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Why Are the Best and Brightest Not Flooding DARPA?
David W. White writes "Wired mag's Danger Room carried an article today that highlighted how desperate the US Military's DARPA has become in its attempts to bring in additional brain power. The tactics include filmed testimonials, folders and even playing cards all screaming join DARPA! Where are all the Einsteins who want to be on the cutting edge for the Government?"
maybe smart geeks are, well, not stupid, and don't want to get sent of to die in some other country?
I assume they're worried that they'll be the tragic victims of mysterious heart attacks.
The short answer... Visit there website. There are not positions available.
intelligent and well educated people don't want to work for an organization that supports torture and oppression?
Even ignoring the hyperbole, maybe they don't want to work for a group who's expressed purpose is to kill people.
... as fast as they can from a life working for the state?
Maybe working on the coolest free software project somewhere?
My blog
Do you want to have "worked for DARPA" on your CV? No company with half an active braincell in its CTO will want you, not knowing whether you've really "quitted".
Twice so if you ever plan to work outside of the US.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'm not saying that people are stupid to be pro-military, just that there seems to be some correlation.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Yes, it's a government job, and the government gives pretty good benefits, but why work as a civil servant when you could get a higher-paying job in private industry doing work under contract for DARPA?
What the government does is terrorism to me.
Where are all the Einsteins who want to be on the cutting edge for the Government?
We have a government that for 8 years has tried to outsource as many of its functions as possible to private firms that pay much better than the government itself. Geez, let me guess where smart people are hiding...
Leave the gun, take the cannolis.
It took a while for me to realize that far too often, it's immoral. Here's hoping that others are smarter than I was, and are understanding that more quickly.
Bureaucracy and politics.
... "all the Einsteins" would do things like implement proper backing up of e-mails at the Whitehouse. Need I say more?
1) It's getting harder to believe we're the good guys.
2) The increasing view of government agencies as mismanaged and incapable (and the fact that we somewhat consistently elect candidates that loudly proclaim this outcome as immutable and inevitable), and public sector/military work as a refuge for the bureaucratic and dull.
3) Business politics are marginally easier to put up with than ideological politics and graft.
4) The private sector pays as well or better, and you probably don't have to relocate.
4a) Fewer of the best and brightest don't choose technology/research, because it's quite clear our society values lawyers and management more.
Tweet, tweet.
Who wouldn't be tripping over themselves trying to get a job with low pay, be saddled bureaucracy, receive no public recognition, have to pass periodic drug, credit and background checks for security clearance, get crappy benefits and with no stock options.
Sounds like a dream job.
How about a music video with lyrics such as "APRAD nioj"?
question:"Where are all the Einsteins who want to be on the cutting edge for the Government?"
answer:"Either working for the Chinese government, or global corporations."
Well, of course, DARPA doesn't do research. DARPA manages contracts with other organizations that do research.
The Einsteins most likely want to be in the organizations that actually do the research.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I've seen a story of someone who worked for the CIA and when the interviewer asked her what she did for the CIA she responded that she couldn't say. The interviewer said "Thank you." and never called her back thinking she was full of shit. The same story is in some article about what not to do in an interview. I don't know. How do you handle that if you've done super double secret stuff for the Government and you want to go into private industry?
As someone who works as a government contractor, my guess is it is because government bureaucracy stifles innovation. Most smart minds would rather work in academia where they get more freedoms, less restrictions, and are more easily able to surround themselves with likeminded individuals.
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- The government is obviously corrupt
- The government is obviously corrupt and working hand in hand with organizations out to destroy the internet.
- The government is obviously corrupt and working hard to make it easier for these same organizations to engage in a domestic terrorism campaign via lawsuits.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Many scientists have wised up to the fact their fun invention today maybe burning the skin off some poor kid tomorrow.
While they didn't do the actual killing, they do have other options available to them.
No one wants a BS in Math now a days. Not even the gubbament's think tank, Darpa, apparently.
;)
But, even still, when I graduate in 09 with my MA in Econ. I'll have much more lucrative and personally interesting things to be doing. Or Ph D in Econ. school
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
and not be evil!
HA! Try going for the salaries, stock options, and posh work environs first. Seems a little more realistic, no?
Blame Bush and 30 years of "Free Trade".
Like the MITer said, few people want to help with a war of aggression, torture and wiretap. The Bush administration has killed close to a million innocent people in Iraq, directly and by infrastructure damage. People die quickly when they don't have clean water, and few have that without the electric utilities and distribution network we bombed out but never rebuilt. All for control of oil.
We are also starting to run out of qualified young people because all of the engineering jobs have been sent to China and India. If you don't make things, you don't know things and the US has been making less and less over the last 30 years.
Trade with China and wars of aggression have a common cause: moral bankruptcy. The result is ruin.
As far as I can tell, from the article, it's DARPA lacking program managers that is the issue. A DARPA program manager allocates money, directs research within a program and decides if a particular group in the program is performing up to scratch. Sure, you have to be pretty well up on the state of the art in a fairly broad range of areas to succeed in doing this but, at the end of the day, you aren't actually doing any research. Working for DARPA is the scientific equivalent of middle management. Who gets into research to do that? This impression is gathered from the giant sample set of one DARPA program manager I've have the pleasure of working with, so I may have a skewed view on the whole operation.
Well everything I hear says that (in CS at least) DARPA drastically cut their academic research funding. Is it then any surprise that research-minded people ignore DARPA?
Young techies tend to be progressive, as progressive as bush is regressive, as such they absolutely hate the Bush administration.
I sincerely would have enlisted with some arm of the military for the structured experience, but I will not associate myself with the bush government.
I get the feeling that a darpa under Obama will grow and prosper.
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I can tell you why I'm not working for DARPA: Because I can make three times as much money in the private sector, inventing and patenting things that hopefully help people out, rather than you know....KILLING THEM ALL. Pretty simple decision.
Strict environments are depressing. Who wants to work in an area where you can't even have your pda with you, or IM your friends in the real world? Especially if all of your co-workers are stereotypical asperger's-plagued basement dwellers who think they are a lot smarter than they really are (typical government environment in my experience), while being lazy sloths compared to those like them in the private sector. What a depressing place to be for the truly brilliant. Then there is the memorization of acronyms, how to use security containers, the incredible bureaucracy, and legacy shit that needs to be changed, but can't be because it is the sr. guy in charge's baby and he hasn't seen a new way to do things in 20 years. Then there is the utter clusterfuck of how things are done. Project management? Yeah, right. The strict military way of doing things as a repeatable process definitely does not apply to their IT infrastructure.
I'm currently working for the military on some stuff that would be really fun and rewarding anywhere else, but this environment and the people within it is sucking my will to live. My resume will be back in circulation soon.
Maybe, just maybe, people are a little put off by the current administration's habit of censoring and twisting science to it's own political stances. You can only abuse science and technology so long before the people who do the science and create the technology start to seriously resent you. Maybe we will see a change after this election, i don't know. But i hope we do.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Word has gotten out that DARPA is run by political appointees selected for their blind loyalty to the present administration, not for their intelligence and expertise. The best and brightest are of course aware of this, and few of them relish the prospect of working for a pack of first-class morons who report up a chain of command which terminates in someone far too stupid to deserve the compliment "moron". It's possible that this will change once President Obama takes office and does some serious house-cleaning, although frankly, any institution so badly mismanaged for so many years can't be put right quickly no matter how competent and sustained the effort. It's a pity that this has been allowed to happen -- or rather, that this has been deliberately made to happen -- but that philosophical note aside, the practical impact is that anyone choosing to work for DARPA at the moment really needs a full psychiatric evaluation with particular emphasis on latent self-destructive tendencies.
... at the right hand of the devil than in his path.
Or, you could live by the sword and die by the sword...
I'm a bit torn.
You can't get a government job in america if you're not american, it's that simple. There are many smart people but they can't apply for those kinds of jobs since they live elsewhere(canada) and don't have american citizenship. Your loss usa.
Here's a free one: DARPA gives grants. Unless you want to be a grant administrator, chances are you don't really want to work for DARPA.
A little, um, research into DARPA would have uncovered that insight.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
No one with real expertise wants to be stuck in a bureaucratic agency, shuffling the papers and attending meetings at least 6 hours a day. I've been a low-level engineer in one of the military's RDT&E agencies (not DARPA), and everyone there who has ever had any technical skill complains of skill atrophy, boredom, and endless unproductive bureaucracy. I was very lucky to get out while I could. One of the high-level managers there had been known to say that their strategy was to bring in the best and brightest technical minds they could and keep them 3-4 years until their skills had atrophied to the point that no one else would hire them.
If the government wants to succeed here, they absolutely have to throw out all the rulebooks and start over. I've been in project groups that tried to do true engineering work within the government, and it was a resource management nightmare. It would take months to order most anything. Everytime I tried to do something, I always needed something I didn't have and couldn't get for a long time. What we have now is simply an exercise in getting people paychecks. This is the real government welfare system.
Where are all the Einsteins who want to be on the cutting edge for the Government?
they realize that this government will only turn their good work into some form of harm or evil.
plus, they generally require you to piss in a bottle. they start off assuming you are a 'bad guy' and require you to prove that you are not. and that's never a good way to start off. I use that as a screening FOR employers; if they want body samples, I say 'no thanks' and I continue on with the next job in my search. the government loses a LOT of really smart and creative people due to insane ultra-conservative-agenda rules.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
The US is ass-deep in a foolish, expensive, illegal, immoral war. Why would smart people want to use the most productive years of their lives supporting such idiocy?
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
I spent two years of my life post-graduate school working at DoD research laboratories, and can say with some experience why Geeks should not join DARPA (or any government research lab). It can be summed up in one word: "research."
Government labs no longer do the stuff for the most part. There are still some pockets left, but they are few and far between, and shrinking. I graduated with a MS in computer science, with a two-year focus on computer security. I was offered a job in a research team with with a DoD lab and eagerly took it. But it wasn't research. It was contract management. Essentially, I got to read research proposals from companies, and decide whether or not those companies would be funded for their ideas. My ability to influence the actual research of the companies was quite limited. I was able to come up with 'calls for proposals,' that is, statements of new topics that we'd like proposals on from companies. By the time these ideas were raped^Wvetted by the various program and contract managers, the descriptions were so incredibly vague that the proposals received in response to the call were completely off-topic. I got frustrated very early on and left.
In my exit interview, I asked my supervisor to define research. His definition was adequate. I then asked him if that's what we did. He stammered a bit, and ultimately conceded that we, "facilitated research." We had a very interesting discussion. Due to research project overruns throughout the 80s, particularly with software projects, as well as the end of the Cold War, the Congress changed the focus of DoD research programs. New funding rules dictate that research projects are placed under contract. In this way, if a company is paid to do research and development on a project, and it fails to deliver, the government has some recourse. If actual government employees received funding and failed, there would not be much that congress could do to them (Congress could slash the non-salary portions of the failed project's budget, but that's not very intimidating to the employees when you think about it).
The place where the 'cool' stuff happens these days is by the contractors. If you want to work on ARPA and DARPA quality work, start a small business and start winning on SBIR awards. I wouldn't recommend actually working for DARPA or a government research lab, though, unless you really want to be a contract manager and not be very hands-on with technology and ideas.
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
No one has any faith in the US Governments motives or ability to perform anymore.
Im sad to say it, but there is to pride in working for the US right now. What is left is battered out of you by complete lack of sense and vision.
Well your post is offtopic and insulting to boot, but it would seem to me that the jobs are here in the US. Except of course that most of them are Indian and Chinese employed by IBM and companies like that.
No, not really. I'd agree with the wars part, but the trade thing is certainly false. Why do you hate China so much? Any particular reason? You keep going on and on about this and I still don't understand it.
