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Inside SAIC
An anonymous reader submits this profile of SAIC, Science Applications International Corporation, the behemoth defense contractor/research outfit/spymaster.
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"Men lie."
"Yeah, about sleeping with other women, but never about bioluminescent plankton."
-Dan Brown
I work for an employee-owned company that is modeled after SAIC, and it is pretty cool. You can clearly see that your work is contributing to the success of the company, which is driving the growth of the stock value, which is putting money in your pocket. And we attract a lot of top-notch people because of that.
If you didn't read too far into the article you might get the wrong impression, though. Twice on the first page they say that it's privately held, and it's only on the second page where employee ownership is discussed.
The "invisible company" angle of this article cracks me up. Seems like you can't swing a dead cat without hitting an SAIC employee. Everyone knows about them. They're everywhere. Finding a person who hadn't heard of SAIC would about as easy as finding someone who hasn't heard of Microsoft. But I guess that's just my world. Good article, tho.
BTW, if you are a java programmer in the DC area interested in doing defense work with a great company, send me your resume.
"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."
I for one have never heard of this company before today and I'm pretty shocked. I've been pretty vocal about worries on TIA issues, but geeze...
On the other hand perhaps it was better "before" when we the people didn't know about everything and just believed blindly in our government to protect us.
intelligence officials say they're pumping new material through SAIC-designed systems virtually around the clock This sounds dodgy: they must be checking everything (text messages etc) to beable to narrow it down to just the ones they're looking for if the terrorists keep changing phones. Surely this is illegal?
Is it a boat?
I worked at SAIC and the oddest thing there was that as an employee you were really dealt with like a contractor. You worked on your project until it was done, and when it was done you were left to your own accord to find a new project to work on. You could hope that your manager would take you with him/her to their next project - but your skillset wouldn't always allow that.
Very strange indeed, having to worry about your job all the time.
joe.
Oh my, the security of our country is now resting on java developers recruited on slashdot. At least the DOD is hiring workers from within their own country though...
kryzx@jeh.net
"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."
I almost worked for SAIC a few years ago. I was about to accept their job offer, but then I was turned off when discussing advancement opportunities within the company. Apparently, unlike most of geekdom which is ruled by skills, the only real way to advance in SAIC is to hang a bunch of degrees and certifications on your wall. Regardless of your skill level, degrees and certifications are what count towards promotions and advancement.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I've met a ton of people with great credentials who are morons and many non-degreed and non-certified people who are excellent people to work and deal with. IMO, there's no hard and fast rule either way. Degrees don't make you smart and vice versa.
Why do I h8 apple?
I bet at least 20% of /. readers are in the gov't and defense industry. 'Course, they don't have nearly as much time to write comments as all the unemployed dot-commers.
(ok, before you flame me, I can make fun of unemployed dot-commers because I was one back in the day. An awful lot of us landed in the defense world.)
"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."
Seems like you can't swing a dead cat without hitting an SAIC employee.
That's Scene 24, right?
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
I work for SAIC, and employee ownership is pretty kickass, and the long list of "cool shit" that we do keeps getting larger and larger. My favorite part by far is that since everyone is an owner, the "retard rate" is alot lower - that guy slacking off is costing you money, so everyone busts ass.
The company is VERY conservative, lots of ex-military folks, but even conservative companies understand saving money, so at our division Open Source reigns supreme.
At our office we use Redhat, Debian, PostgreSQL, Bugzilla, and CVS almost exclusively. We all have linux desktops and laptops, even though the "corporate standard" is Exchange. We can get away with this because SAIC acts more like a cluster of tiny companies rather than a monolith. As long as we remain profitable, we can really do almost what we want.
My boss donates space to the local LUG at night to hold meetings, because they recognize the value of fostering professional development, AND it gives them a nice steady hiring pool.
If you ever have a chance to interview for SAIC then do it.
This is one company that i certainly hope never IPO's...imagine taking decisions about secret technologies to the stock holders...
What, like these companies?
Boeing
Lockheed Martin
United Technologies
Being listed on the stock exchange hasn't lead to these companies (and many others like them) being denied defense contracts or them leaking military secrets so why should you expect that to be a problem for SAIC?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
After reading the article through two or three times, I can certainly say it's interesting. What is REALLY interesting though is the message embedded in the article. Didn't expect that, did you?
Seriously, check it out. ROT13 the article, then drop every other character. Finally, use the alphabet backwards starting a S for one char, then A for the next, I for the next, C for the next, and repeat.
VERY clever. The message is certainly worth the effort decrypting.
KIKOMANThe interesting point about SAIC is the "private market" for company shares that the company itself maintains. How well does that really work for employees who don't want to have a disproportionate share of their savings tied to their company's stock?
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
You are:
1) An idiot.
2) A Slashbot. And, most importantly...
3) Not funny.
Put your tinfoil hat on, why don't you? SAIC has been around since the sixties.
Now that's the sort of conspiricy theory FUD that slashdot has been lacking for a long time! lol.
It take more faith to believe in evolution than it takes to believe in God
SAIC is not secretive. It just doesn't a "Investor Relations" dept. whose job is to hype its name on Wall St. and CNBC.
SAIC _has_ bid against itself for government contracts (highly embarassing). This is because the company is very diversified and has little vertical control coordination. Each unit operates like a small business. They are responsible for their own profit/loss. I've known a unit a unit to sub-contract to another company, because they didn't know the capability was already in house.
Employee ownership:
All employees are equal, but some are more equal than others.
I'm curious about how many SAIC emps read /. I started a journal entry to find out. http://slashdot.org/~NTT/journal/32648
SAIC played a huge part in the Venezuelan government-owned PDVSA lockout. SAIC handled all the computer related technologies of the billion-dollar company, and when the strike started all the computer systems where sabotaged (thousands of machines with all the passwords changed, wireless network cards for shutting down the gas-filling plants when tried to be restarted, and a lot more).
