem of boot camp, not so much the cyber department.

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Part of the “problem” is that much military pay is “hidden”. An e-6 at 12 years makes $55.6k. That is very low compared to the private sector. However, basic allowance for housing (BAH) for an E6 with dependents is another $20-40k, so let’s call it $30k. Finally there is retirement. Retirement is harder to calculate, but traditionally if you reach 20 years then you get half your pay for the rest of your life as soon as you leave the military. An E6 @20 would get almost $30k/year, which will automatically increase with inflation. If you retire at 39 (enlisted at 19) and live to 80 you get $1.2M in inflation adjusted payments. The net present value of that is not something I know how to rigorously calculate, but $1M seems in the ball park. That’s an additional $50k/year over a 20 year career if you make it.

That means if you are a 12 year E6 and plan to stay in to 20 your real total comp is closer to $130k/year, and that’s not including BAS, retention bonuses, and other compensation. And it excludes tricare and other VA benefits post retirement.

The total potential compensation for military personnel is far more comparable than it looks, but is heavily weighted to non-cash compensation.

* Apologies if I’m being too pedantic here to much, but I wanted to make sure people who aren’t familiar with the subject can understand what I’m getting at as well.

But it would take you much more to jump to that $140k if you were not in military.

It wasn’t like you could get that right of the bat.

Military experience is valuable on itself.

Yes you don’t want to stay there for whole career- but doing 5 or 10 years is going to pay off later. Just be good for your mates ;)

Did you get BAH? In high CoL areas like DC metro the housing allowance is like an extra 33k, tax free.

I mean, the reason you're getting that much is due to the experience and creds you earned during service. I can't even post into real security roles at my current company because they only want external candidates with federal experience. They post internally for 1-2 days as a formality. Even then, most of those roles are under $120k. The only roles available to me are shitty ones like application security champion and managing/configuring SAST tools.

Also a major point not covered was defined benefits vs the 401k model.

But is that not also a common issue with many IT companies? The technical career path is short and the higher levels on that path are already supposed to work more on powerpoints and meetings than on code.

$200k isn’t huge for people capable of cyberwarfare.

Nobody is denying that many people find military service fulfilling. But certain roles have extremely limited talent pools. The odds that you'll find someone willing to take a position primarily for fulfillment when the starting salary for a contractor is double/triple/quadruple/quintuple what government offers, the public service role is immediately starting at a significant disadvantage.

Besides hiring talent, it carries through to career advancement and development (which plays heavily into personal fulfillment!) which on turn affects retention. If you're thinking of starting a family and settling down, being able to have more flexibility and significantly more money is a highly attractive option.

> They're paid the same rate for govt contracts as everyone else no?

No. Where did you get the idea the government pays the same rate for every contract/contractor?

Defense procurement is notoriously complicated, and there are myriad ways contracts can be structured. There is definitely no single rate.

> Unlike most defense companies, we don’t wait for our customers to tell us what they need. We identify problems, privately fund our R&D and sell finished products off the shelf.

The idea is to be more like Microsoft or SpaceX. The government doesn't micromanage Microsoft's R&D, they simply purchase licenses for Windows off the shelf. Same thing happens for SpaceX rocket launches at this point.

> Where is Anduril getting that money?

A mix of VC funding, foreign defense sales, and private sector deals, because their products are dual use. Also, as a private company, they don't have the same kinds of expenditures that a service has (pensions, capex on infra, etc)

> I think that it's complicated

Yep! Esprit de corps does play a role in retention to a limited extent.

Also, after this hearing happening in 2018, all the branches began pushing heavily for Cyber Reserves branches because it's the easiest way for them to remediate the skill and pay gap.

Anduril doesn't generally sell hours to the government like most defense contractors.

because the military can't retain talent, they pay through the nose for contractors who don't enforce their "standards"...

In the military though aren't people enlisted for specific amounts of time, so if the military no longer wanted them around it could just not allow them to reenlist when their current term expires?

Even if you have a lot of time left on your current enlistment period and they don't have cause to toss you out, couldn't they reassign you for the rest of your term to something else?

I mean, the government absolutely could fire people. They aren't giving money to Anduril because Anduril can fire people. They are giving money to Anduril because:

1. Anduril is more competent than the people they can afford to hire.

2. Giving Anduril money funnels funds into local enconomies and individuals that are important to political objectives.

Most federal employees are limited by the amount paid to a member of congress. The SES doesn't have a lot of people in it and they mostly run a bureaucracy, they're not doing real work.

> Enlistees are bucketed based on rank and years within the service. It is almost impossible to make a case for Cyber Enlistees to get a separate payscale from other Enlistees because other enlistees can and do get pissed.

I wonder if (and maybe this is already in practice), there's an opportunity for warrant officers in this context. In the United States Army where I enlisted, our helicopter pilots were mostly warrant officers and then you had the staff officers who would always try and get more flying time.

The warrant officers were, I believe, paid less than the staff officers, but there's no reason to think the military can't provide additional pay. Retention and sign-on bonuses for expertly-trained cyber warfare and other compute-related activities warrant officers could be something to consider.

Even as an enlisted soldier since I worked in aviation we'd get extra pay because of the odd shifts we worked which was supposed to make up for/supplement on-base meals. I may be remembering incorrectly but being airborne trained provided some extra money as well, though nominal.

All that to say, if a W-1 is making $50,000 in base pay per year, if we wanted to we could just double that via retention and sign-on bonuses.

Of course you might say, well sure but then you know you really aren't making as much as that engineer who is pulling $180,000/year + bonus/equity, and you're right, but in a similar vein I'd say yea and you can only fly an AH-64 in the military....

Palantir has been overstating its benefits for decades at this point. Slick UI can’t hide the almost minimal usefulness you get out of it (and even that minor utility requires an army of support engineers anyways)

I don't put a huge emphasis on credentials. If someone is capable and talented, a degree doesn't change that. However, if they were able to complete an engineering degree (or insert analogous degree from any other area) then they have demonstrated an aptitude and capability that others have not.

The people who couldn't create their keypairs may have had the raw material, but they were trying perform at a level they weren't yet capable of - they couldn't google a simple task and follow instructions. They needed to go back to square zero and learn basics when they were in a graduate program. And because the graduate program was dumbed down, they weren't going to learn the basics in the program.

> To bacteria, individual humans are "too big to fail" in the same way geography is.

...which is why diseases rapidly evolve away from lethality?