That's rich, coming from the guy who has to pretend he's eleven different people.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Security Clearance.
We're rejecting and canning people because of even the most minor and often ancient of unrelated and innocuous financial transgressions and social relations -- even for the most insignificant of positions in government, contractors and even subcontractors thereof.
It's asinine. There are senators and congressmen with worse records and credit than contractors denied clearance to mop their floors.
The process is so intrusive and debasing that many people take one look at the paperwork and simply walk away.
I believe most DARPA jobs are in the DC area. As an Electrical and Computer Engineer, I was recruited for many defense contractor jobs. The problem is, they're all in the Washington DC area and pay like they're not.
Good, recent college EE graduates should be getting 80k+ to work in the DC area. Otherwise, you're underpaying them.
Cost of living adjustments for my first salary to the DC area showed that I should be paid 100k in DC.
and if you think that was a snide comment on other countries having the best and brightest, don't worry about it
DARPA is still employing them, in shanghai and bangalore
and so we actually have an optimistic comment here: an interconnected world is a world that doesn't have a need or desire to go to war with itself, that doesn't actually need a defense department. the de-isolation of governmental brainpower isn't the beginning of the end of a good defense department, it is the beginning of the end of a need for defense
globalization ftw
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
DARPA may be different, but every gov contract I've ever worked on has been a soul-sucking, process-intensive horror in buildings that are row after row of blue-gray cubicles. No flexibility in hours, no creative work environment or benefits. No bonuses for on time delivery and certainly no equity positions. And always badges. Stinking badges, base stickers, dog and pony shows for the brass, and mandatory meetings for the sheer delight of listening to someone go on about the dumbest things. And never any room just to experiment, try things that don't work, and make mistakes.
If DARPA moved their tech research to a beach-side resort in Peurto Rico, provided a beach volleyball court and bbq, free sodas and regular hops back to the states, you'd see the brightest and best lining up to work there.
Hey, DARPA, if you want top talent, call me. I know what programmers and researchers want and how to structure a work environment to keep them interested. Otherwise, best of luck with your soul-sucking land of crappy cubicles.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I witnessed a state come up with a way to provide free college education to all residents.
The stipulations were
A) Had to be a resident when graduating high school
B) Had to be an instate college
C) Had to have a B average and maintain it through college
When the enacting governor left office, the replacement governor promised college for all students.
The result was grade inflation where the D average inner city kid got that magical B average
and because of affirmative action, the D average kids got head of the line admission to the universities over the real B and A achievers.
We see animosity from the educational unions over the home and private schooled kids because their results are better and it's the unions that say that the results aren't fair.
Political correctness got rid of the best and brightest.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
I'd rather live in a cardboard box than help Bush kill brown people.
Most of the R&D under DARPA's watch is farmed out to the big 5 American defense contractors: NG, Raytheon, LockMart, BAE, Boeing, as well as think tanks like Mitre, Rand, Battelle.
Maybe at one time DARPA was something more, but thinking back to ARPANet... that was all contractors and contracted academia as well. BBN, MIT Lincoln, Mitre all immediately pop in mind.
(And yes, I am aware BAE Systems is a subsidiary of BAE plc. With the SSA and totally separate financials, it is in all but name an American company... and soon will be totall US in fact as well. Meerkat Salute!
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
The jobs are in ther US?
https://jobs3.netmedia1.com/cp/search.jsp?tc=1213836613622
That's the URL for IBM job postings, go there and you will see that for the most part IBM is hiring everywhere but in the US. Then please come back here and apologize to us for that utterly uniformed statement.
I'm planning to retire early at 50, but, honestly, I could see going over to DARPA or some such to manage or oversee some projects. The moeny wouldn't matter as much as it would to some young guy trying to get a maximum salary out in the private sector.
I've worked on similar technology programs where the idea was simply to push the state of the art. The other side of the job didn't seem so bad. They get to travel a lot and see interesting new tech. Maybe they should recruit in the 40 to 55 age range. You've got experience and stability there.
Have they tried, oh, I don't know, paying them well?
The US has yet to purge potential opposition the way the USSR did so many times. Everything is in place but we have yet to go beyond economic assassination. Mass murder starts when the press is really beat down. We are very close, so watch out. After mass murder comes wars of conquest that will make Iraq and Iran look like Italy's North African wars.
Advertisement on playing cards? Oh yeah, that is a sure way to attract smart people. Why not have ads on lottery tickets while we're at it? Why indeed.
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
y work at darpa when you can work somewhere else that wins darpa contracts? actually, i work for a 'research' place that wins lots of awards from DARPA. i would rather work at this place because this place pays extremely well, is located close to boston, and there are a lot of cool people that work there (besides myself!) so y go to darpa, then? and there are lots of places like this.
Who wants to be top egghead in the next has-been, banana republic?
ZOMG!! We are growing banannas now?? The Bananna species will be saved!!
wait!!!
ZOMG!1!!one!!! We are a Republic now??? Long live the death of Facism!!!!
How amazed would you be to suddenly find that you just forgot what I wrote and you needed to reread my post.... again.
"They too are after you !?!"
"Here take a beer, and let me talk to you about when I was approached to work for the NSA"
"Why shouldn't I work for the N.S.A.? That's a tough one, but I'll take a shot. Say I'm working at N.S.A. Somebody puts a code on my desk, something nobody else can break. Maybe I take a shot at it and maybe I break it. And I'm real happy with myself, 'cause I did my job well. But maybe that code was the location of some rebel army in North Africa or the Middle East. Once they have that location, they bomb the village where the rebels were hiding and fifteen hundred people I never met, never had no problem with, get killed. Now the politicians are sayin', "Oh, send in the Marines to secure the area" 'cause they don't give a shit. It won't be their kid over there, gettin' shot. Just like it wasn't them when their number got called, 'cause they were pullin' a tour in the National Guard. It'll be some kid from Southie takin' shrapnel in the ass. And he comes back to find that the plant he used to work at got exported to the country he just got back from. And the guy who put the shrapnel in his ass got his old job, 'cause he'll work for fifteen cents a day and no bathroom breaks. Meanwhile, he realizes the only reason he was over there in the first place was so we could install a government that would sell us oil at a good price. And, of course, the oil companies used the skirmish over there to scare up domestic oil prices. A cute little ancillary benefit for them, but it ain't helping my buddy at two-fifty a gallon. And they're takin' their sweet time bringin' the oil back, of course, and maybe even took the liberty of hiring an alcoholic skipper who likes to drink martinis and fuckin' play slalom with the icebergs, and it ain't too long 'til he hits one, spills the oil and kills all the sea life in the North Atlantic. So now my buddy's out of work and he can't afford to drive, so he's got to walk to the fuckin' job interviews, which sucks 'cause the shrapnel in his ass is givin' him chronic hemorrhoids. And meanwhile he's starvin', 'cause every time he tries to get a bite to eat, the only blue plate special they're servin' is North Atlantic scrod with Quaker State. So what did I think? I'm holdin' out for somethin' better. I figure fuck it, while I'm at it why not just shoot my buddy, take his job, give it to his sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard? I could be elected president."
So fuck NSA and fuck DARPA! Now where are my sheeps ?"
This is a stolen sig.
I never said that the positions were being occupied by Americans, just that a large percentage of those jobs is indeed in the U.S. Doesn't make it any better, obviously.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
As a young professor at a top CS program, I can give a simple reason CS interest in DARPA has waned: because DARPA funding as waned, both in the amount of available grant money and the attractiveness of the terms.
While NSF grants have little oversight, require few deliverables, and have 3-4 year terms, DARPA grants increasingly have 1.5-2 year horizons, require regular reports and site visits, and have go/no-go mid-term decisions. Furthermore, DARPA projects increasingly want deliverables and seek classification. Thus, while NSF still allows you to engage in more blue-sky, high-risk research, DARPA is interested in advanced development. Not quite the thing academics and grad students signed up for. No surprise most DARPA funding has switched from universities to contractors.
Most academics I know would love to return to the DARPA gravy-train of pre-Tony Tether days; the funding terms and dollar amounts just aren't there currently.
This CRA post summarized it well:
http://www.cra.org/govaffairs/blog/archives/000624.html
Hopefully Obama will win and change this because Senator graduated 894 out of 899 McCain would probably be worse than even Bush.
As a veteran of several Federal institutions, both as a contractor and a Fed, I can tell you that there are a multitude of reasons why the government has a hard time getting people:
1. The hiring process for Federal employees sucks. It is byzantine and SLOW. One of the more progressive agencies was able to bring me on in a couple of months, but another took a YEAR. The average is somewhere in the middle. I had reasons to wait at the time (had to see what was behind that big NSA fence) but why would anyone wait under normal circumstances when contractors/the private sector moves so much more quickly?
2. The pay sucks. The GS scheme tops out at around $120K right now. There are grades that pay more (SES) but without going into detail, good luck with that. Anyone with solid experience in security/enterprise IP engineering/etc can smoke that as a contractor or in the private sector.
3. The atmosphere sucks. The government may be trying to change, but everything you've ever heard about the stereotypical gov't employee is generally true. Some agencies are better than others, but at most the fat guy with the polyester leisure suit lives on.
4. The positive reinforcement sucks. Managers have little ability to give raises or promotions. In some agencies, spot awards are used, but most still view them as evil.
5. The benefits suck. Is there any other employer in this day and age that doesn't have maternity leave? The rest (medical, 401(k)) are par. The pension is nice, if you stick around long enough to qualify.
6. The culture sucks. No matter how much they try to change, years of hiring the sub-par have infused the gov't with a culture of sluggish bureaucracy. This will take decades to undo. Also, this is precisely the kind of environment that will drive a decent technical person raving mad in short order.
Noone who [knows|can do] better would ever work for the Federal Government.
would be that bright people aren't choosing to work for the government because of the sinister ways in which the current government might (will) use their technology.
That's far from reality but I can still dream...
At least until DARPA remedies that...
PM
Even ignoring the hyperbole, maybe they don't want to work for a group who's expressed purpose is to kill people.
This is nonsense, of course. In the past, plenty of highly intelligent people have contributed to warfare and advanced weaponry. Leornardo da Vinci comes to mind. The problem is has to do with what Thomas Kuhn wrote about in "The Structure of Scientific Revolution". DARPA relies on a filtering mechanism that employs academics. Academics are not open to new ideas that may upset their world view. New Einsteins would do just that, disrupt their world view. They therefore tend to avoid organizations like DARPA and prefer to go it alone. Eventually, new paradigms are accepted and science experiences a seismic explosion of creativity. DARPA would do well to encourage disruptive ideas but, given that the old guard is in charge, I am not holding my breath. We might have to wait for them to die off, as Max Planck once suggested.
It's not just the last 8 years. DARPA has long used external corporations to do research and development on projects while providing the management and funding.
ARPANET (which, as you likely knew, grew into the series of tubes we know today as the Internet) was built to connect DARPA sites, and was conceived and originally built by BBN (still one of the major DARPA contractors). One of the first sites connected to ARPANET was SRI, which is still pretty big in the DARPA contracting world.
It's not new.
As for the link in your sig (which apparently you're too lazy or ingorant to turn into an actual hyperlink), I'd recommend everyone reads it. In fact, here's a proper link just to avoid cut-and-paste.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
The government is obviously corrupt Well this must be false, it's been proven time and again that our government is beyond corruption.
