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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?"
I assume they're worried that they'll be the tragic victims of mysterious heart attacks.
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.
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.
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.
My blog
... "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"?
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
We are all getting paid much better in the private sector.
Playing along with the "other country" theme, if you step into a graduate engineering department, you're likely to find a majority of non U.S. citizens comprising the graduate student workforce. These people are also ineligible for most U.S. Govt. fellowships and jobs that require a decent level of security clearance. Thus, DARPA might be having a tough time recruiting top-notch talent because most of the talent is ineligible to work for DARPA.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
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.
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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.
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?
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
"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."
Yeah because DARPA is a part of the infrantry.
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.
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.
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,
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.
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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 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.
This person will be a valuable member to your team, they will do anything, ANYTHING, to get the job done
Sincerely, Unnamed Government Agency.
-I only code in BASIC.-
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.
Along about the time my brother was getting his MS degree, he was recruited by the CIA for 'junior specialist in 'xxxxxx'
Our dad (wwii pilot) talked him out of it, saying "well...you can be the absolute best in that field, but you'll never be able to tell anyone about it."
It is possible that DARPA will grow and prosper under Obama. After all, he wants to increase military spending, increase the size of the military by up to 80,000 troops and send even more cannon fodder to Afghanistan. Possibly to Iran as well. Maybe he'll decide to increase funding for DARPA too. After all, regardless of what their PR department claims, the purpose of DARPA is to help the US military. Destroying countries and killing people is what the military does best.
Frankly, I think most people give Obama too much credit. He's a hawk and he's pro-empire. Electing him isn't going to change anything except the rhetoric used to justify the US's imperial ambitions.
This government doesn't have a good name for honesty. Or trustworthiness. Or consideration. Or not cutting your benefits after they have you signed up. Or...
Turn it around. Why *expletive* would anyone want to work for it? Including DARPA.
Ignorance is the prime reason that I can think of. Tunnel vision & short sightedness comes a close second. But those aren't characteristics of the "best and the brightest".
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
"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.
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.
Actually, they don't do research. They organize and fund research, but DARPA itself does little to no research as an organization. In fact, they must be pretty desperate for people as they only directly employ about 200 people (According to Wikipedia some even call the agency "100 geniuses connected by a travel agent").
Personally, I have no problem with things which kill people. I own several guns, and would happily use them on people who would do me harm. If we had a country and a government where we acted morally and fairly in this world, didn't get needlessly involved in foreign affairs or start wars of aggression, and only used our killing technologies to protect ourselves from actual, valid threats, I wouldn't feel bad about helping to make those technologies. But the way this government behaves, I don't want to help it in any way. And with the way the stupid voters in this country keep voting for these buffoons, I don't have any hope that future administrations will be any better. So while I wouldn't mind, for instance, making guns to be sold to Citizens who pass a proper background check (hypothetically, since I'm a software engineer), I wouldn't want to make guns to be sold to the government.
If you don't see the difference between his platform and mccain, you need some serious readjustment of perspective.
I'm not saying the man is infallible, and frankly that's the reason why I like him as a candidate.
He's OLD SCHOOL washington, the kind that consult experts and demand substance.
He represents the possibility of yanking the US government out of wacky-land and back into sanity, where further progressive efforts will at least be examined on merit.
Of course, my congressional votes will go republican to help prevent another unified government.
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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.
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 ----
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.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
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.
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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.
The NSA and the CIA both routinely recruit grad students in certain sciences (and also linguistics majors.) What's interesting is how laughably 'normal' and open the whole process is for general employment. As for "not being able to tell anyone", that's just ridiculous, somebody is making excuses. It's a bit of a grandiose delusion to expect that you're going to be some kind of spy, because the CIA or the NSA recruits you for an IT or engineering career... Do people think the FBI is like the X-Files too?
Why is a (loooooong retired) WWII pilot any kind of authority on this? That also comes from an ignorant, delusional point of view.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Even if you're a US citizen it's a PITA to get a serious clearance, which is why if you have one you can usually get some very good pay out of it.
~X~
~X~
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?
that an administration that aggressively fights and denounces science would suppress scientists' interest in public service?
National Intelligence Estimate: Iran does not have a functioning nuclear weapons program.
Bush: Iran is developing nuclear weapons, we must bomb them!
McCain: What he said.
Obama: Iran is developing nuclear weapons, so let's try some sanctions first and if that fails, bomb them!
People of Iran: WTF? Is there any candidate that doesn't want kill us and justify it with another lie?
The differences between Obama and McCain are more about style than substance. They both support using the US's military unilaterally as they see fit. Obama has said this many times. If you believe that Obama isn't going to do whatever he can to maintain and extend the US's hegemony then you are the one who needs some serious readjustment.
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.
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.
It's not that I want to get paid better. I actually care almost nothing about that.
I just won't make weapons. And sorry AC, no salary would make me change my mind.
Please, flame on all, and tell me how many useful technologies are spun off from DARPA research everyday. And, come to think of it, how many weapons are created out of 'off-label' uses of otherwise innocuous. I guess, for me, it's principle.
I wonder if studies exist of correlations between higher education and pacifism...
[/sarcasm]
I'd like to work for DARPA. problem is I am an immigrant and they require US citizenship
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.
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.
You just got troll'd!
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.
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.
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.
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.
You would think so but not everyone gets the big bucks just because they have a clearance. In the environment I work in it depends on which contractor you work for and which contract you are on too which can dictate whether you get mid-level or senior pay.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
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.
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.
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. Actually it's not even that. I'm not a US citizen and hence I don't have a right to be in the US. The US isn't being racist if it decides not to let me in. Just like China or Japan, or Chad wouldn't be racist in deciding not to let me in. I'm not from those countries and so I don't have a right to go to them.
If a US employer decides to hire someone from the US instead of me, that's also not racist. Maybe they want to avoid all the paperwork and expense of getting me a work permit. Or maybe they want to hire someone that can come in for an interview on short notice. No one would say that a California company was being regionalist in deciding to hire a local rather than someone from New York.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
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.
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
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
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.
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.
I am a programmer who on the job had the task of looking at DARPA's wish list for new projects with the consideration of bidding. I and several others in the company declined to bid because the requested projects were targeted at removing the freedom, privacy and civil rights of our fellow citizens. These projects included looking into how to intercept 100% of all E communications and all Phone and other similar communications. These projects included developing methodologies to evaluate human brains for what they were thinking. I am not against DARPA but so long as major goals are like these, no engineer with morals will want anywhere near the agency.
Never Politically Correct ~ I prefer the facts If you don't like what I say, get a life, or comment yourself.
It's silly to claim the best scientists and engineers either were or were not born here. What this guy is reacting to is pretty clearly the fairly obvious thing: many of the best scientists in the world came here to do their works. They got the high profile exposure; the peak was certainly around WWII, when we had an influx of German scientists coming over en masse.
So sure, not every scientist or engineer in this country is "world class"... but most imports... yeah, they are, pretty much by definiton. They come here to work, in a free environment, with native-grown examples cut from the same cloth.
And I think, given the more recent state of governmental support, this flux of great engineers and scientists is waning. As an engineer(I'm not claiming the "great" title), I want to get my work done. If I have a great idea that won't play at my current employer, I'll move to someone who would embrace it... no problem. Under the right circumstances, same goes with the country... a regieme restricting free thought could make plenty of projects fail.
And sadly, we've been under just such a regieme these last 7+ years... politics should NEVER have veto power over science, and yet, the Bush Administration has routinely had political drioids editing scientific papers. So there's at least some validity to the claim that we simply GAVE UP our former crown as "the world's center of technology".
-Dave Haynie