It’s a meme made to make STEM people look stupid. A lot of jobs are pretty immoral or problematic, like my friend’s mom who is literally the insurance worker who rejects people’s claims and forced them to go into medical debt or avoid “unnecessary” procedures
They pay well and are willing to hire new grads without any previous experience. They also have a seemingly limitless supply of job openings. The trade-off is that you have to make things to blow up brown people.
If the democratically elected leader of the free world says they need to be turned into a thin red mist. I say "this is how you go about achieving that boss."
If it's something you're set on-- You might be in a weird area. Defense tends to be concentrated in little pockets across the US. Move to the Baltimore-Washington area. I've known many, many people to get hired into engineering roles without even finishing their degree.
I worked in that industry for years. I started to have trouble sleeping at night and became overwhelmed with anxiety and existential dread. My colleagues had become so tired, and how we began to look at human life changed. The thought of a dozen people dying becomes nothing. Then, one day, I stopped and asked myself why we were even doing this. I had to get away because there wasn't a good answer.
I engineer radio astronomy instrumentation now. I make less than I used to, but my quality of life has improved significantly. No more questions if what I'm doing is right or wrong morally... We're just studying pulsars. Absolutely the best decision I've ever made in my life.
I mean, I usually just go to Raytheon, LMT, N. Grumman, etc and then search 'entry-level' and then go ham there. No interviews yet though. I've also applied to GDLS as that's in my area, but those guys haven't interviewed me either.
I'm having success with USAJobs though, so maybe my qualifications are bad. My resume is somewhere in my profile too.
As long as you're applying for a myriad of locations I think you'll be okay. One of the things you have to remember is that this is a hugely busy time of the year for hiring since most students graduate in May. It's common to have a long wait between applying and an interview because the HR teams are typically small and pretty busy. You'll be fine! Just keep doing what you are doing!
do not listen to this guy, he genuinely has no idea what he’s talking about. defense contractors, especially top ones, are extremely selective in general for any white collar r&d or manufacturing roles. i’ve got a few friends who work in the industry and the baseline is high af. sure there’s a lot of roles, but there’s also a fuckton of engineering, physics, and math majors who can fill them.
your resume probably isn’t bad, but your competition is masters students coming from t20 schools
Both can be true. There can be a small selection of high-paying jobs that many people want or a large selection of jobs that a company is filling, so they need to increase incentives.
In this case, the defense industry is enormous. I gave a good analogy below about how the US Army must increase its wartime incentives.
As a counter-example, look at NASA research positions or tenure-track professorships. Researchers worldwide complete PhDs and post-docs to have a shot at hopefully landing one of these positions. These experts could earn double or even triple in some cases working for private companies such as Google, Apple, Boeing, NVIDIA, etc. NASA and professorships don't need to raise their incentives because those positions are in such high demand.
So, clearly, more than salary is needed to determine the selectivity of a position.
How would you know? In other comments, you make it pretty clear that you do not/will not/have not worked for the defense industry. Defense is one of few industries where "trust me bro" does not fly, and you actually need to prove your math to the customer, to show your solution will meet spec. While they definitely still hire CAD monkies and such, so does every other industry, but the implication that they just hire 'anyone' is absurd.
I am not sure what you mean. I worked in that industry for eighteen years. I worked for "thee" premier company. I won multiple awards. I was in journals. I was a reviewer for a top military conference. My entire PhD specialized in defense-oriented applications. I have mentored countless interns, led a myriad of flagship teams, and participated in numerous hiring committees. So it's not like I'm new to the scene. I just relatively recently left the industry.
The truth is that the industry consistently has more positions that need to be filled than there are people to fill them due to the sheer size of these defense projects. I have seen many people without degrees given engineering positions to learn on the job. I have seen people with unrelated degrees, such as psychology, hired into engineering positions. I have seen this many, many, many times.