The government is obviously corrupt and working hand in hand with organizations out to destroy the internet. It's quite obvious to even the most cynical of observers that there is absolutely no collusion between the government and any organization that might be seen as antagonistic to the foundational principles of the internet. The government is obviously corrupt and working hard to make it easier for these same organizations to engage in a domestic terrorism campaign via lawsuits. Well here the OP just get silly, I mean come on, a campaign of terrorism via lawsuits? That would imply scaring people into following an organization's agenda by scare tactics, such as unlimited, unprovoked, irrational, abusive lawsuits and illegal legislation. That's just ludicrous.
You guys are right, OP is a troll.
I had quite a few friends who worked for NASA in various capacities. Their stories were remarkably similar. A couple of them were earnestly working on projects that got caught in some kind of political cross-fire and found their project(s) killed. One of the telling comments was that government service still manages people the same way it did in the 1950's.
You can work as hard and on pretty cool stuff for a company like Google (or Microsoft in years past) and make a million dollars or more at the end of five years. Your office will probably be nicer, the food is certainly better, and there are quite a pile of perks (like, I don't know, no drug tests and no silly loyalty oaths) that are quite unimaginable in government service.
The problem is that the people doing the recruiting can't even see the problem: they have probably been lifers and don't have any basis for comparison, and probably don't really believe that Google has a concierge.
I don't know about DARPA but the vast majority of US Military engineering jobs i've looked at require US Citizenship as a pre-requisite for Security Clearance. I would be there in a heartbeat, however, my New Zealand citizenship doesn't cut it for US Security Clearance.
I disagree and ask that you look there again. You will see that IBM is hiring in China, Mexico, Brazil, Russia, etc., etc., maybe 10% of the jobs are in the US.
I worked for IBM for 10 years - the best and the brightest rarely stay there because it doesn't take long to realise that layoffs at IBM have more to do with stock prices quarter to quarter and politics. IBM is as guilty as the govt and many other companies regarding outsourcing. The best and the brightest beat a path to the exit.
It once was a great company, sadly they have lost their way and essentially become a marketing company.
Just where are you going with this Ikea boy?
"We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars."
"But we won't."
"And we're slowly learning that fact."
"And we're very, very pissed off."
tyler
E MC^2
E = (Wan't fries with that?)
Potatoes have a lot of potential energy.
If I make a really cool pencil, and the military want to buy it, I don't think it makes me a 'little Eichmann', as the parent seems to suggest. If I make 'brown people seeking missiles', that is another matter.
Whether or not you support current military activities, in good conscience you cannot advocate that the military should get second class service. Your conscience will get in the way because you will be causing the death of somebody.
By the same sword, the talented shouldn't feel an obligation towards something they wholeheartedly disagree with. When the military take on 'adventures', they must realise that they are risking a generation of braintrust if there is little support for their mission. This is the case for any employer, although short of the Pinto, most employers haven't set out to kill people.
During the 1990s, after a massive victory in the former-Yugoslavian states, there appeared to be an uncommon support amongst techies to be proud of working for the military. That good will, perhaps tenfold, has certainly disappeared. Quel surprise.
Who wants to work at a crazy bureurcracy like DARPA ? It is an old boys network that is a way to give pork to industry and professors. They've had some successes, but hey that's shotgun science for you. They mostly like to make up crazy ideas that won't work. I worked on a robot project for them for a few years. It was insane. There was no way to do what they wanted - but my university got lots of money!!!
I understand what you're saying, and I agree with you and what the link proves. But you are not understanding my point. A great many of those people who are hired in those countries end up working here in the United States. IBM has thousands and thousands of "employees" working here, for IBM and under contract for U.S. companies. They might have been hired in India and China, but lots and lots of them are working here.
I should know, I work with an enormous amount of them every day.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
It's true that DARPA is part of the DoD, but the research it has sponsored in the past has given benefits far beyond the military. Examples of things it's sponsored include:
* Networking (the Internet)
* Graphics
* Timesharing systems
* VLSI
* RISC
* RAID
* Parallel and high-performance computing
As for not wanting to work there, it's like other comments have said: DARPA program managers don't *do* research, they manage people who do (and really it's more like: they manage people like professors and company project managers, and *those* people manage the students and scientists who actually *do* the research). People get PhDs for different reasons, of those who got one to do research, few of them want to be that far removed from actually doing it.
Why is everyone flaming DARPA. DARPA doesn't invent new bombs or kill people. That is the DoD's job. All DARPA does is try to find the "next" innovative technology and buy it. They INVENTED the internet. The first real internet was the ARPAnet and then the usenet was set out be the "poor mans ARPAnet". They sparked it.
So what's the big deal. If you want to make bombs and viruses the DoD always has positions. But DARPA has never been involved.
Just my 2 cents. Just kind of tired with everyone's one sided way of looking at things.
My personal reason is because I did not want to see something I developed perverted and turned into a weapon that could kill thousands/millions. I could never live with that or face my maker knowing I had a hand in something like that.
Have you guys *met* people that work for DARPA?? It takes amazing dedication and energy. These people hand over a huge chunk of their lives to accomplish this mission, and fight uphill every step of the way. First, let's show some appreciation for them and the job they do. Second, let's ask whether any of us are good enough to do this job. A pretty scary proposition. Hats off to those that do it!
It is this mind set that runs deep in government that makes people look elsewhere.
(btw its a quote from Ashton)
Arash Partow's Philosophy: Be a person who knows what they don't know, and not a person who doesn't know.
If the government gets desperate enough, they will just start recruiting people from Canada! It's like this... hire a ice hockey player to build your super expensive data center and keep it up 99.999% of the time! I don't believe the work is promising enough to warrant anyone pursuing a position at DARPA. I'd rather find a better over paid position at a corporation or something similar. At least you'll know you aren't the government's personal slave!
"In the kingdom where everything dies, the sky is mortal."
DARPA doesn't actually "do" research like university or national lab, rather they fund research at such places -- labs make proposals and DARPA funds them. A university physics lab might have a DARPA contract to perform DARPA research, but it's that lab that carries out the actual science, so it's not a matter of attracting brainpower to DARPA, it's a matter of attracting the best and brightest minds to national labs, military labs, and research universities, and then attracting top research places to do DARPA research.
can't pass the drug tests
No, its not nonsense. Noone said all of the best and the brightest refuse to do so, but a non-negligible portion do. I for instance, refuse to take any job that creates weapons, or from a company who's main purpose is to make weapons. I consider it equal to being a murderer.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Although it's about a unit of state rather than federal government, you could look at the story directly below this one concerning a Massachusetts man who was fired for (not) downloading porn on his computer. Given how well government tends to work -- more examples of it working (or not, once again) are available here, at GWC -- I'm not surprised that many free-thinking and brilliant people wouldn't be inclined to work for it.
that an administration that aggressively fights and denounces science would suppress scientists' interest in public service?
who TF wants the grief of working for Tony Tether at government pay rates, anyway? Lots of better alternatives.
At least we can be thankful that DARPA is not wasting any money trying to create its braintrust with recruits from /. It would appear that they are aware that there is no great intellect in these forums...
Most of the latest generation of developers, scientists and engineers are very much into self development and self interest not like the previous generation which was into working for a big company for 20 years and retiring with a pension.
The issue is that most of the big contractors treat their employees like dirt because, you know... they have 75,000 other people working for them who are just like you and they can replace you in a heartbeat.
I should know... I made the mistake of working for one once whose name I will not mention here. The people I worked with were top notch, but the company itself was as evil as they come.
The "problem" is the spirit of individuality that my and the current generation have... thank god for it.
Regards, GC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
This is a wise observation: for a particularly detailed account of one such person, read Richard Rhodes' Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb . It prominently features Edward Teller, who was the driving force behind the hydrogen bomb even when many of the other Manhattan project scientists, and most notably Oppenheimer, had lost their zeal for weaponry and their certainty that we are the good guys, as the GP argues.
Note too that I pitched a theory as to why this is a problem in another comment.
It's pointless, their drainage is too good 'n you'd need, like, enourmous amounts of water.
I consider it equal to being a murderer.
:-) . Anyway, just working in a country like the US (or almost any country for that matter) contributes to warfare and violence. What do you think pays for the wars and the weapons? Your taxes, that's what. Having said that, I doubt that most intelligent people would refuse to work for DARPA because of the military issue. There are other factors such as recognition, freedom to work on pet projects, etc... Personally, I am an iconoclast by nature and I tend to go against the grain. The academics who run DARPA would not like my ideas. So I stay away from them.
You should seriously consider moving to the Amazon or some other equatorial jungle, then. Be preapred to use violence to defend yourself against some of the locals who might not take too kindly to weird looking strangers like you moving into their neck of the hood
Rolling up a little bit upward, and we can see all twitter's sockpuppets are committing racism against my race. These people need to be purged from the U.S.A. in conjuction with the neo-cons for the new age to arrive.
Our culture is one of the most peaceful in history, and have little history of waging war against other country (although lots of civil war against their own people. That's sad.) If you don't like things that are Made in China, SIMPLY DON'T BUY IT. There are tons of alternatives if you get your a$$ up from your seat and search. You are like that little neo-con radio talk-show host bitch called "Laura Ingraham" who yelled "Chinese come over to kill Americans" during the Virginia Tech massacre, while in fact, the psycho is Korean. She never offer any apology at all.
In the New Age, two languages will be spoken in the New World Order. Let me give you a hint. These are all come from Asia.
"The New Age. The New Beginning."
Only white, black and may be Hispanics are considered "Real Americans" and get promoted, no matter their performance. People who are in none of those above described race (i.e. Indians, Chinese), even born in U.S., are considered "Non American" and the glass ceiling is on you, no matter how hard you work. You can't fight. This is their culture.
And if you got promoted in the rare case, chances are a scapegoat are waiting for you. You will be the first one to go to jail if something happens, even you are not related.
There is no need to fight. There are many opportunities in non-Defense related field.
"The New Age. The New Beginning."
Let's see.... be a scientist in industry. Start at 70k, and work your way up to Director making 140k in 5 to 10 years. After another 5 to 10 years, get to be VP of Research making somewhere between 150 and 300k, depending on the company. OR Go to work for government. Start at what? 30 to 40k? Work your way up to some upper level of government official doing research at what? 100k tops, maybe, if that? (And have it take about 20 years to get there?) You might get a pension from the government after that time and then get a real job making money while collecting your pension, but who wants to wait until they are 40 to start their life? Also, I've been wondering. How come all posts that call America nasty names, like terrorist, get modded up, but those that defend it in some way get modded down? Is /. really that far to the Left by and large?
It has to do with my (rejected) Slashdot submission:
http://it.slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=718461
The military and most organizations are NOT looking for intelligent people; they are looking for Yes-Men who appear intelligent (people who talk the talk and walk the walk of Management). This excludes Geeks, and any independent type thinker. People who make it to the managerial levels of DARPA and ANY organization will ALWAYS have their psychological preferences suited to the lowest common denominator of "intellectual".
If you can "Sales" your way to the top of Management (or Human Resources Management) then you are looking for somebody like yourself (a Sales Person); and NOT an intellectual who challenges bad assumptions or procedures. People in bureaucratic structures like DARPA want TEAM PLAYERS and not thoughtful folk who will question and analyze things only to discover that systems designed and administered by a potential superior are inadequate or defective. DARPA (and all other bureaucratic organizations) want committee meetings and group hugs; intellectuals and problem solvers want results (despite the social euphoria of working in an Office with free coffee and all the other perks).
There is a distinct divide between what organizations WANT and what they get. This is because their social biases and academic lameness propelled them to the position they are in. In this respect I'm talking about eagles fly with eagles and worms wiggle with worms. People only hire who they appreciate. People who are intelligent enough to know better don't even bother wasting their time trying to apply to places like DARPA.
It isn't peculiar to DARPA. It's a problem for most government scientific institutions.