...).
How can this be? In a country that has a oil industry of over 40 billion US$ a year, how can a known US defense contractor and spymaster get hold of all the computer systems? Well, some time ago (about six years ago) the president of Venezuela, seeing the inminent election of Hugo Chavez as the next president, hurried a deal between SAIC and PDVSA to create a PDVSA subsidiary called INTEVEP. INTEVEP was the technology provider for PDVSA and, as specified in the contract, it had a monopoly of all technology related operations in the state owned PDVSA. The idea was this: PDVSA gave all the infrastructure and hardware (computers, offices, etc), and SAIC gave almost nothing. At the end they where 50-50 partners (how come, nobody knows
When the oil strike started on december, INTEVEP was one of the first to stop working, cancelling contracts with thousands of independent contractors who, to this day, remain on the streets without a job. Meanwhile, the people who took over the administration of PDVSA and relaunched the operations started to cease the contract with SAIC and decided to liquidate INTEVEP.
Guess what??? The contract signed 6 years ago says very clear that, in the case where PDVSA cancelled the contract, it had to pay (buy to) SAIC for all the INTEVEP properties, which were given by PDVSA as its part of the agreement.
In the end, PDVSA has paid over a hundred million dollars, and a lot more has to yet be paid for infrastructure and obsolete hardware that had been bought by them in the first place.
Union? At SAIC?
Ha!!!
Surely, thou art a troll.
The interesting point about SAIC is the "private market" for company shares that the company itself maintains. How well does that really work for employees who don't want to have a disproportionate share of their savings tied to their company's stock?
Well, for one thing, the 401(K) plan gives you a list of mutual funds/bonds/etc. of varying degree of risk to invest in, pretty much the same as any typical 401(K). You don't need to invest in SAIC if you don't want to (although you certainly can.) SAIC's company match is given in the form of SAIC stock, but that is hardly unusual.
SAIC gives its employees lots of chances to buy company stock (and stock options), and it gives out things like stock options and fully-vested shares as performance bonuses, but nobody is required to invest their retirement savings in it. If somebody's got 100% of their retirement funds in SAIC stock, that's because that's the way they wanted it.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
Yeah, just imagine...
I wish I could pull this back up:
2001-03-30 23:34:37 CIA Goes Investing in High-Tech as In-Q-Tel (articles,tech) (rejected)
Whom are the stockholders of the CIA? (rhetorical question)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I'm a subcontractor at Lockheed Martin along with a number of SAIC subs, and I can't say that I've been all that impressed with all of them. Most of them that I've known have been testers, so maybe that's the low rung at SAIC. Also, they never appeared to be that happy with SAIC.
I'd much prefer to be in my situation, where two guys own 51% of the company and give out stock to exceptional employees instead of everyone. They make sure we get great benefits, and despite our high fringe rate, our overall rates are still lower than most because of our low overhead.
I heard that they are working on a new project called Skynet or something like. Something along the lines of an AI to help protect us...
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Read the post you're replying to again. The author is advertising his own employee-owned business, not SAIC.
-Billy
When I was just starting out in the field I worked for SAIC in NewPort, RI. before the days of GPS. They designed a Satelite calibrated Loran system. The best part of the job was going out to sea testing the equipment. We would go out to find a submerged bouy, get to the coordinates, release the bouy to see how close we got. It was a fun job. Ah... but I was young and I wanted my career to evolve and work with embedded controllers. I'd have to say the SAIC partys were pretty cool too.
My question was more geared as to how that market works - since it doesn't use the public capital markets for price determination, how does the price get set in the first place?
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
I start working for SAIC next Monday - I am actually pretty stoked to see what's up inside the company.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
...and you expect people to respect your journal entry?
c k here for the journal entry</a>
<a href="http://slashdot.org/~NTT/journal/32648">Cli
Is that too difficult for you? I mean, hell, you've got a reasonably low userid, how can you struggle with that?
holy shit you're naive.
when you leave you're forced to liquidate all your holdings in the company.
As long as the company size is growing or stable there's no problem here.
What, pray tell, would happen if some big contracts didn't come through and a bunch of people were all let go at the same time?
Seems to me, with the constrained marketplace for SAIC shares, you could get a big drop in the effective share price. The people going out the door would be doubly pissed: once for having been let go, once for getting a pittance for their shares as they depart into the ranks of the unemployed.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
I work in a place where we have to justify ourselves by getting projects that bring in money to the department. Its an interesting place to work, and really fast paced if you want it to be. But you can't ever worry about your job, if you can't find another project then its a bitch, but that gets determined by you, not the company finding work for you to do. This kind of approach keeps people there as long as things are interesting, but when they cool down people have a way of leaving, but we get lots of people that come back to do interesting projects even after they have left, so its a interesting model.
That's a good question. :-) SAIC has got a broker/dealer subsidiary called Bull, Inc. that essentially operates an internal market that allows employees to buy or sell shares. The price is determined by a process too complicated for me to explain (based on performance of similar companies, other external market factors, etc.) It sounds a bit unusual (like the fox guarding the henhouse, since Bull is an SAIC subsidiary) but something must be working.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
Much of the work may be hidden, but it has never been more vital. SAIC is on the front lines of today's most momentous national security battles. It's not too much to say that the future safety of many Americans rests in the aged hands of a brilliant and quirky septuagenarian and his clandestine army of techno geeks.
A nice piece of prop...writing.
I, for one, would feel safer without top secret companies and organizations, because what you don't know can hurt you.
The problem with companies that deal in security is, they're always trying to convince you that you need them, as it would be counterproductive for them to admit, at any time, that they are not needed. (Also an interesting problem with pharmeceutical companies.)
But that's just my cynical view...
