I went through the TS positive vetting process (for signals intelligence, not writing software for fighter jets, but the process is presumably the same).
If I were back on the job market, I’d be demanding a big premium to go through it again. It’s very intrusive, puts significant limitations on where you can go, and adds significant job uncertainty (since your job is now tied to your clearance).
Not to mention embedded software is often half the pay of a startup and defense software often isn't work from home. Forget asking what languages they can hire for. They are relying on the work being interesting to compensate for dramatically less pay and substantially less pleasant working conditions. Factor in some portion of the workforce has ethical concerns working in the sector and you can see they will get three sorts of employees. Those who couldn't get a job elsewhere, those who want something cool on their resume, and those who love the domain. And they will lose the middle category right around the time they become productive members of the team because it was always just a stepping stone.
Yes but like a certification, that clearance is yours, not the companies. You take it with you. It lasts a good while. There are plenty of government companies that would love you if you had one. Northrop, Lockheed, Boeing, etc.
An Engineering degree and a TS is basically a guaranteed job. They might not be the flashiest FAANG jobs, but it is job security. In this downturn where people talk about being unable to find jobs for years in big cities, I look around my local area and Lockheed, BAE, Booze Allen, etc they have openings.
My issue is you end up dealing with dopes who don't want to learn, just want to milk the money and the job security, and actively fight you when you try to make things better. Institutionalized.
And yet my experience looking at the deluge of clearance-required dev jobs from defense startups in the past couple of years is that there is absolutely no premium at all for clearance-required positions.
That was how I took most of my school and university exams. I hated it then and I'd hate it now. For humanities, at least, it felt like a test of who could write the fastest (one which I fared well at, too, so it's not case of sour grapes).
I'd be much more in favour of oral examinations. Yes, they're more resource-intensive than grading written booklets, but it's not infeasible. Separately, I also hope it might go some way to lessening the attitude of "teaching to the test".
We had orals for graded programming assignments in graduate school. You had to present your solution to a panel and defend it. Some of my classmates really struggled with anxiety in front of the panel and took any question, however mild, as intense personal criticism.
Maybe this is a case for "learning styles", but it's probably logistically prohibitive to offer both options.
I didn't look too close but it wouldn't surprise me if this was intentional. Many of these Meta/Facebook projects don't have open licenses so they never graduate from web demos. Their voice cloning model was the same.
This technique is surprisingly powerful. Yesterday I built an experimental cellular automata classifier system based on some research papers I found and was curious about. Aside from the sheer magic of the entire build process with Cursor + GPT5-Codex, one big breakthrough was simply cloning the original repo's source code and copy/pasting the paper into a .txt file.
Now when I ask questions about design decisions, the LLM refers to the original paper and cites the decisions without googling or hallucinating.
With just these two things in my local repo, the LLM created test scripts to compare our results versus the paper and fixed bugs automatically, helped me make decisions based on the paper's findings, helped me tune parameters based on the empirical outcomes, and even discovered a critical bug in our code that was caused by our training data being random generated versus the paper's training data being a permutation over the whole solution space.
All of this work was done in one evening and I'm still blown away by it. We even ported our code to golang, parallelized it, and saw a 10x speedup in the processing. Right before heading to bed, I had the LLM spin up a novel simulator using a quirky set of tests that I invented using hypothetical sensors and data that have not yet been implemented, and it nailed it first try - using smart abstractions and not touching the original engine implementation at all. This tech is getting freaky.
I wasn't actually able to use it because the servers were overloaded. What exactly impressed you (or more generally, what does it actually let you do at the moment?).
What you get is a 3D room based on the prompt/image. It rewrites your prompt to a specific format. Overall the rooms tend to be detailed and imaginative.
Then you can fly around the room like in Minecraft creative mode. Really looking forward to more editing features/infill to augment this.
I don’t know the exact numbers, but I feel like OpenAI raised far more money than those companies, burned through it far quicker and has much more competition with a much shakier value proposition.
They definitely have a strong consumer brand so it’s not like they’re going to disappear, but I understand the bear case.
Sam A is pretty well connected and knows the game well. No doubt there will be some risks where the whole thing goes right down to zero, but I personally wouldn't bet against them.
If I were back on the job market, I’d be demanding a big premium to go through it again. It’s very intrusive, puts significant limitations on where you can go, and adds significant job uncertainty (since your job is now tied to your clearance).
reply