1) They're earning one heck of a lot more money and doing more actual research working in industry, especially for military industries, which seem to be doing a booming business lately;
2) They're flipping burgers in McDonalds (or other lower-pay jobs) because even though the pay is better they don't want to work for the military or by proxy in defense industries;
3) They're in other countries where science and technology is highly valued all through the education system, instead of being more time-consuming, more difficult, and in the end less financially rewarding or socially respected compared to getting a degree in, say, business management or law (i.e. losing smart people to other professions entirely, or other countries).
What DARPA is seeing is the culmination of a couple of decades of education underfunding and the consistent rewarding of people for being able to BS and spin their way to the top rather than solve tough scientific problems. It may be important, but the skill is undervalued. In addition, the problem is made more acute by including a few years of questionably-justified warfare and contracting out as much as possible. Then there are the layers and layers of bureaucratic overhead. Smart people want to do research, not endless paperwork.
In other words, you reap what you sow.
In the long run all those lab shutdowns and contracting out doesn't seem to work as well as the accountants said it would, eh?
I can't believe any of the smart people left at DARPA can't figure it out. More likely they can figure it out, but their management or political appointees are in denial and want to keep collecting their inflated paycheques while goading along the few remaining drones working in sector 7G until they retire.
Government labs *can* be great places to work, but it usually in spite of the system rather than because of it.
HOPE should be withheld until after the first semester or two of college, with "back pay" if the student does maintain the B. That would weed out a lot of the kids who couldn't really hack it.
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
- why are so many managers so dumb, where as so many tech people & researchers do smart?
:). In practice I think even many smart managers don't do (a) and (b) and hit and miss with (c). Hence lots of sub-optimal (and even stupid) decisions.
My theory is that it really has less to do with a lack of innate intelligence in management -- I've known and know some who are quite intelligent.
I think it often appears that management is unintelligent because:
(1) The Peter Principle is at least partly true.
(2) Management education (and culture) doesn't refine the same kind of intelligence that engineering/tech does (mitigated in some programs which have a harder side of it which emphasizes real economic quantitative skills). Strongly detailed domain knowledge isn't a big part of things (and formalism is either absent or ridiculously static). Managers trained this way and shaped by that culture are going to end up with big blind spots unless they have (a) native gifts that counterbalance the problem or (b) real domain-specific training or (c) cultivate relationships of trust with people who have domain knowledge and can give them good advice (which is NOT necessarily a large subset of people working in the field
It's worth mentioning that engineers and other tech folks often have blind spots too. I've had the chance to step into account and project management roles dead cold, and find out first hand that what I think a lot of us would call "soft skills" are real and can be non-trivial to acquire. And I'm sometimes envious of some of the DIY ability accountants and lawyers have when dealing with systems which, like it or not, are a big part of operating in an economy in a modern state -- a good chunk of management does have significant domain knowledge here.
Ultimately I wonder if the problem has a lot to do with sociological/organizational roles and identity issues. I think you could cross a few things Ironically, this is one domain in which management is supposed to excel...
Tweet, tweet.
Sorry, what do weapons have to do with scientific revolutions?
Wernher von Braun and J. Robert Oppenheimer would be my examples of weapons scientists, but scientists can be pacifists, too. Joseph Rotblat quit the Manhattan project, and later received a Nobel for his efforts to encourage disarmament. Linus Pauling had a change of heart after WWII and spoke out against nuclear testing, among other things. And I think that if you talk to people today, many will express reservations about working for the military-industrial complex.
Regarding world views, Einstein had the "right" world view for the theories of relativity. However, his world view could not accommodate quantum mechanics. Despite facilitating a paradigm shift in one area of theory, Einstein was unable to accept a different shift in a different area.
I disagree that "academics are not open to new ideas". The problem these days is that there are very few "disruptive" ideas. There are few new theories worth exploring; we are mostly nailing down the outer reaches of existing ones, and discovering that what we have got works extremely well. Every scientist wants to push the envelope. After all, scientists are rewarded with Nobel prizes for radically shifting our understanding of nature.
We live in a post-Kuhn era, where the phrase "paradigm shift" is cliché. Scientists are well acquainted with his ideas, whether explicitly or implicitly. The last thing we need is a bunch of people telling us that we're locked into our paradigms, because it's simply not true. When the LHC starts up, everyone is hoping that new physics will be found, because accumulating more data to reinforce existing theories is not terribly exciting.
DARPA is a place? Really? Hell, I thought everyone just got their DARPA grant, and went on doing whatever it is their doing. A la an NSF grant.
What do US military interrogators do that is worse than half the some EU/Japanese/Chinese/lots of industrialized police interrogators?
It's the drug test, man. I thought it was all about how much you can take.
Geez, it's the federal government. When will they do this right??
I work for the DOC and our pay scale tops out at 149k. You can work plenty of overtime, so you have gs 5-9's hitting the 149k ceiling and we have comp time which is great if you like to travel. The govt also pays for law school and just about any other education you want. We have a quota, so the more hours you work of comptime/ot your quota increases.
You need to work 5 years to get a pension (1% of your salary per year for your three year high, i think you can collect it when you turn 62).
You get plenty of vacation and sick leave, accumulate 4 hours every 2 weeks, 6 after 3 years, and 8 hours after 15.
Flex schedule. Basically you can work your 80 hours any way you want in a 2 week span.
Nearly 100% telework. Still have to come in 1 hour a week, but wanna live out in NYC and come in for an hour to the DC area, you can.
Managers don't have enough tools to retain people. You are dead on about positive renforcement.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
Many of the 'brightest' don't want to work for the government, for various reasons.
Some of these reasons are practical ( less income then in the private sector, tho more secure... ) others are more personal and moralistic.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
How can you kill women and children?
It is easy, you just lead them less.
Or make a robot to do it for you.
The last thing we need is a bunch of people telling us that we're locked into our paradigms, because it's simply not true.
Yeah, I know. This is precisely the sort of smug complacency that Kuhn warned us about. There are plenty of people who disagree with you. The truth is that the paradigms keep on shifting in a revolutionary way, like they always do. Indeed, I believe that the fields of physics and computer science are ripe for a few disruptive changes of their own in the not too distant future. Ever since the arpanet (DARPA funded, mind you) took off and changed into the internet that we know today, we've been living in a much more rapidly changing world. Disruptive technologies are bound to emerge from places other than academia. DARPA would do well to keep its eyes open.
DARPA develops, amongst other things, weapons - lethal, nonlethal, economic, social, etc.
Einstein was a pacifist, more or less. He wound up deeply regretting his tangential involvement in the Manhattan project.
I work in nuclear physics and related fields, but I would never consider working to build weapons.
Violate the law that they are sworn to protect perhaps?
The constitution is supposed to protect people from government abuse but right now it is getting trampled and shown very little respect.
Personally I think it's a sad day when we have to give up our high ground because our enemy is so strong that our principles will prevent us from winning the day.
I find it strange how we act like that's the case even though the "enemy" is extraordinarily weak.
Just because they do it, is not a reason for us to do it.
It's simple really. People who are smart enough to be useful are smart enough to know not to work for terrorists.
...operation paperclip. The DOD (or state department blackops) will hire, overt or covert, anyone if they really need them, and laws are for those "other people". The regular military uses any number of foreign born as well.
I live in the DC area and in doing some research on the job market in the area, the government is just not willing to pay what the private sector does. This is especially a problem with the cost of living being so high in this part of the country.
DARPA was once filled with bright scientists and engineers with new ideas. These people were trained by - that's right - the academy. The academy isn't full of a bunch of stodgy old fools who aren't able to keep up with change or adapt to new data or ideas. The academy of today is the same one that has produced many great minds of the past such as Einstein, Turing, and Planck - as well as many great minds of the modern era like Hawking, Prusiner (discovered prions - quite ground breaking) and Blackburn (she co-discovered telomerase). The academy is turning out good people as it always has and DARPA isn't making any mistakes by restricting their searches to only those people who have been properly trained as scientists in the academy. Anyone who says otherwise probably has very little idea what they are talking about.
The reason that DARPA isn't pulling in talent the way they once did is because the private sector is simply more lucrative and more exciting right now. That, and the fact that DARPA doesn't have quite the same prestige today that it did during, for instance, the cold war. These simple explanations might not sound as revolutionary and insightful as someone taking it upon themselves to decry the academy for its perceived inflexibility and unadaptability, but they are far more realistic and down to earth.
Yes, but the perceived moral superiority of one's state has a lot to do with people's willingness to support it. I would most happily have applied my talents to supporting US military technology efforts during WWII or even the cold war, when the US really did appear to be under existential threat.
But in today's world, it looks to many of us more like our government has been picking wars they wanted to have and seeking justification afterwards
Recent US military antics have leveraged the population's fear of from an attack that killed 3000 people to initiate a war with an unrelated country that has now resulted in the death of nearly a million people
I know there are people who feel differently than I about these events - but many also feel the same or similarly. I am no pacifist, but I feel like my current government uses kindergarten logic internationally in ways that cost millions of human lives.
That alone is plenty to keep me out of DARPA, and I suspect it is for many others as well.
If there were a real external threat, I'd be supporting my nation's efforts to fight it as would any other good patriot. Right now, the greatest threat is from within.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
I'm there -- a contractor, not a government employee. So I get to speak with some first hand knowledge. Very little written thus far bears any resemblance to the truth of DARPA.
... (There is most assuredly no good ole boys network of academics controlling what DARPA will fund!) The director also hires and fires every government employee at the agency. Some people don't like that model...
DARPA PMs are researchers, though they are rarely *doing* research while at DARPA. Instead DARPA offers them the ability to pursue their hare-brained, pie-in-the-sky ideas and to do so with budgets of millions of dollars a year. So they get to try to make their vision a reality but at the cost of not getting to do the research themselves. This is not unlike being a senior research scientist at an R&D lab or a full professor at a University. You can be in there directing and interacting with the front-line researchers, but you rarely get to be in there doing the front-line research.
There is very little bureaucracy at DARPA. That is not a reason to avoid the job. On the other hand, the current director has a choke-hold and veto over every idea that goes forward. One man, $3+ billion a year, and he personally decides annually on the fate of projects ranging from quantum entanglement to cybersecurity with side orders of robotics, space vehicles, microelectronics, flying things, floating and swimming things, neural interfaces, advanced vaccines,
While there are some "usual suspects" who win a lot of DARPA business, the only inside-track they have is their past-performance and doing good marketing to an existing customer. I suspect every company's business development people focus significant attention on their existing customers too. And if they're any good they get more business from those customers. "So let it be with Caesar."
It *is* expensive to live in the D.C. area. But a DARPA PM can earn over $175K/yr with bonuses. Not all do, to be sure, but they can. So that's not a reason to avoid considering DARPA.
A DARPA PM job lasts about 4 years. Some stretch it to 6 years. But then you're done. Gone. Bye bye. Find another job. Most don't have any trouble finding another job, but in the interim they have either left their families behind for a few years or they have uprooted them for a few years. Some people don't like that...
The minimum daily adult requirements for sitting in the building and doing work is a SECRET clearance. It usually take a few months if you haven't been too bad too recently and don't have a lot of family living in other countries. Much of the work requires much higher levels of clearance, but if you are targeting intelligence work in the first place you have probably already bitten the security clearance bullet.
PM's are government employees and DARPA is a part of the Executive Branch of the US government. Bashing the incumbent administration publicly would be politically un-astute, much as publicly bashing to CEO of your current employer could be a career limiting move (CLM). Privately, DARPA employees are republicans, democrats, and even the stray libertarian-leaning independent.
In my experience -- opinion and conjecture here -- the reasons DARPA finds recruitment a challenge are (in my subjective order):
1) Only the director can hire. If he doesn't like you or your idea, nothing and no one else matters.