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
SAIC is actually the parent company of my compnay(AMSEC LLC). It's really a cool company to work for, especially the stock options...Of course I work offsite of our office, and have gotten a pretty good thing going supporting the fleet... Such is life...
such is life...
LSI is prolly what enables Echelon to process so many faxes and conversations.
Step 1 is an ass-numbing 8-hour indoctrination into the company and how not to harrass people, how to report wrongdoing, yada yada yada. I just went through it a few months ago and boy did it suck. Not to mention that the Human Resources people have the flexibility of a piece of ceramic. Other than that, it's been ok.
Imagine one of those robots (depicted in the article) approaching you with its menacing video camera peering at you. What's the first thing any sane person would do... labotomize it (and in the process gain a free iPAQ).
come on fhqwhgads
I was surprised to see that they were mentioned on slashdot. Ever since working for them, I've rarely met anyone who has even heard of the name. But I guess they don't need to advertise to the general public.
Contracting for them was actually my first professional programming experience, as I had only completed two years of a four year degree when I started. I wasn't working on any of the cutting edge stuff mentioned in the article though, our project was an internal website.
It was a good experience, even though I never really got any ownership of my own...and we had to wear ties.
Yeah, I have a webcomic...
I've got a trackball built by SAIC. It's lasted me for, oh, 5 years? And it still shows NO signs of anything approaching failure. I got it off ebay, the seller claimed it was designed for submarines and I wouldn't be surprised. It's ugly as hell and about 1/3 the size of a 104-key keyboard but with keyboard key buttons instead of lame ass normal microswitch type buttons. I have yet to figure out how to take the ball out to clean it, but then again, it has never been necessary to do so. .45 round right through the middle and keep on working. Pair this up with one of those old IBM "tank" PS/2 keyboards and NOTHING will ever stop you from inputting into your computer.
I have the distinct impression that this thing could take a
Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati
Why is this modded down, esp. as a troll? The SAIC does have some very serious Union problems.
I have a relative who works for SAIC, and it's not all spooks and defense work. The National Institutes of Health also sub contracts large portions of it's intramural research to SAIC labs, both on the main Bethesda MD campus and sattelite campuses scattered around. As for the quality of the organization, relative to the rest of the NIH, it really depends. The cost sensitivites are a bit different than working for the government proper, and perhaps there is a slightly higher caliber of employees at SAIC, but that may as much be the lack of cushy, sit in the break room and read the paper, job security a government job gets you.
no you read it asshat. yeah it's his own company, but its doing defense work which is what the comment you responded to is about.
Seems like you can't swing a dead cat without hitting an SAIC employee.
Man, government regulations are getting harsh.
It's downmodded as a troll because likening a labor union to the mafia is considered a bit juvenile.
I can answer this from my own experience.
I was an employee there (1988-1993). When you signed up for a 401(k), the first $2000 of your contributions and all of the companies contributions
went into company stock.
Once a quarter, you could trade out of company stock, but you had to take the initiative.
If you were a high-level manager, I suppose you would have to explain why you kept selling SAIC stock.
But I was just a programmer there and I did sell blocks of stock that were in my IRA.
I would have made more money if I had left it in SAIC stock though.
The article says that they beat the S&P 500 and I can attest to that during the years I was there.
In 20 years of working in the computer business I have never seen more formal project management -- especially on fixed price contracts.
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." -- Albert Einstein
The city where I live in Canada is the provincial capital. A number of years ago the provincial government created a new health care agency called SHIN whose purpose was to facilitate the development of a provincial health care network. SAIC was awarded the contract to do all the necessary IT work involved to make SHIN's vision a reality.
They have done some really cool things. They utilized the existing Internet infrastructure to allow pharmacists in remote areas of the province to be able to send their prescription data to a mainframe here in Regina. They have also provided doctors with wireless communications using PDAs for appointments, emergencies, etc. The grander picture here is that since the province was wired with fibre-optic cable a long time ago (thanks to the wide-open geography and a telephone company with a lot of foresight) they plan on allowing doctors to view CT scans, MRI scans, etc. real time over a network. There are also plans in place to even have surgeries performed where a general surgeon is performing the operation in one location being guided by a specialist in a different location.
SAIC definately does some neat stuff and as time passes I hope that the work they do benefits the pathetic health care system we have right now.
back when I got my PhD and was job hunting, I applied for a couple of jobs with SAIC. They looked like a good company to work for. I ended up with a job somewhere else before I got interviewed with SAIC, though.
The point of your post is?
Not only are they doing whatever it is that they do at ORNL (it is black stuff I am sure), they are also writing pretty cool Remedy apps for us here.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
That's funny, I used to work for SAIC when my whole division was canned. Now I work in a much more secure job in the private sector. (Insurance Industry)
Real SUV's don't have cupholders
It's 5:42 A.M., do you know where your stack pointer is?
I worked for a compnay that was acquired by SAIC in the late 90's, and there was a lot of concern by some employees about working for "a military industrial complex" company. So SAIC invited all employees to hear about the tremendous non-military stuff they did. One guy spoke at length about SAICs' position in health care research. At the end of his talk, an employee asked "so, exactly what kind of health case research are we talking about here?" The red-faced reply from the SAIC guy: "Uhh... the effects of nuclear radiation on the human body". Sigh.... so close and yet so far....
The last time I wrote code, it was Morse
SAIC can be a great place to work if you are a PM, VP or above. Otherwise, you are just considered contract labor that will probably be laid off at the end of whatever contract you are on. The VP's and project managers move on to the next contract and the worker bees are all let go. Great place to be a boss. ('Course if the PM ticks off the contractor (The Army, in our case), the contract closes even earlier, all the worker bees get terminated, and the PM just goes on to the next SAIC contract. I was the last one out the door of about 70 FTE's.) The weirdest thing about SAIC is that it is so much like it's biggest customer -- Uncle Sam. All the Big VPs used to work in the areas (and Agencies) in which they are now expected to produce contracts. Fancy that.
