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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?"
It's DARPA. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. They do research. They don't do spying. The spooks all work for CIA, DIA (that's Defense Intelligence Agency), and NSA. And probably a few organizations we don't know about. But DARPA just ain't one of them.
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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?
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.
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"maybe smart geeks are, well, not stupid, and don't want to get sent of to die in some other country?"
In what alternate universe does DARPA deploy?
OTOH, your troll post may just be proof-testing of the DARPA "exploding clue" project.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
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.
military --> civil servant --> private sector --> consultant
As for why you'd work as a civil servant... it's really hard to get fired?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
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.
Not only does DARPA not pay very well, compared to the private sector, the jobs are located in the Washington D.C. area. DC is expensive, the commute is hellish, the summers are hot and muggy and the area is very conservative. I spent 4 years working for the government in DC before I fled to California.
This is what most people here simply don't know about DoD/Gov't employment. The people who work for the gov't in that world aren't doing interesting technical work. They're managing projects at a high level, sifting through requirements, sitting in meetings, and setting up contracts.
Oh, and they've also taken lots of excruciatingly boring courses on understanding this process. (ok, DARPA gets an exemption from that, but everyone else doesn't)
Whenever you hear about a cool new DARPA/DoD project, its not the DARPA/DoD folks who are actually doing the cool work. Its non-gov't people working for some company the gov't has a contract with that actually have all the fun.
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
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.
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.
This is correct. The best and brightest US citizens are not US born, and not eligible to work for these groups. The first example I could think of off the top of my head is the story of the student who builds rail guns and laser guns for fun and for his doctorate, the DOD approached him with 2 jobs and then found out he was not a born US citizen.
Excerpted from his site, powerlabs.org:
From its conception, the original PowerLabs Linear Magnetic Accelerator ("Rail Gun", or "Railgun") was conceived for the primary goal of simply proving that it could be done; on a low budget, with common materials and powered by a never tried before electrolytic capacitor bank.
In that, it was extremely successful: Not only did the gun fire flawlessly over 30 times (it is not uncommon for research rail guns to break down in the first shot), but it also attracted vastly more attention than I could ever have hoped for:
After its page generated hundreds of thousands of hits, the gun was featured on Discovery Channel, TV6, numerous newspaper and magazine articles, and earned me several job offers from the private sector, research institutes, and industry. The highlight of the popularity of this project came in the form of two separate offers from laboratories associated with the department of defense (DoD), which, apparently can't hire me because I was not born in the USA (someone must have forgotten that the majority of the best scientists and engineers in the world weren't born here)...
---- Liquid was a patriot ----
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.
Read the DARPA wiki.
DARPA has been responsible for funding the development of many technologies which have had a major impact on the world The operative word is that they fund the development...DARPA has no research laboratories. They have no computational computer network. They are program managers. They are no more researchers than the PHB is a programmer. They are good at moving money around and have a great BS meter. The closest thing to research I have seen in SETA contractors working for a DARPA Program Manager. They do some background work, determine the state of the art, and potential for different research areas.
If that's not racism, I don't know what is
I'm gonna go ahead and say that discrimination based on, you know, race is a better example of "racism". Discrimination based on national origin is called "nationalism". Note the common root words in both cases.
Now nationalism might still be a bad time, and might even lead to racism if people of a particular nationality commonly share a race, (see the use of "Mexican" as a racial slur against all latinos regardless of national origin) but it is not racism in and of itself.
It is pretty well established that he did in fact invent them in 1945 - and although many people lament the fact that he never bothered to file for a patent - he would often retort that even if he had, the patent would have long expired before the first commercial geostationary communication satellite was launched (Intelsat 1). The first geostationary satellite of any type was the Syncom 2.