2) Only one person can approve programs. Your good idea will never fly if you can't sell it to him.
3) Taking a temporary job of 4 years (and possibly less if the director decides he doesn't like you anymore) to move to an expensive part of the country is not always a good personal or professional decision.
4) Some people have moral objections to working for the military -- regardless of whether their research area involves blowing things up or protecting computers from hackers.
But most of the PMs I have known loved the opportunity and very rarely wanted to leave when their time was up, even with the frustrations.
If you were right, then other academic-minded funding agencies, such as NIH and NSF, would be facing the same problem as DARPA, but they are not.
The best and brightest don't want to work for the military. They can make much more money working for companies that don't promote war and killing.
They are making bank in the private sector.
The truth is that the paradigms keep on shifting in a revolutionary way, like they always do. Indeed, I believe that the fields of physics and computer science are ripe for a few disruptive changes of their own in the not too distant future.
Uh, doesn't this jibe with what I said? Paradigms can't shift if people are locked into them.
But, now that the US has completely insane visa bullshit going on, few people are willing to put up with it. Especially considering what kind of environment people would be living in while there. You people are going bockers.
But, all that is old news. As has been widely reported, fewer and fewer grad students are entering the country. In the longer run (feeling it right now) it's trivial that it'll turn into less brain power for industry and government in the US.
Is this honestly a surprise?
A DARPA "program manager" is often what Government procurement people call a "Contracting Officer's Technical Representative". This is someone who knows what the project is about, technically, and goes out to check on progress. Back at HQ, you write reports, go to meetings concerning what projects ought to go forward, and look at incoming proposals. You get to see a lot, and have some influence over research, but don't really do much yourself. The problem is finding people smart enough to do the job, willing to work for the Government not actually doing technical work, senior enough to tell companies and professors what to do, yet not has-beens.
Although many academics are unhappy with DARPA under Dr. Tony Tether, I think he's done good work. Academic robotics needed a serious butt-kick. DARPA had been putting money into robot vehicles since 1969 without getting anything usable. Tether dreamed up the DARPA Grand Challenge to light a fire under academic researchers. Early on, the big-name schools didn't want to field entries. It was quietly made clear to them that the gravy train was over - if they couldn't compete, they weren't getting further funding in robotics. Entire academic departments were devoted to that problem, and it got results. More recently, Boston Dynamics' "Big Dog" robot has been demoed. Again, this was something far better than anything from decades of academic work. I can't speak for work outside robotics, but DARPA really has succeeded in forcing robotics groups to produce.
I sure as heck can give our soldiers the tools they need to come home alive.
A lot of Americans don't want the soldiers to come home alive.
Uh, doesn't this jibe with what I said? Paradigms can't shift if people are locked into them.
But they are.
A lot of people don't want to work for DARPA because it means living in or around Arlington, Virginia. (Source: http://www.darpa.gov/hrd/ )
My friends aren't there. My family isn't there. It would take a shit ton of money for me to be able to financially justify relocating there, which would involve my wife needing to quit her job to come with, as well as needing to sell my house in a shitty market for selling houses.
Sorry, but if you have only one location and you want the best and the brightest, you have to be willing to offer stupid amounts of money to make sure it's financially viable for all the best and the brightest. I think it'd be cool as hell to work on a lot of the projects I've seen come out of DARPA, but not enough to enter poverty (and more, to ask my family to enter poverty) to do it.
"Yes, but they do it too" is not a defence, either legally or ethically. Further, placing your military interrogators on a similar footing as the worst torturers on Earth doesn't really look so good.
If you were right, then other academic-minded funding agencies, such as NIH and NSF, would be facing the same problem as DARPA, but they are not.
I think they are. Where are the Einsteins working on behalf of NIH and NSF? If they exist, why has research into the parallel programming problem and the software reliability and productivity crises gotten nowhere in the last 30 years? 30 years is an eternity in the computer business.
Also, I admire your bold use of selective quoting. Way to ignore the rest of my paragraph; I used the construction "post-Kuhn" for a reason.
;)
There are plenty of people who disagree with you.
There are plenty of people who disagree with you.
I don't think academics are the problem here.
http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn13907
Even if that were true, DARPA isn't tasked with "creating new world views". It's supposed to be pretty cutting edge, but still applied science and technology. And I don't think Einstein ever contributed much directly to the Manhattan Project, though of course he got the issue some attention by writing a letter to FDR.
What is the difference between you and any other Good German?
...and since less than 5% of the world population lives in the US, yet 10% of the open jobs are there, it means that there are a lot more open IBM jobs in the US than elsewhere in the world.
You were saying?
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
D average kids = minorities (affirmative action beneficiaries)
"real" B and A achievers = white kids (affirmative action not applicable)
It's amazing that you can take something as complex as this and turn it into a 10-line "I got laid off, therefore the Indians and Chinese are evil and must die" whine. Just amazing.
How old are you, BTW? Is that what they are teaching you in college these days?
And let me tell you something to close off. You have no idea what the moral bankruptcy of a culture looks like. None at all, if you're using it in this context as a punchline for your arguments.
Nobel is another example.
In the 15th century, working as an engineer for the military might mean "figure out how to defend Venice from a naval attack". Even if this meant killing people, it at least sounds like a Good Thing on the face of it. You might come up with a new way to sink ships, and drowning is a terrible way to die, but would have at least been restricted to people attacking your city.
Today, every educated person knows about the Holocaust. Every government or military action since pales in comparison. Even on the internet, we use it as the measure of how extreme a position could possibly be. And a new military innovation today can be quickly mass-produced, and used immediately to hurt countless people, military and civilian alike, on the far corners of the globe.
Even many of the geniuses who worked the Manhattan Project later in their lives worked hard to stop others from building nuclear weapons. I'm sure it made sense at the time: America was in a war with Japan that, even if you were certain we would win, surely you saw we could only do so at enormous cost in terms of human life.
Having been born many decades after both the war and the last military use of the bomb, it seems downright absurd to me that anybody would work on such a project. The atom bomb was for engineering what the Holocaust was for politics: so horrible it's nearly unbelievable.
George Orwell wrote a great essay called "You and the Atomic Bomb". The message: big, complex, expensive weapons are inherently undemocratic. A rifle or shotgun or grenade is a democratic weapon. Quite simply, the things the military works on today seem to be about putting more power in the hands of the already-powerful, not about letting people defend themselves.
Then look at what's going on in the world: 9/11 was some religious nuts who took matters into their own hands, and thought killing was a good way to solve problems, because their god told them so. The Iraq/Afghanistan wars were
Combine this with all the commercial opportunities in the world today, and I see no reason I'd ever want to work for DARPA. The American military disgusts me.
Would Leonardo work for DARPA if he was alive today? I think he'd probably be building stuff in his garage, funded by inventions and private donations. We'd ruffle through his old papers and find schematics for a Segway he designed in 1971 or some shit.
I'd love to be a part of DARPA, but I don't really want to give a military commitment while we're off policing the world; and DARPA seems intent on its applicants having college degrees(I got bored of classes that taught me less than just reading the text). Perhaps a focus on creative thinking and logic skills rather than worthless pieces of paper would bring people in.
Those who know, do not speak. Those who speak, do not know. ~Lao Tzu
You seem to believe yourself to be some kind of grand revolutionary - smarter and more capable than those fools in the universities.
Nope. There are many others who share my ideas. They are just not as upfront as I am.
It's far more likely that you're nothing but a simple kook.
ahahaha... Well, at least I am not an anonymous kook, nor a coward. I face the music, unlike some other people, right?
I was going to suggest the opposite.
As a scientist working on disruptive science, I don't want someone else telling me what to do, or what I'll be able to do. If you know the results of your research before you do it, it's not research. If they want Einsteins, they have to allow open ended physical science research. Einstein was not an engineer.
Oh, and what would Kuhn say about applying scientific cultural ideas from more than a generation ago? The old guard *is* dead, Kuhn was one of them.
Seriously man, I've been watching you and your sock puppets for some time. Am posting AC now, to save my karma (and so I don't get some shill named after me).
Twitter, and it is you -- we can all tell, you need to take a step back and look at your life. All this anti-Microsoft bollocks and shilling can't be doing you mind tank any good. You _need_ psychiatric help, honestly. If you weren't so fucked up, you could be a great force for good in the Free software world.
This is your wakeup call. I'll post this again, next time I see you sockpuppets in action. :)
Hmm, so how old are C, unix, and the x86?
I work at one of the country's leading computer research laboratories. A lot of what we do is funded by grants from DARPA. And although that military technology is used for weapons, the same technology is adopted to farming, security, trucking and much more that improves our quality of life. It's a lot of grunt work, but that work also facilitates the opportunities for researchers to take up their own projects, and own desires for research.
These same projects we do also provide a experience for a great deal of students with their internships, undergraduate, masters and Ph.D.'s. For some, DARPA is a stepping stone, for other's, it's an opportunity to pursue their own interests. But for all of us, we reap the benefits.
The next time you go to the grocery store to pick up your food, or you use your computer to check email, or maybe just turn on the television to catch breaking news -- that technology has been refined by the offshoots of DARPA research. You don't know how, and I'm not at liberty to say, but the first thing the lot of you can do is shut your pie holes with your holier-than-thou attitude about an industry you know very little about, and a country that makes it possible.
That makes us even then. :-D
I did a bunch of drugs throughout high school and college. If you can name a drug, I ingested it. Do I have ideas that DARPA would like? Sure. Do I have a degree in nuclear physics? Yep. Do I have a history that bars me from any such job? Unfortunately, yes,
Even if your weapon is used in a defensive mode? Remember that battles -- even attacks -- can be defensive in nature.
Recent events have people strictly thinking of the military as a vehicle of attack, but it's also a defensive organization. Without it, we'd have people flowing across our borders uncontrolled to take jobs mowing lawns, working in construction crews, forming violent gangs in Los Angeles...
I think you're pretty right with this. And these companies also take up a humongously large part of the yearly work visa amount each year, these days it's not an easy job to fit into the visa cap, I'm from Europe and I stopped thinking about getting a US job, since chinese and indian companies almost fill up the entire cap year by year.
DARPA employees don't do any research themselves, they manage R&D programs done in companies and (increasingly rarely) in universities.
Here is the life of a program manager at DARPA:
- you are, or have been a researcher, and probably reached your apex as a researcher. You are in between jobs, or ran out of ideas, or just retired, or perhaps were overwhelmed by a feeling of irresistible patriotism: You join DARPA as a program manager.
- it's a government job, you might think that the pay is bad, but the job is secure, but it's not like that at all: it's a temporary job. You must leave after a 4 year tenure.
- At first, you run around all the labs in the country to get an idea about the state of the art in a technical area.
- you form an idea for a research project and propose it to the DARPA director, Tony Tether.
- Tether says the project sucks and won't get funded. He tells you to manage this other project whose original program manager was about to start just before he left DARPA. Who are you to tell him that this other project makes no sense?
- you write a request for proposal
- most of the proposals come from clueless companies that make a living out of government R&D contracts. Most of these companies are totally clueless about the topic. They try to convince you that whatever obscure technique they are experts at is the best solution for your project.
- The smartest companies enlist academic labs as sub-contractor on their teams. The academic partners will end up getting a tiny piece of the money, but will end up making the whole thing work.
- but you can't just give the money to universities because Tether doesn't like them (bunch of no-good commies). He is surprised, but still not convinced when Stanford and/or CMU win the Grand Challenge (not Boeing, not Lockheed-Martin, not SAIC, Stanford and CMU).