Well, bub, I AM a real lawyer
You are so full of shit that I can smell you from here. Ah hell, maybe you *are* a lawyer after all.
Okay, they're freaking geniouses, but why on God's green earth did they stop neighboring companies from coming to their cafeteria for national security concerns?
Dr B. give me a break. I'm hungry!
Sheesh. Ease up on the pretty heavy-breathing tone, dude. You're just talking about a standard "Beltway Bandit" defense services company. There are a couple of dozen like SAIC around (I've worked for two of them, and contracted with SAIC), and hundreds (thousands) of similar small companies.
Much (hell, most) of the work in this industry is very prosaic, but you wouldn't know that from reading the output of a journalism major whose only exposure to the military and/or defense was watching "Platoon" in college...
While I currently don't work there, I put in nearly 14 years at SAIC. I could write my own long article about it, but I'll try to summarize:
1. The most important thing to remember is the company is set up to make money through strong cost control measures. This mostly describes the rest of the items.
2. If a contract ends for any reason, you've got 2 weeks to find a job within the company, if you don't you are out of the company. It rarely carries employees who don't have a contract to charge to. They did improve and add programs to make it easier to see what jobs are available.
3. Some employees are more equal than others. These are the few that know somebody that can carry them longer than 2 weeks while they look for a job. They also tend to get paid more for equal or lesser work. The more equal ones tend to be around long enough to really score on the internal stock.
4. The company is a collection of lots of little companies that don't talk well to each other, and fight over all kinds of things. If they don't make money, the managers get removed or the group/division/project goes away.
5. Contrary to the article, a lot more work is done at SAIC in more mundane areas including software testing, maintenance, and other "fun" activities for other companies or Gov't contracts. I know I was on several of them, but I did get to work on some fun contracts also.
That is probably enough for now. If you need a job, SAIC is a decent place to work depending on which little company inside it you end up in. You can also get some decent experience, but as always keep your eyes open.
I have two SAIC stories:
-- A group of developers at my company entered negitiations with the local SAIC Head-Guy to move to SAIC. When negotiations between the group of employees and SAIC broke down, the Head-Guy called my company's HR department and ratted them out. HR was not amused.
-- Two local SAIC offices bid against each other for the same contract. One office got the win, the other the pink slip. Classic!
From the article:
He created a special arm of SAIC called Bull Inc. that effectively acts as a trading floor for the stock, setting a price for the shares based on SAIC's performance and that of peer companies.
It's kind of interesting when people say that SAIC stock is based on peer companies, earnings, and things like that. My dad works for SAIC, and he showed me the formula they use:
(a_bunch_of_really_complicated_math) * K
The bunch_of_math part is what uses the other companies' performance, and most people don't notice the K at the end. K is given some important sounding name, but it really boils down to "whatever we want to multiply everything by." Kind of a dirty way of hiding the fact that they set the stock price to whatever they want.
It's an interesting company, and I like their employee-owned thinking, but this always makes me laugh.
"We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!" - Vroomfondel, H2G2
The funny thing about working for SAIC, is that for the most part, its just like any other 40,000+ person company. Sure, its privately help, which means our stock is significanlty buffered from the market by means of an internal market (which is only traded once quartely). But otherwise, we have some brilliant people, some idots, and a lot in between. Outside of defense and intelligence communities I find that noone has ever heard of us. There isn't enough vertical orientation to the company ('course, that could be why we're still successful) and we have bid against ourselves on contracts, but the day to day of my life is sitting in my own office, writing code for defense and integration contracts (java, python, cml, and opensource dbms mostly) for an ok salary and decent benefits.
The company founder Bob Beyster is a great guy (I used to crew for him on his sailboat - fun!).
I also feel that the management of SAIC is extremely honest; I never worry about an Enron or Health South type financial crisis for SAIC. When I was an active employee, I heard stories of people getting fired for even a wiff of questionable activity.
-Mark
One of their employees has taught me CCNA. They aren't evil.
The funny part about working for SAIC (which I do) is that we (SAICers) read articles all the time about how exciting and revolutionary we are or how we are developing some new and exciting technology to solve some incredible problem and we just say to each other, "Did you know we did that?" Then we go back to our middle of the road technology on our over-managed, over-budget projects and wonder if that group is hiring...
There's also an external company that specializes in valuing companies for takeovers - they advise the SAIC board if their price is within a certain realistic range. If not, go back and refigure.
It was a real shock to a lot of people about a year ago when the market dropped between the time the price was set and the quarterly trade, and these external guys made the board adjust the price downward. Lots of mad SAIC-ers.
Bureaucracy was the order of the day over there. We were in the same time zone, but inexplicably the roving cast of developers we had to work with would inevitably be out when we had to get in touch with them; any requests for fixes had to be routed through their project managers who couldn't find their own developers until they relented and let us contact the developers which was great until mail started bouncing and we found out that the developers had left. Great communication skills.
For all I know, they could still be using the half-assed bug tracker I knocked out in a day or two (and kept revising and revising) over there. It's why I get a kick out of the black helicopter set who are all doom and gloom about SAIC and the gub'mint - SAIC really is too clueless to do anything more sinister than fuck projects up.
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
I worked there as a consultant.
I watched as my asian supervisor allowed another asian person, who was an hourly temp, to literally do nothing for a month.
Cronyism is alive and well at SAIC.
While I'm not going to comment on all of the erroneous information in the above posts, suffice to say that SAIC should be viewed as more a collection of separate entities than a single company. The division I work for is not involved in the 'spy' world, far from it. Also, just because one division of the company is poor, or one of the managers, does not mean the whole company is bad. If a division or manager does poorly enough, they will cease to be with SAIC. Just this past year, we had many, many changes in the company structure. Just my cent-and-a-half.
were awarded a contract to expand the seismic network used to do nuclear testban treaty verification, in competition with a company I do business with. Unfortunately, they were planning to use our equipment, apparently not realizing that we weren't going to produce the equipment unless we got the whole support contract. In the end I heard it turned into a real cluster-fuck.
