Slashdot Mirror
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.
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?
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 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.
Yeah because DARPA is a part of the infrantry.
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!!!
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]
You think you are intelligent. (Everybody does)
You think that people that agree with you are also intelligent. (Everybody does) That's pretty much the underpinning for every Internet flame war ever.
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 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;
That's too bad because an anti-Turing revolution is precisely what is going to happen to computer science. The time is ripe for a revolution.
Science welcomes such things, if in fact they pan out. And yes, they can suffer from opposition at first, but in the end results are what count, and starting a revolution is a good way to get your name in the history books. That's why we know the name Einstein, because overturned what you would call "orthodoxy", but I'd call a result that had survived any practical experimentation for centuries.
Turing is basically the same as Newton in this situation. If you can disprove his theorems, or build a machine that operates under less restrictive assumptions, then get to it and make a name for yourself. The closest we've come even in theory is the quantum computer, which differs from Turing's machine in only some ways, not all. Practically there's been tremendous progress but it's still in it's infancy. This could be the very revolution you're saying is needed but not happening, even though it is happening as fast as the people working on it can do it, because it means their names may be remembered just like Turing's is.
Saying science is like a religion, where nobody dares challenge the "orthodoxy", and there's a disincentive to upturning conventional thought, is freaking ludicrous claim in light of the facts.
The enemies of Democracy are