- University labs don't want to apply for DARPA money anyway, because they often come with restrictions on publications, and with "go/no-go" criteria that stifle scientific creativity. Under Tether, long-term research projects have given ways to short-term industrial development projects.
- Some proposals will promise incredible things, like "we will solve the AI problem in 18 months".
Since the other proposers merely promise to solve the AI problem in 3 years, you pick the 18 month guys. Next time around, the 3 year guys will say 18 months.
- spend 4 years herding cats, preparing powerpoint presentations, running around the country some more.
- Naturally, the teams you pick don't end up solving the AI problem in 18 months, or in 4 years.
- after 4 years, you leave DARPA without fanfare. After 4 years of management, politics, and no research of your own, our career as a researcher is in shambles (if it wasn't already).
Yes, some DARPA managers are excellent, but they are few and far between.
Yes DARPA-funded projects have had a huge impact in the past, but in recent years, most projects have been geared towards very short-term goals.
No blue-sky research there anymore (or if there it, it's the wrong type).
The problem is has to do with what Thomas Kuhn wrote about in "The Structure of Scientific Revolution".
Khun's SSR is not good scholarship. The whole idea hinges on one thing: scientists are humans, and humans are intellectually territorial (have a "world view" they will defend regardless of any factor) and therefore incapable of changing their minds based on new discoveries or even of "thinking outside the box" at all. If we were talking about politicians or religious followers, that might be largely true; but we are talking about scientists, and it is largely false. Sure there are open-minded politicians and stodgy conservative scientists, but these are the exceptions. Among all demographics in society, scientists are rare in that their livelihood rewards the willingness to change one's mind, and the ability to "think outside the box".
Eventually, new paradigms are accepted and science experiences a seismic explosion of creativity.
What a conspiracy theory. Even though Khun abused and thereby expanded the meaning of "paradigm" (in usage since his book), there is no such phenomenon within science. Science itself is a paradigm. There has been only one "paradigm shift" in recorded history: that from the theistic/deistic idea of divine interference (even to the extent of occasionalism; look it up) to scientific thought. Obviously, the paradigm of science began long before the generally agreed "beginning of modern science" around the time of Bruno or Bacon, and just as obviously it has not fully supplanted theism even to this day.
Sometimes the "stubbornness" in science is human stubbornness in the face of physical reality, but most times it is compelled by fact, and facts are stubborn things indeed. I think your interpretation and thereby overzealous application of his work is exactly the kind Khun himself complained about. It's an easy mistake to make if you let that book speak to you too deeply. So no, I don't think your Khunian claim is a particularly good description even of the situation at DARPA, let alone the state of science in general.
Besides that, it's unreasonable of you to dismiss the other poster's speculation that scientists are repulsed by the idea of advancing military causes. Scientists, like most people, tend to believe in moral causes and not mere jingoism. That both why Einstein wrote his famous letter to FDR and why he later regretted doing so. Supplanting human nature with Khun's largely inaccurate portrayal of human nature in one small endeavor is just a crock.
I doubt that most intelligent people would refuse to work for DARPA because of the military issue.
That's probably a good generalization from a practical standpoint. However, though you agree in the letter here, you then:
There are other factors such as recognition, freedom to work on pet projects, etc.
disagree in spirit. It's unreasonable to believe it plays no role in original, creative thinkers' job preferences. It would be the same straw man argument to say: "I doubt that most intelligent people would refuse to work for DARPA because of the recognition issue" or any other issue.
I'm glad you're interested in the philosophy of science and in human nature; I wish more people were. But I hope you will keep reading and thinking, because Thomas Khun is far from the best or last word on the nature of the scientific endeavor.
The academics who run DARPA would not like my ideas. So I stay away from them.
I'm sure that a) they're heartbroken, and b) you would contribute revolutionary, useful ideas to their cause. Seriously, that was a really pretentious, arrogant statement.
Well, at least I am not an anonymous kook, nor a coward.
Who are or aren't has no bearing on the correctness or rigor of your ideas or of what you
Because intelligent people -- the kind DARPA wants -- have realized that our nation has already moved far beyond kicking the asses of anyone else on the planet in the way of "defense"... and that our government has moved on to offense as an alternative.
And, being intelligent people, they don't want to be part of that.
Duh.
Point taken. And I do not mean in any way to denigrate the talents and abilities of these folks. What upsets me is the constant demands for higher visa quotas because the execs say that we don't have the talent here. That our colleges aren't very good and on and on. If they were to be honest they would simply say, there are plenty of talented well educated people here already but we choose to hire from outside of the country so that we can pay lower wages.
In the end we find that more and more of these foreign hires go back to their own countries bringing with them the knowledge and experience gained here at lower wages. Lower because our local corporations care not one whit for the future of this country, only that they hit their quarterly marks. I don't blame the foreign workers, I would do exactly as they do. At the end we as a country have underemployed, discouraged, talented and yes even brilliant engineers and scientist who can no longer compete in the marketplace becasue they were never given the opportunity to sharpen their skills in a real world environment.
And our government respects owning you like chattel
Well. Da Vinci had his own morals. I have mine. I'd rather work at McDonalds than for the military.
the agency "is the best thing you can do for your career."
What career would that be? If you are a "geek", i.e., you actually like working with technology hands-on, then becoming a program manager at DARPA sounds dreadful. You don't get to work with technology, you just get to see lots of other people having fun. And you do get to hand out the money, but more often than not, you have to NOT hand out money and be a general PITA to other geeks. And after all that, if you're lucky, once you decide to leave DARPA, you'll be ready on a career path... as an administrator or financial manager at a university.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
Plenty? I don't know if you can qualify 'plenty' with one example. You also used 'in the past' and the question at hand is more about the, you know, present.
Are you kidding me? There are lots of scientists and engineers working right now in the defense industry. It is a huge industry that employs hundreds of thousands of people around the world. Famous companies like Lockheed, Hughes, Boeing, GM, Ford, Ratheon, BAE, etc.. come to mind. There are also tens of thousands of enlisted and civilian scientists and engineers working directly with the various branches of the military.
They are busy flooging Ohio?
SCNR
The short version: Intellectuals are all subversives.
The longer version is that the most intelligent people are often not good at automatically following orders. They tend to reflect on what is said and question authority - when you have gone through university and possibly got a PhD, I think you can be excused for feeling that you are the best authority around at any time. This is not quite what the army is after, is my impression; they want people that can whip of a "Sir! Yes Sir!" so it feels like a slap in the face.
And the military doesn't have a reputation for intellectual brilliance - it is more a case of "if you can't be anything else, be a soldier".
All in all I think well-educated don't want the army, and the army don't want intellectuals either. Not an easy one to solve.
After all there is a lot of private sector jobs that pay well, provide a good working environment and leave you feeling good about the work you are doing. If you of course prefer to work for the government and contribute to society as a whole (reduced pay but better job security and contributing to the society you are a part of), there is always the medical and education sectors (hey, we might all pick on government workers for fun but it mostly isn't true and mass media has jumped on the bandwagon because it has been paid to by extremely corrupt private corporations, who want to provide you with absolutely no service and charge ten times as much as the government would ever have).
Perhaps various governments might have to figure out a way to clearly separate defensive, non-aggresive technologies and companies from death at a profit companies, so they can attract better people for defence and as for offence well I'm sure there are enough jock strap wanna be computer drones to pick from, the typing monkeys thing, get enough of them and some sort of code will come out just look at M$ Vista for example ;).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Startups promise chance of instant wealth and position, without slow climbing bureaucratic ladder. Scientist are not interested in material gain are better provided for by universities or corporate research centers. No need of humiliating security checks, freedom of publishing, travels and associations.
Yes. The Manhattan project, for example, had no difficulty recruiting large quantities of extremely top-level talent. But that's because intelligent people perceived both a need and an ethically justified situation. Right now, both the need and the ethics appear to be missing from the equation.
The problems we face from, say, people hijacking airplanes are social, not technological. Lock the cockpit doors, stop cooperating with terrorists when they ask for stuff, and maybe give knives to all the civilians on airplanes. This doesn't require any new technology. And it certainly is not solved by arming the government with new weapons of war.
These things are obvious to most of the people DARPA would want to recruit.
In this world of ideas, you don't get paid for having an idea, you get paid for acting like you have an idea.
This is because eating is more important than R&D. An idea lasts for a minute, your children last a lifetime. If you're lucky.
This is military research. Most if not all posts have to be filled by US citizens, after extensive security checks.
The military research and engineering area were always going to be the first to suffer from a decrease in the number of US citizens going into scientific and engineering fields. It is one area where importing overseas trained scientists and engineers can't fill the gap.
Einstein fled nazi Germany. Many German scientists preferred to surrender to US than to Russia. Intelligent people sometime work for armies, less often for weapon manufacturers and very rarely without interesting themselves in politics.
Why did scientists chose a science career ? A lot of them genuinely want to improve the world. In order to make them work for an army, you'll have to convince them that they will fight the good fight. The Bush administration did not try that very hard.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Idiot.
It is because DARPA requires clearances, which the best and brightest usually cannot get because they are foreign nationals. The "best and brightest" US students are not smart enough to work for DARPA anymore because of their socialist education system that is more interested in teaching liberalism, "fairness," demonization of high achievers, and so on...
This one is a real no-brainer. It goes like this. Back just after 9/11, the Bush administration went after scientists. If they were working on science projects that could be somehow connected to anything terrorist reated, then the scientists would be labelled terrorists (and if I recall correctly, some were jailed). Even if they were working on vaccines for dangerous diseases, the disease material could have been turned into a weapon of mass destruction, so jail! So lets review. 1) Study your brains out at university for 12 years. Work hard all the time. Get a job at univeristy/research lab. Work hard all the time. Get on the cutting edge of something, and then get chucked in jail by someone who has no idea what you are working on, but has a healthy dose of misunderstanding, and an overwhelming sense of importance. Blowhard 1, scientist 0. And now you are asking why not work for DARPA? Why even bother to stay in the US is a better question!
Just hurry up with my medicine .. thank you!
Please DARPA contact me. I have a BS in telecommunication engineering and i am a natural born self-learner. In all the jobs that i've had until now, my bosses always grow tired of my curiosity and when i have tried to create my own company (twice), the people around me say that i can't (I must be missing some misterious prerequisite). I have even tried to become a daytrader in the stock market, but it seems that i'm not predestined either. Taking into account that most of my life i have been under constant scrutiny, i don't really care giving up some civilian rights in favour of my intellectual freedom. I'm not sure if your offer is available to Spanish citizens. My only condition is to live on the coast or near a lake in a windy sailable place. I don't leave any contact information, because i know that if you are interested, you will know how to contact me.
Hear hear. I seccond that completely.
Property is theft.
Huh? The People's Republic of Montgomery County is conservative? The District is Conservative? Arlington? You have to get out to Loudon and western Fairfax to find conservative.
Best Slashdot Co
...for whatever they're worth! Seriously, the biggest reason is the paycheck. It's a pretty much well-known fact that Uncle Sam doesn't pay.
Think about it. By NOT working for them you've possibly denied them the breakthrough in weapons researc hthat would have
A) Created a completly non-lethal but entirely effective weapon with no lasting side effects B) Created a weapon of mass destruction so powerful it would prevent any conflict as long as you are its sole possessor.
Therefore, you aare responsible for all the deaths that WILL occur resulting from your inaction on weapons reasearch.
Take this with a cubic meter of salt.
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
As a PhD student in computer science, I would rather give up computers for the rest of my life and work on a farm rather than have my work help kill or torture more people. At least in my research community, working for DARPA is thought of as selling out to work for conservative bastards. Sure, you get lots of funding and the coolest toys, but for most people it's about hot ideas, not gear. If instead we were talking about major government programs to develop massive renewable energy resources, provide clean water or more food, I think the application process would quickly become very competitive. Oh, and it would probably increase American security, both physical and economic, an order of magnitude faster as well. Put the money into the NSF, the NIH and the part of the department of energy that actually does renewable energy research.