The official line is : Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a Fortune 500 company, is the largest employee-owned research and engineering company in the United States. We provide information technology, systems integration and eSolutions worldwide.
The important point is that we are very diverse. The best explaination of our corporate makeup is to describe a solar system of companies with SAIC corporate in the middle. The organzation is very flat and transparent.
As much as I like the cuetsy characterizations of SAIC as a spy haven with wizards and towers and stuff, the truth is less exciting. The vast masjority of our constacts are straight meat-and potato development and support work. We do just about anything tech related, and we do it very well. please disgregaurd the SIG below.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
It's no surprise you wrote as an Anonymous Coward, but you may as well wrote as Totally Uninformed Coward. I used to work for PDVSA, and I can assure you there is now way to manipulate the production facilities by any other way than actually being there, at the control consoles. The remote capabilities are for monitoring only, and unless you're a hopeless control freak, you can continue to work without them. As for the 'wireless network card' used for the sabotage, they simply don't exist outside offices. My guess you got you information from the highly unreliable sources close to the goverment, such as a really idiotic woman who said to the ever greater idiot we have for a president (Hugo Chavez) that each valve had an IP Address and by using satellite signals, those valves could be manipulated. Any person with even a basic understanding of oil technologies knows that the said capabilities are at this point, if not impossible, impractical, and they certaily don't exist anywhere in the world. Those reasons were given as an excuse for the disasters cuased by the morons the goverment brought in to replace the legitimate oil workers. How can an mechanical engineer with no experience possibly replace a guy with 20 year experience in a particualr facility? The answer: they can't. And all the accidents happening at the different production sites prove that.
I am a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls.
good grief.
Remember that we have SAIC to thank for the jokers at Network Solutions (now Verisign) having so much power over Internet DNS.
Networking With Spooks by John Dillon
It's Time For ICANN To Go by John Gilmore
This seems very much like a company that's driven mostly by the founder. This is evidenced in simple statements like a flock of geese following the leader as he runs, occasionally dropping a bread crumb for them to consume into their spiral notebooks.
Traditionally, companies like this tend not to fare well after the founder leaves. Infighting becomes rampant, and rarely do any successors have the founders visionary ability.
So what happens when he goes? Is the CIA/NSA/Secret Police going to be stuck high and dry? This seems like a serious case of putting way too many eggs in one basket.
These are the guys that were trying to develop some anti-gravity devices. I also recall hearing that they had some small scale prototypes working.
I also heard that they had something to do with Ross Perot at one time and that all of the top dogs are Illuminati..
Spooks, oh yeah. And there's more than meets the eye..
Anybody find it chilling that SAIC controlled the InterNIC?
Actually, that's part of the interview.
Indeed I'm writing this anonymouly because I have been subject to a lot of retaliation for helping rebuild the industry after it was sabotaged.
I'm not politically inclined, and I claim I'm neither chavista or member of the oposition, but I went on my own will to the plants that had been sabotaged to help restart the hearth of the venezuelan economy. Whether that makes me a traitor to the cause of the people that sabotaged the industry, that's your choice.
I removed personally two wireless cards that where used to control the computers remotely. I struggled with sabotaged computers, servers, Oracle DBs, and a lot of media pressure wanting to publish our faces to face public vengance.
The wireless cards where used to send terminal commands to a filling facility that caused a lot of gas spillage.
I know, as any other, that the people that has left the industry is some of the best (and some are plainly the best) professionals our country will see. And to replace such a good and trained people will be really hard. And I (as you) know that this story is not over. No matter what happens in the political future of Venezuela, this will not be over for quite some time.
But my point is this: as I said, some of the best professional of our country have left PDVSA, and the majority of them have gone overseas. But whose fault is that? I challenge anyone to put his self as manager of a big company, having highly payed employees to match the level of responsability they have. And you, as manager, are faced to a lot of those employees who join a two months strike, what would you do? Even as great professionals as they are, you as a manager can't run a company through a two months strike. I know if you were in charge, you would have done the same, as I would have done.
Yeah, especially considering there is no mafia...
Woops
....
s/INTEVEP/INTESA
I screwed up the names
a bit of trivia but a correction to the 100% employee-owned statement in the article: some early employees of SAIC (then SAI, I still remember getting rebadged) left the company before the requirement to sell your stock back was imposed so there is some SAIC stock owned by non-employees.
They've still managed to avoid being subjected to the whims of institutional investors, however.
One of the cuter projects SAIC worked on was remote viewing. A guys named Ed May did some work there under government funding until 1995. Spooky shit but having met and worked with some of these guys (I was on SAIC's software process board for a year or so) I can say the real guys are not very interesting. The science of psi stuff is very primitive -- not because it's not real - but because there's no good theory yet. Quantum "computing" will probably drive developments of theory here more than the empericists. There just isn't an emperical question any more as to whether psi phenomena are real -- it is all down to developing good testable hypotheses that feed theory.
Seastead this.
SAIC owned %60 of a company called Intesa (http://www.intesa.com) in Venezuela. They faced serious issues there because the Venezuelan goverment accused them from conspiracy when opositors to the goverment went to strike for almost three months (that happened two months ago). They decided to retire "quietly" from the country (the Goverment also owned them money) and now seems to be than IBM will retake that contract. In short, SIAC fired almost 3000 people and lost a juicy contract with the Venezuelan Oil Industry. For those interested here is a link with the information (sorry Spanish only): http://www.lared.com.ve/archivo/extra73.html
Whoa,
As UNIX Sysadmin at said office now, I'm willing to make a few guesses as to your name. b)
There is _NO_ career track within this company, at least not within any one department. There are only two ways I've ever seen a promotion after five plus years here:
1. Pull a dogbert
2. Essential quit one division, and get hired elsewhere in the company.
I've heard SAIC described a few ways:
1. It's the world's most diversified privately run mutual fund.
2. Ex Gov't country club.
3. A pyramid scheme.
4. Saturdays Are InCluded
5. HUGE
I find that it's designed to be the BEST second career-job of any established professional. Also happens to be a great way to build XP to get your first one too.
