alt Hacker NewsTangent: I would love to see the US gov and military take coding seriously internally. It's nearly all outsourced to contractors, and the software is usually slow and buggy. I built some tools while in, but it was all bro-level.
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The military could fix this internally if they wanted to. There are plenty of people who can write good code and don't mind doing push-ups and going to the range as well.
Dotgov is a lot harder. Salaries are artificially capped very low, and even one of these horrific contracting body shops will pay you 30% more than you'd make in the government, and you don't need to deal with all the bullshit that comes with working for the government.
Oh they definitely have, and likely continue to re-evaluate periodically. They've even done a lot of tests and such to determine feasibility. Unfortunately the costs tend to balloon when done internally, and the quality is not necessarily better.
A friend of mine was a uniformed programmer back when the Marine Corps had an MOS for that. He got out shortly after 9/11 and went on to become a Software Architect in the federal government. He actually has a very negative opinion of the concept of service member software engineers. I think his perspective is colored by his experience working for a Staff Sergeant who lat-moved into their MOS and was just completely useless as a programmer and by extension as a Team Lead or "Senior" Software Engineer. But the Marine Corps is notorious for abysmal Talent Management so YMMV...
The trouble is that outside things like CYBERCOM and the NSA, it's hard to pitch a use case for people in uniform to be slinging code. If anything, that just makes cybersecurity/counterintelligence harder, because you have a bunch of those bro-level apps running around, potentially poorly-built and secured by amateur coders. There's not much more justification for people in uniform building software tools than there is having them design and build artillery guns or transport jets. Better to buy those from industry and train folks in uniform to use them.
I don't disagree with how horrible a lot of DOD software is, but that's more an artifact of the broken military procurement process combined with the often-childish attitudes people in tech have about working with the military.