I'd love to work for them. But the applications involved are ridiculous.
I graduated in June, 2006. While hunting for jobs, I applied to some federal government job sites. In the time it took me to fill out one application for a goverment job, I could have filled out a hundred for private companies. The applications are confusing, mishandled, buggy, and hopelessly obfuscated by poorly explained terms, nonexistant support, and a complete lack of common sense.
From a cost benefit standpoint, it simply wasn't worth my time to spend an hour on a federal govenrment job application, only to have a message show up telling me that a glitch had destroyed the damn thing or I'd miscoded something and I'd have to start all over again.
Gimme a break... Defensive???? It is the US military we are talking about here.
Maybe they should team up with the USPTO - no shortage of crackpot^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H "blue sky" ideas floating around there.
... wasn't exactly known for being pro-military...
In general (no pun intended here), military doesn't attract the brightest of a nation for a carreer.
True, but as long as there's no way for the designer to ensure that the weapon will only be used defensively, I agree with the GP: if you knowingly put a weapon in the hands of a murderer, you are a murderer.
As technologists we like to say that technology is morally neutral, because that absolves us of responsibility. But it's not true. Swords and ploughshares are not morally equivalent: there are good uses for swords and bad uses for ploughshares, but that doesn't change the fact that one is designed for killing people and the other is designed for feeding people.
The best and brightest will be drawn to R&D type work and DARPA does little of it anymore. Not just DARPA though. I was in charge of an R&D project at a major defense contractor a few years ago and found it impossible to recruit decent talent. Microsoft and others snagged them instead by offering them much more money even though the project was very interesting.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Not being American, I probably wouldn't qualify anyway, but here's my guess:
1) The first letter in DARPA stands for "defense"
Most serious scientists want to create and explore, not destroy. Does NASA have problems hiring? THAT would be news. Actually they probably do have problems, as does anyone trying to get "real" scientists these days. I'd actually expect DARPA to be the last place to "dry up" because it won't get an enormous percentage of otherwise-eligible scientists apply.
2) Money.
Government agencies tend not to pay anywhere near market rates and if they do, they certainly don't keep up with those rates after a few years.
3)
I'm afraid this item is classified information and you may never, ever discuss it with anyone, ever.
4) Freedom.
Work for the government for a pittance to develop something that will then be claimed as a government invention, or work for a serious research place where you will get some credit and be able to discuss your ideas with others (that is, basically, what science is all about). You'll be able to research just about anything you want, in all kinds of esoteric fields, rather than being forced back to "make me something that'll kill more people", for instance. You'll (hopefully) be able to do it without a massive committee of people with their own agenda pushing you into areas you have little interest in.
Where are all the Einsteins...?
Obviously nowhere near the bush regime...the white house has been an intelligence draining quantum singularity for the last 8 years.
"He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice." , Albert Einstein
Because you can - or because you should?
Less than a year ago, I gave up a job that required DoD Clearance because I didn't want to support the war with my knowledge. I'm sure others are feeling the same.
Ok, I'm not trying to say that I'm the best or the brightest. But I do have 12 year of industry experience, and I'm working on my Ph.D. in AI right now. I've applied for DARPA grants before, only to be rejected. I get enough funding from other sources, so why waste my time?
I think the problem is with DARPA, not the bright people.
Einstein played no other role in the nuclear bomb project. As a German who had supported left-wing causes, he was denied security clearance for such...
This could explain a particular einstein.
Things didn't work out so well for
Robert Oppenheimer , if you are a student of
history, which some engineers are.
Science is based on truth.
War is based on lies.
Not a good match.
"When men hire themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking nothing about the justice of their cause, I don't care if they are shot themselves."
--Herbert Spencer
AEIOU: open-source anonymous internet currency
The "cutting edge of government" is just a euphemism for the "point of a bayonet". As intelligence increases, people are less likely to engage in anti-social patterns of behavior (like supporting government). What DARPA is witnessing is that the human race is evolving, and thus is starting to do things that make sense, as opposing to engaging in the idiot primate acts of aggression and status on which the survival of the state depends.
"Dominance is a game played by apes and other primates" - Barbara J. King, Biological Anthropology (paraphrased)
Otherwise the people I see when I look around me at the office must be... old-timers. They do good work, but you can't rely on these people more than a decade or two into the future.
USELESS without pics.
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
I have considerable experience applying for DARPA grant funding, administering DARPA contracts as principal investigator and going to both fact-finding and status-review meetings. Although I've been on the receiving end the whole time, I've had the pleasure of interacting with a variety of DARPA program managers. DARPA does not conduct primary research itself. Rather, program managers contribute to forming an overall vision and each form their own plans to contribute to this mission. This means coming up with a set of research interests that they'd like to fund from their given budget, soliciting proposals, deciding who should receive money and then monitoring the progress. As they form their portfolios of projects, the managers report in to the head of DARPA and hope to make a good case for getting their portfolio funded so that they can use this funding to grant various contracts to carry out the research. All this means that a program managers job is all about talking with and traveling to academic and industry labs on a regular basis, trying to figure out what is going on, what work contributes to DARPA's goals, what work is likely to proceed well without DARPA's input and which would benefit most from DARPA grant money. There are proposals to solicit and read, usually with a lot of back and forth to refine them to the point where both DARPA and the receiving party can agree everything makes sense. There are review meetings to attend to make sure existing contracts are proceeding properly. This is a very travel intensive position that requires a lot of organization and a comfort level with people always holding out their cup for money. You need to be able to sift through this and be able to say yes to some and no to others. None of this involves doing research yourself. Even though many program managers are researchers, they typically suspend this in order to do a public service and act as a DARPA program manager for a few years (its time-limited and you need to return back to the private sector afterward ... this is to keep things fresh and avoid forming relationships with companies that might bias future decisions). There are benefits to the program managers such as access to leading-edge research results which could help know where to direct ones own research in the future. Plus, the pleasure of helping to enable this research. However, these jobs are not for those who don't like administrative work and would miss the lab.
Ed Teller was kind of a dick. I met with him twice: once, after a public lecture, in the 1980s; and once, at a small dinner party, in the 1990s. His jingoistic zeal and fervor for the hydrogen bomb were pretty scary, even when he was an old man. He wanted to use hydrogen bombs to dig canals, build reservoirs, and generally remake the face of the Earth -- but both times I spoke with him, he telegraphed a creepy undertone of manifest destiny and the intoxicating political power that could come from powerful explosives.
Teller was a big reason (for me) not to join DARPA. Instead, when I got my Ph.D. (Applied Physics, Stanford University, 1995) I went to work first as a contractor at NASA/GSFC and then for a non-profit research institute. If I ever had any doubts about going to work for DARPA or joining the civil service, they have been washed away by the shenanigans pulled by the Bush administration.
Don't you people read the news? The constitution is as strong as ever. The judicial branch just did a smack down on the executive and legislative branches.
Whatever. The reason I wouldn't work with DARPA is because they fund a quarter at a time. You can hit all of your milestones, have a great project and still get your funding yanked out from under you. When your funding gets cut, they aren't gentle about it. At a DARPA conference in Hawaii, the colonel in charge announced after reviewing all of the projects that 90% of them were being cut. It was one of those moments where you are expecting 'duh-duh-duh' to be played.
Luckily my project wasn't one of those that was cut, but it was clear that DARPA had made a sea change and that the funding was going to dry up eventually. They are lavish in their spending. The conferences were always held somewhere swank. My wife loved it.
There is no such thing as a defensive weapon- all of them can be used offensively. Perhaps if in addition to making them I got to choose when and how they were used in all circumstances, I'd agree to do it. Since they won't be under my control after their creation, the odds of them being misused by my standards are nearly 100%. I won't contribute to that.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I'm surprised that the Slashdot crowd didn't say this earlier, but I am reluctant to work with ANY super-secret organization. With open-source software leading IT innovation, I want to build a reputation that the world can appreciate, and I want to be able to be able to take (a copy of) my work product with me when I go somewhere else !
I wouldn't want this for the US legal system for obvious reasons, but given the extingencies of war, allowing the US military access to industrialized nations' police force interrogation techniques seems reasonable.
And come on, if it were Clinton in Iraq now, and Clinton had listened to his generals, kept a tight reign on contractors, and not fucked up the occupation, would anyone really be complaining that the military was water boarding a half dozen assholes, and making some lesser assholes stand awkwardly for hours? Either one of those still sounds like a huge improvement over an Italian police "talk".
I, President of Guntenhimen University, do present to rtb61 on this the nineteenth day of June an honorary Doctorate for his exemplary work in promoting and producing Bullshit.
I am truely impressed.
Attack military industrial complex...check
Attack lobbyists...check
Attack corporations...check
Attack mass media...check
Attack comcast/cable co...possibly
Attack Microsoft...check
Direct mention of sheeple...sadly missing.
You're thinking small. Why miniaturize the laser, when we could instead enlarge the sharks? -John Searle
"Geniuses" they will find a better way to make money then working for the government.
Actually they have a worse problem -- people leaving the government sector for industry because of security requirements.
I also have friends who tell me that if they had it to do over again the would not get involved with defense.
Are you equating your self with the best and brightest?
TERMINATOR T12! eeeek! darpa is not always the best place for clever cogs to go work at. google, or slashdot sounds more fun :)
But the portrayal of academics as closeminded fools is pretty much what I'd expect from a crackpot — ahem, "scientific rebel", as per your Homepage — such as yourself, who rails against the "chickenshit voodoo" physics establishment.
He started out as a bench engineer, but he's always been a "big picture" kind of guy, so he liked getting into a position where he could survey the field and have input into where it would go in the future. World experts in technology came in to brief him on all kinds of exciting new developments. He got to go on training exercises with Special Operations forces to learn more about their needs, and loved the "field trips" — it's not always just sitting behind a desk. He also liked being in a position of giving out money to people, instead of having to ask for it from guys like him. I've been a low-level engineer in one of the military's RDT&E agencies (not DARPA), and everyone there who has ever had any technical skill complains of skill atrophy, boredom, and endless unproductive bureaucracy. DARPA doesn't have any low level engineers, and doesn't do any engineering work itself. It has program managers (grant officers), who review proposals and making funding decisions. It's completely different from an actual engineering agency.
And what does that prove?
That pretty much rules out defensive mode.
"I for instance, refuse to take any job that creates weapons"
The "standard" argumant against this is this: Let's say you worked in a day care center and I walked in one day and starting killing babies one after the other. You being anti-weapon would have no way to stop me. I'd just continue baby killing untill I ran out of badies then move on the the next day care center.
Next I get 50 other people and systematically rob and loot end-end retail stors and banks. We steal truck and just load them up with the goods. What would you do.
In many cases I say that weapon usage is morally required. Certainly in the bady killing scenario use of force is justified.
Unfortunately, when you do work for hire, you don't get to choose the employers' use of the gadget they paid for.
Not to mention the fact that most science, or rather information gleaned from science, can be used to make weapons or otherwise more effectively kill people. Perhaps most science is evil because scientists can't stipulate how the information can be used?
Simple example: Science tells us that the heart is in the upper left quadrant of the chest. This information can be used to guide an attacker to the most effective place to stab someone. Was that the anatomist's intention when he first opened up a human body to learn its parts? Probably not, but he doesn't get to choose. Therefore, anatomy is evil.
Perhaps the botanist, when he documented that a certain flower is poisonous to eat, never intended it to be formulated into a concentrated, potent poison, but there it is. Therefore, botany is evil.