As for conservative: I'm likely to get a phone call tomorrow for posting this.
Before I part with'em: two pennies weigh ~4.996+/-0.014g, have a zinc core, and the face of Lincoln. You can keep 'em.
They run a tight ship, and produce good stuff. It's a cool place to work, but the work can be really hard. IMHO, they spend a lot of time creating workarounds for stuff that's already implemented, but starting from scratch doesn't necessarily guarantee a better product.
stuff |
Quote:
"It's the largest private IT firm in the nation. It's turned a profit for 33 straight years. And it's on the front lines of the war on terror. So why haven't you heard of SAIC?"
Dammit, it's not for want of trying and there were quite a few of us who did a few years ago.
They are quite arrogant, SAIC/CIAS it's where old spokes go to pasture.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
I attend UCSD, about a quarter mile from the SAIC headquarters. One of my computer science professors this quarter is a senior programmer for SAIC. He is one of the most dedicated knowledgeable professors I have ever had. Not only does he hold a full time position with SAIC, but he teaches my CS class, holds the discussions (no other class I have had has the professor ever done that), holds all of his office hours, and tutors in the lab until midnight some nights. If this is a representation of the type of people that work at SAIC then I have nothing but respect for that company.
As an employee owner for coming on 7 years, I can tell you it's a tightly run company. I've seen people come and go left and right. But hands down, I'm glad I work for SAIC over anything else at the moment.
Reading through the comments, I've seen some that mention getting cut after your project ends, if your manager doesn't have anything for you to work on afterwards. Well, then I'd have to say that your manager didn't work hard enough for you. I've seen people that are working on 2 or 3 contracts at a time. Yes, you work your butt off, but at least you know you're working. And I've also seen managers work their butts off to make sure there IS constant work for their employees.
Also, what isn't mentioned is that HR is usually more than willing to help find you another job within the company. Of course, this might depend on your organization's HR department. But I know a number of people who have moved elsewhere within the company rather than leaving.
Oh, and it's not the two towers anymore. A third has been added to the main complex, and we also own (and have for as far as I can remember) a building across the parking lot from the main complex.
SAIC used to be a big user of the MUMPS (or M) language, and a major sponsor of the M Technology Association.
I wonder if they are still using it and whether any of the big projects mentioned are based on it?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Needless to say there was a lot of resentment for this military machine who wanted a slice of the huge Kaiser contract, so they bought us out and mismanaged us to the point where we lost the Kaiser contract to IBM, then they dumped us.
Are you sure they didn't do this just so they they would be quashing a successful company that so liberal? Think about it.
Things that make you go hmmm...
Those who trade freedom for security will lose both, and deserve neither" -- Ben Franklin
Actually it was Unreal (not the game by the same name, though) and Second Reality. I wouldn't say the demo scene has gone underground. I think it is outside the golden age though, when you could do more impressive things in demos than in games. I think these days games are more works of art and coding skill than demos. Recently I picked up a DVD with lots of PC demos you could watch on your TV (video captured). Oh ya, it's called "Mindcandy vol 1. PC Demos" It's actually produced by Hornet (the demoscene ftp server guys) if you remember them. www.mindcandydvd.com So you can watch 2nd reality anytime you want without having to whip out the Gravis Ultrasound and CONFIG.SYS menu editor. :-)
No, it's not INCREDIBLY complicated (although it does sound scary) and the algorithm (or a close relative) is publically available and studied. A google search for that or for "latent semantic indexing" turns up plenty of research lab pages. LSI is related to "latent semantic analysis" (maybe the two terms mean the same thing, I'm not exactly sure).
I'll leave it up to you to judge whether it "processes language in much the same way the human mind". As for my opinion, note that the algorithm ignores the ordering of words in the documents. LSA has been offered as a model of word learning in infants, though.
The algorithm is this:
- Represent your corpus as a matrix, with words as rows, and documents as columns. The number of times a word occurs in a document is the entry in the matrix.
- Apply a certain pre-processing transformation to each cell of the matrix -- this is a scary looking formula but it can be written on one line.
- Take the SVD (singular value decomposition) of the matrix and then throw out some of the lower singular values (set them to 0).
- Multiply the SVD back together again to get a least-squares best approximation of the original matrix, given the constraint that you threw out some of the dimensions (I think that this business of the SVD essentially solves the problem "Gimme a matrix which is of of a small rank, but which behaves as much as possible like the one that I had initially" -- you can sort of interpret "rank" as "simplicity", so you are sort of approximating the original matrix with a simpler one).
- Now you have a vector for each document. Consider the similarity of two documents to be given by the similarity between their vectors ("similarity" between vectors could be taken by the cosine between vectors).
Apologies if I've made any mistakes. Here's one paper that describes the actual algorithm (and gives the preprocessing formula, which I haven't stated here): Landauer, T. K., Laham, D., & Foltz, P. W., (1998). Learning human-like knowledge by Singular Value Decomposition: A progress report.How many times I have to say it? There is absolutely no way to control a production installation from a desktop computer anywhere within the PDVSA network. Perhaps the wireless card were used to access a mail o file server, but to open valves and "cause" spillages, you have to actually be there on the spot. The crap about remote access is just an excuse for the incompetence of the traitors who are helping the Chavez government send more free oil to Cuba. About the firing of the workers, I seem to recall there is something called the right to go on strike. And even if you could through some weird, alternate universe logic (similar of that used by the Chavez government), justify the firing of those employees, the fact is after more than 4 months, not a sigle fired worker has received his severance payments, which are mandatory by law in Venezuela. This is again, the fault of the Chavez so-called administration. One final point: when talking about gas, you don't say "spillage", but "leak" instead. I think this reflects you lack of experience on the subject.
I am a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls.
We've got one SAIC contractor. He comes in every other day or so for a few hours, plays minesweeper, and leaves.
"Successful software development" by Scott E. Donaldso and Stanley G. Siegel is one of the ones I've been looking at lately - the authors work at SAIC, and after reading it a bit I looked up the company a few weeks ago - very interesting place, it sounds like.
Energy: time to change the picture.
By the way, SAIC bought Telcordia (Bellcore) a while ago.
If Chaos Theory has taught us anything, it's that we must kill all the butterflies.
BTW, if you are a java programmer in the DC area interested in doing defense work with a great company, send me your resume.
s topscud.jar
Fantastic...java in the defense industry
"Soldier, there's an incoming scud...fire those patriots...now!"
Click
Grind...Grind....Grind....Grind
exception in thread main, java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError..."No class found called gov.defence.patriot.FindAndStopScud"
"Hang on sir...think my classpath may be pooched"
Export CLASSPATH=$CLASSPATH:/usr/java/lib/defence/please
Click
Grind....Grind....Grind
2 weeks, 4 days, 13 hours, 3 minutes later....patriot fires.
oh I could go on forever...haven't even touched on the 40 foot wide security whole that JVMPI would introduce.
Though one good thing...everytime you called System.gc() every U.S. soldier and politician would suddently find themselves miraculously sitting on a boat heading for home..."What tha? How'd that happen"
Speaking as an IT guy about to get out of the military w/ a higher level security clearance, they alway seem to be hiring people like me.
This guy is way out there
1. Buy Cheap Compaq Hardware.
- Planned obsolescence after exactly 3 years ensures an ongoing maintenance contract. And passing 110% of the open market price on to your customers helps profitability.
2. Design with Microsoft OSes.- Skim 10% in another two years when MS forces your customer to relicense. Make sure there will be frequent patching of the OS involved.
3. Cob it together.- When one MS box can't do the job, do it with three. Plus 2 more for glue logic (export an Access DB to a flat file that Oracle can read, for instance). Make sure that patching any of the intermediate systems kills the entire data flow.
4. CrapCode.- Write everything in VB. Don't document code. Make sure every piece of code that is not immediately obvious goes into DLLs created by a different team and are not documented. Rely on hardcoded versioning so that an OS patch requires a complete recompilation of the software.
5. CYA.Has anyone else had a better experience with SAIC? They're still developing for Windows NT under our contract, and still have one release to go under NT, due in a year! Mention UNIX and they go into vapor lock.
Well at least they're not Calibre Systems.
"If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat." -Sun Tzu
the boss is known to toss off as he jogs
wtf?
It's not an optical illusion, it just looks like one!
You and me both. I work for SAIC and yy entire group doesn't do a thing spy related. We do portals, webpages, and analytical junk on treaty agreements.
...CIAs...coincidence? I THINK NOT!
...as related by a former employee: back when
...so, while that little "Darwinian chaos" dagger looks all shiny and pretty when stabbing fellow employees in the back, it cuts both ways. This guy now occupies a position that would otherwise be filled by a SAIC droid and I can tell you that there's nothing that makes him happier than that fact.
NSI was privately held and owned by SAIC, all the so called employee-owners were offered a a chance to invest as much as $5k in NSI's IPO. That offer was extended to the rank and file shmucks just a few miniutes before the close of business (west coast time).
Shortly after that little stunt, he resigned and that so called "employee owned company" lost one very motivated employee. How motivated? Try two onths at sea doing deployed network/systems support with the Navy.
There's a really good reason why SAIC gets most of their money via government contract... that's the only organization stupid enough to hire them. Also, for any higher-ups being courted by SAIC for post-retirement employment: you're being pursued for your contacts and influence, which fade rapidly. In fact it's questionable if you will be able fill the function that SAIC needs you for without violating the "cooling off" period required. Unless you're very adept at pulling a political rabit out of your ass, I'd suggest you consider employment with a company that values you for your skill and experience... SAIC will discard you if they believe your influence has expired or your contacts have moved out of their chess move billets.
BTW, that #@!% company still owes him $8k in unpaid travel expenses... unfortunatly there aren't any lawyers in CA who will pursue SAIC. I guess their all too busy look for the low hanging "sexual harassment" fruit.
United Airlines was employee-owned too. The employee unions kept on voting themselves juicier contracts until it went bankrupt. The total market cap is now less than the price of a jetliner.
I've always had a really bad opinion of SAIC since I ran into them as my first defense subcontractor at my first job with an aerospace manufacturer. Maybe it's not fair to carry a negative opinion after so long (It's been 18 years), but this was so bad that I've never forgotten it.
The setting is a now-merged aerospace company in Southern California. We had a contract from the Air Force to develop one of the stupidest devices I've ever run across - a "flexible" assembly fixture that could programmatically reposition all the "hard points" to support aluminum panels as they are riveted together. Granted, the fixtures aren't cheap - most of them cost at least several thousand dollars, but this was replacing a $10,000 system with a $5 million one. (Oh, and there are dozens in use on any given day in a single plant - the logistics is a pain, but get real...) Anyway, as a young robotics engineer, it seemed like an interesting project, even if it made no economic sense.