Scientists, you're all working for the destruction of the human race!
Is that the logic? Or maybe science and technology really are neutral, and it's humans who are evil, corrupt beings who misuse tools and information?
Weapons are no different. In the hands of a nation that is typically defensive, their uses will be typically defensive, even if the particular battle situation is offensive. Yes, even if their primary purpose is to kill people. The question is: Which people, and why? Those are questions of politics, not technology.
You must also consider the deterrent effect of advanced weaponry. Why does no one openly attack the US? Because we've got a strong military. If we didn't, would we have had so few conflicts on US soil? Would Mexico or Canada (eh?) have invaded? As it is, no one dares because we have advanced weaponry.
All the would-be Einsteins are at Google, or some other private industry job. Private industry pays better than government up front, and is extremely enticing, especially when you are talking about Google's perks. I personally turned down a Defense Research position with CECOM/CERDEC to pursue a career in software engineering in first telecom, then the financial sector. The money is better, which is great when you are trying to get yourself started in life, and trying to pay down that mountain of debt accumulated over the years in college. There's also the idea that you can be safe in the knowledge that what you engineer isn't actively killing someone.
Aside from it all, who WOULDN'T want a beenbag chair in their cubical?
izm
A friend put it to me like this once after I expressed my interest in working on robots, "Do you ever think about just giving in and joining the Dark Side and going to work for DARPA...". I think that's pretty apt. If you're building the military's next generation of killer robots or data miners for finding dissidents or uav spies, you're not that far removed from one the engineers who worked on the death star. You know anyone from Aldaron, dickbag?
Beat my investment bank salary and I'm there.
We all had a little too much "fun" in college. And the current set of clearance policies don't agree with "fun".
As many of the comments on this thread show Gov't work is now (believed to be)synonymous with Military and Weapons work, and that wasn't always the case. In the heyday of the Space Race there were huge opportunities for non-weapons application development that only the Government was doing. The Government was on the cutting edge of nearly all Technologies. Now the Private Sector owns the leading edge of nearly all Non-military/weapon tech. The Einsteins of the nation just aren' going to work for the second best out of patriotism. This is one of the reasons the Gov't is throwing money back into Space Exploration, they are hoping hoping to revive some of the spirit of the Space Race, by giving the Up-and-Comers a Non-Military goal.
Common Sense isn't as Common as people think...
But you can choose your employer, and the projects you work on. Which is what I do, since controlling their use eternally is impossible.
True. But since I can't control the politics, I don't try. Instead, I choose not to create things that will be used as weapons. Yes, its possible for an unintended consequence of some invention/discovery to be used as a weapon, but I don't hold that against anyone. No one knows the future. Intent is what matters- if you make something that has the intent of killing, you're as guilty as the one who uses it to kill.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Simply look at the article about the effect of focusing so much energy on the low achieving students in our education system. The best and the brightest get left behind. http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/19/0333202 Of course this is not the only reason for Darpa's brain drain. I'd suggest increasing salaries, benefits, etc. Private companies are probably doing cooler stuff and paying more.
Agreed, there are situations where the use of force is justified. This does not equate to creating weapons, many of which (if not the majority of which) will be misused is justified. There's a difference between evaluating a situation and deciding that someone/something must be protected and force is required to do so, and between making a weapon which has no such evaluation mechanism and allowing it to be misused.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
There are plenty of answers. But the bottom line is simple: most of "the best and the brightest" simply do not want to work on technology designed to kill people. It really is that simple.
You cannot compare this to the Einstein era. In World War II, there was a reasonable belief that the Nazi regieme might actually be successful in their effort to take over the world. That level of desparation will get the best of us involved in things we might otherwise not support.
Despire the radical right's efforts to paint the activities of thousands of equally radical Islamists, as a similar threat... well, the best and the brightest among us are not that stupid. Duh. We are substantially smarter than the people using the fear of terrorism to maintain political power in the USA.
Personally, I was in the direct line of this kind of decision tree back in the early 80s. My first job out of college (CMU '83), I was hired at General Electric, lured in based on the prospect of working on tiny bits of the Space Shuttle.
In reality, it was all about Nuclear Weapons... specifically, GE then was dealing with the things ICBMs had to do on the way back to earth. It took me about two months (no security clearance yet) to really grok all they were doing, and a month or so to get the balls to quit a company after such a short time out of school (but I went on the work at Commodore computer, helping to deliver your Commodore 128, Amiga 2000, 3000, and 4000).
The people who make things, who really want to create something new, who have that vision and talent, will not waste their lives building the tools of death, unless our fundamental way of life is seriously threatened. So DARPA will have to subsist, basically, on the people who are rejected from other ventures, and the occasional Evil Genius.
-Dave Haynie
Why? Your statement is nothing but accusation based on hyperbole. It says and proves nothing.
I don't know about that. Take the most destructive weapon invented so far, the nuclear bomb.
Were the people who invented it evil? As it turns out, Germany wasn't too terribly far from inventing it themselves. Had we not made it first, what would have been the consequences? How many more people would have died when the German army used their own bomb and won the war?
Wars happen, and you want to be on the winning side of them when they do. When your country is ill-equipped to repel invaders, or can't adequately defend allies, all the feel-good "I don't like guns" rhetoric in the world isn't going to stop that army from steamrolling your house.
I'd love to work for DARPA, but I'm sure I'd get paid much more working for Boeing or Lockheed or some such contractor which actually develops many of DARPA's projects. The UCAV Raptor (the unmanned drone plane), the Apache helicopter, airborne 100kW lasers, most missiles, every F-series fighter jet, and almost all bombers were developed by either Boeing or Lockheed (the B in B-52 stands for Boeing.) Besides that, (most) sub-contractors aren't associated with the stigma of government-financed evil like DARPA is.
When I was in the navy, I worked in a highly technical field (nuc power program). Almost everyone who could get out did get out. Why? It was almost always money. You were paid better in the private sector. For the same reason, I had trouble going to military doctors. Why would any sane doctor stay in the military considering how much they could make in private practice?
Because we don't have civics classes.
I tried to join DARPA right out of college. I was rejected because they said I was 6 pounds too fat for military service. That's right, DARPA members are required to fulfill the same physical standards as the guys on the front lines. Good grades? Lots of recommendations? Eagle Scout? Degree in a relevant field? Multilingual? Doesn't matter, fatty. I think the big reason smart people aren't joining DARPA is because they know it's a dead-end career with lousy pay, acres of red tape, and nonsensical rules. If they're going to go through all that trouble, they want to be compensated for it.
I assume you mean weapons designed to be used on humans. There are plenty of uses for weapons which don't involve killing other humans.
There are also plenty of weapons that don't kill people as well. You might think of that the next time some small friend of yours finds it necessary to move through some quiet part of a large city alone.
A little pepper spray goes a long way.
My best friend wants to do some kind of public-support work, e.g., education. Ignoring factors of qualification and interest, we could assume that this DARPA work is roughly equivalent. What would dissuade her from working at DARPA?
Like the real estate mantra, I find that much of hte problem with federal government work is its location, location, location. Sure, public work has terrible pay, but if you can get it in a decently cheap region you don't have to care so much. But working for DARPA likely means having to live in ugly, crowded, expensive regions in or about Washington DC. Why is this, exactly? A good share of the technological development is going on in places like Sillicon Valley, Boston, and Austin. My favorite is Austin, as it has all the tech and none of the expense. I can live a nice life in a safe neighborhood with a tiny commute on 20-30k a year. The others are expensive, but there are more justifications to live in those places than "oh hey look the government's offices are here".
Even contractors in random places about America are bound to be in nicer, or at least cheaper, places. So if you're trying to solve the two-body problem, how likely is it that one partner can get a job that pays just as well as two people working for low government pay? And the limited selection of those jobs in and around DC... means practical considerations alone make DARPA work (along with a lot of federal work) unimpressive.
The same goes for all the other slices of government work that are having a hard time getting qualified applicants like, say, the patent office. Why do examiners need to be in DC? Again, a significant number of the applicants are going to be in the tech centers. Why are there not satellite offices on the west and gulf coasts?
We can have a nice little debate about how big the American government has become, but until The Revolution comes, could we at least have it behave in a relatively efficient manner? The concentration of offices in DC, to the exclusion of offices elsewhere, is idiotic.
The current president and his cronies have done everything they can to fight honest science; even if DARPA isn't necessarily going to be moderated by political appointees, my guess is that many won't bother to make the distinction. Why bother to work for the government as a scientist if your conclusions are going to be second-guessed or changed by your editor?
Perhaps folks are right and we need to make sure American soldiers have inferior weapons. I can imagine a more moral version of World War II where concentration camps weren't liberated because of an inferior Military Industrial Complex. Yeah, that'd be grand.
Might be as simple as the example that this Administration sets:
Under this Administration, government isn't the place for individuals who want to serve the American people and the nation. Applicants should remember that their purpose is to further the causes of Big Business and Big Oil, and any failure to remain "on message" will reflect poorly upon their chances for career advancement.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
I tried the CIA right out of college, and they wanted the best and brightest too (who doesn't?). I imagine that DARPA is similar. They want the best and brightest, but still pay civil servant wages (30-40% below the industry), and now have crappier benefits than private industry as well (double the copays, much worse coverage).
My hardware lab (last in HQ) got taken over for cube space, and my new location was now 20-30 miles from my main customer (ops folks), so they never came to see me anymore, and visa versa.
I left for private industry and in 12 months was making 50% more than as a public servant, and now just a few years later I've almost doubled my old gov't salary and live in a MUCH lower cost of living locale than the DC metro area. Much better people to live and work with too.
Ouch, that got me a surprising number of Einstein loving moderators trying to silence me. Thanks to the one brave soul who gave me an interesting. Hopefully the metamods will nail the trolls and flamebait.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
A Mr. Don Bright emailed me to ask if I really thought that Einstein would have worked for Darpa. My response is below:
Yes, I think Einstein would have worked for DARPA (if he was given the security clearance). Please note that Edward Teller (who was directly involved in the Manhattan Project) was also a friend of Einstein and was consulted by Einstein's team about the necessity and urgency to develop the nuclear bomb. Discover states "Despite helping to spur Roosevelt into action, Einstein never worked directly on the bomb project. J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI even back then, wrote a letter to General Sherman Miles, who initially organized the efforts, that described Einstein's pacifist activities and suggested that he was a security risk. In the end, Einstein played only a small role in the Manhattan Project. He was asked by Vannevar Bush, one of the project's scientific overseers, to help on a specific problem involving the separation of isotopes that shared chemical traits. Einstein was happy to comply. Drawing on his old expertise in osmosis and diffusion, he worked for two days on a process of gaseous diffusion in which uranium was converted into a gas and forced through filters." Taken from http://discovermagazine.com/2008/mar/18-chain-reaction-from-einstein-to-the-atomic-bomb/article_view?b_start:int=0&-C=
Note that the article says "Einstein was happy to comply" to work for the Govt/Military on this aspect of the project, and it could be implied that it was just because he was not given the necessary security clearance why he did not become more directly involved in the larger Manhattan Project.
Regards.
David W. White
--- On Fri, 6/20/08, don bright wrote:
From: don bright
Subject: Re: your question on slashdot
To: David W. White
Date: Friday, June 20, 2008, 12:42 PM
yes but would Einstein work for darpa? You did not ask "where are all
the Edward Tellers"
New theories must exceed old ones in their explanatory power. That should be self evident.
I dunno, where are all the "Wars supported by most of the country" to incite these Einsteins to action? Necessity is the mother of not only invention, but payroll-sacrificing, patriotic and government sponsored inventors.
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