SAIC was contracted to do the basic design and preliminary feasibility analysis. (Why we didn't do it ourselves given their demonstrated incompetence, is beyond me...) I still remember how in no fewer than probably a dozen places in the document and presentation, their "brilliant" young engineer (who was actually a couple of years older than I was at the time) kept pointing out how absolutely vital it was that SAIC's design used six bolts (all into the same flat plate) to restrain the device in six degrees of freedom. He really believed you needed one bolt per degree to hold something to a flat plate! The document had been reviewed by SAIC's "more experienced" hands, but when we complained about getting crap for our money, they pretty much said, "if you don't like our design, do it yourself". We did, and I've never been willing to work with SAIC since then. (Unfortunately, on of the worst PHB's I've ever encountered in the real world forced a decision to keep far too much of the SAIC design he had spent so much of the company's money on, so the project was doomed. I transferred to another group, and never looked back...)
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
When "Randi" went to a monetary challenge without a clearly verifiable -- widely recognized -- objective for acquiring the money, he departed from so-called "science" and entered dispute processing. His failure to allow adjudication via normal dispute processing leaves his definition of "scientific" in dispute just as much as it would if PSITECH were to try to define a panel of retired federal judges as "scientific" -- which they didn't. Rather than rhetorically posture about "my scientists are holier than your scientists" PSITECH just did the honest thing -- particularly given Randi's insistance on (and I'm sure everyone's hope of) avoiding the courts -- and that was what most people do when they avoid courts -- they find a suitable substitute usually via arbitration.
Seastead this.
I once said "Maybe SAIC can go back to how it was, but only after a serious cleaning out" but the signs seem to point to an eventual 5-7 years sell out / IPO.
Now the only factor that matters is who you know and how sharp your tongue is. I have seen entire divisions liquidated and good people scramble for coverage while managers that had tried to get the employees to willfully misrepresent facts and just all out lie were kept on and even promoted. These managers did not bring business in, they did not facilitate good working environments and they did not perform any billable service. However they said the right jokes and winked at the right people, other than that there was no real value to their presence even if they had been volunteering.
Enron happened for a number of reasons, most of which were not any sort of conspiracy to do wrong but just being incompetent and arrogant. Once the wet fertilizer hit the fan it was then cover up time and then you saw all the willfully illegal and unethical behavior. The problem was that they talked the talk (ethics, professionalism, taking care of the employees) but did not walk the walk. Many have commented on their ever present ethical reviews and training and how all the right buzz phrases were slung around like dollar bills in a strip joint.
Enron proved that words matter not if the environment itself is not conducive to ethical and professional business. "Rah-Rah Team" tactics also are not the solution. Apathy seems to be the big issue... yet I find I just do not care about it anymore (hahahaha, snort)
I think Bob Beyster is a really good person and I would like to work for a smaller company with him at the helm. SAIC just grew to big too fast and we have lost a very good company. I salute you and your healthy retirement fund and wish I too could be in such a great company.
I can't tell you how many people I have known that left the company because they were so disgusted in the "eat their own children" practices within the company.
When you lose coverage you are on your own, so your comment is more accurate than you know about SAIC being no different than any other company. That is the ticket... they are no different. In other companies you can possibly dig and find good managers as well. Just as you might suggest to someone that repeated (and multi-division) problems are not indicative of the entire company you yourself should remember that your good experiences may be the exception now and not the rule. The important question is this: "What have you done to ensure your work environment grows and becomes the norm and bumps out the shitbirds inside?"
I have worked with many people of different races, religions, both sexes and gay. None of these become an issue until it is shoved in everyone's faces. You have pandered yourself to the lowest common denominator and your comments betray you. You automatically view any military related contractor to be out to get you and your hippie friends I guess. You said it yourself... very liberal company. Perhaps if you had just tried being a competent company, not a liberal company and were full of competent employees not atheist, black lesbian employees there would not have been a problem... then again maybe not. I don't trust SAIC but I have real arguments for my distrust.
Seriously, I am NOT comparing Bob to Hitler in any way but the point is just the same. The issue within SAIC is that finding good managers and leaders like yours is a race to find the needle in the haystack. Much like a lottery you can thank your lucky stars you found a good leader. Have you and your boss worked to extend this attitude to other divisions?
Christ pushed the idea of separation of Church and State... one of the reasons he was killed (don't disappoint a conquered people off who want you to be a General and head of state). Christianity never has a problem with "gays" but it is definitely the case often that the reverse causes problems. Once, it was Evil (tm) to suggest or show any facts pointing at the possibility that homosexuality was determined. This angered many who said it was a choice (as in freedom) and should not be treated as a disorder or malfunction. Then a scientist revealed research pointing to an indication that it was indeed choice but at a very wrong time. Science is often the bastard of social retarding movements like PC. So, which is it now?
because BS is about all that is at my location. It is so common for people to claim to know languages like Java for example and then do good to stumble around their "pet" VB. Of course anyone stumbles when you have no direction and get daily conflicts on duties...
There will never be a convinient catch phrase, written law or thus a constitutional amendment that would perfectly word how to fix the problem. It takes vigilence and frankly that is something missing now. There are two types that would say something bad about the US military. Those who just hate military and those who think that Military is both a sad necessity and thus one of the most noble callings and simply does not like seeing it be reduced to the level of an expensive toy due to big government mentality.
After 9-11, the money poured so blindly into DoD contracts was shameful but what was even more shameful was that many of these projects simply DO NOT WORK, or rather can easily be replaced by existing COTS products. Politics rules while efficiency drools. It is those who see the ultimate goal in contracting of simply gathering more contracts through back rubbing that are the problem. The underlying idea of competing based on quality and price is great if applied but with government contracting it is more of a socialist system.
One little comment that hasn't bee expressed is that
SAIC IS ONE OF THE MOST RACIST COMPANIES IN THE NATION!
To be a manager inside SAIC, you got to be anglo-white or jewish. The percentage of non-jewish minorities in management positions is close to non-existent. You can work for years without seeing one, if ever. Ironically, the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT is biggest sponsor of this behavior, since most contracts are with them. This definitely tells you something about who discriminating the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT is.