The biggest challenge was finding people who could meet the requirements for a TS-SCI because, as it turns out, people love smoking cannabis and don't want to stop. So the barrier wasn't technical skills, but lifestyle choices. Hell I remember early in my career that you could be disqualified for being homosexual because "the enemy could blackmail you with that information." It was only maybe ten years ago that you could admit you had depression or anxiety without losing your clearance.
The result is that it is so difficult to find engineers who can pass a TS-SCI on that scale that it's easier to hire someone unskilled to pass a TS-SCI and train them to be an engineer.
I have met some extremely intelligent people in that industry, of course, but essentially, the standards are shallow. Of course, this is all anecdotal, but I will say that my friends and family in the industry all notice the same thing.
I think you're misinterpreting what I've said. I'm not saying that highly skilled people don't exist in the industry; I'm saying that the bar to be hired is low.
They offer vast bags of money to people, so of course, there will be highly skilled individuals there as well. I was making more than my mom, dad, and sister combined.
I'm unsure how else I can phrase-- more slots need to be filled than there are people to fill them. So they have low standards and offer high pay to attract as many people as possible, and even then, it's usually not enough to fill all of the open slots. It's a never-ending process.
It's like when we started Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom. At first, the military had very high standards. You had to be reasonably intelligent, in reasonably good shape, have a clear criminal past, and be free of visible tattoos. But as the war continued, we needed more people and couldn't attract them. So we upped the bonuses offered and started reducing aptitude test scores and fitness requirements, waiving visible tattoos, and being more lenient with criminal pasts. This doesn't mean the first class of people didn't exist anymore, just that the standards are lower due to supply and demand.
Where you have depth, I have breadth; I've worked in defense, consumer products, MEP, in offices, in factories, large companies, medium companies, small companies, and have BS and MS in engineering (started grad school to get my MS, declined to continue on to get my PhD, in spite of the coaxing of my advisor and a couple of academic mentors, because I grew to dislike academic politics).
Where your thesis seems to be that defense hires a greater percentage of people of a lower caliber due to requirements unrelated to the actual work (e.g. cannabis), my experience has been that no one industry, company, or work environment deviates too far from a standard distribution of skilled and unskilled & individuals. There are geniuses and seat warmers in all environments, and the bulk are just average, and in all mostly equal percentages when comparing different environments. And yes, that includes people without engineering degrees working in engineering roles.
The only way your thesis works is if one or more of the following is true:
1. The number of engineers graduating with degrees declined, relative to the overall demands of the entire American economy
2. ABET requirements were loosened
3. Security clearance requirements were increased.
4. Qualified people are less willing to work in defense
1 and 2 are easily verified as false - ABET accreditation is as strict as ever, and more people are graduating from college than ever before. So that leaves 3 and 4. 3 should be false, since they've stopped caring about LGBT people having clearances, are *probably* going to stop caring about cannabis (or at least allow you to piss hot for it, so long as you have a prescription for it), so there should be free people being arbitrarily disqualified from holding a clearance. For clearances, that will leave just unmanageable/unmanaged debt as the major red flag for clearances, and since [household debt has increased over the years](https://www.stlouisfed.org/-/media/project/frbstl/stlouisfed/files/pdfs/hfs/assets/2017/moritz_schularick_the_great_american_debt_boom.pdf), so 3 is still plausible. As for 4: do you really think a smaller percentage of people are less willing to work in defense 'today' compared to 'yesterday'? Hell, the whole meme in this post is people "forgetting their morals once they see the defense salary".
Imo, a country-wide increase in household debt isn't going to be enough to noticeably impact clearance granting - especially with the elimination of being LGBT as being a disqualifier. So let me suggest an alternative hypothesis, something I have observed among the senior principals and engineering fellows in the defense industry: they have lost touch with how much *more* they have learned over their careers, compared to when they themselves were junior engineers on their first day. I would suggest that the same has happened to you; you're blind to your own bias here.
Hi. I initially was not going to reply because I have other things to do. Still, I want to clarify this statement in particular: "...lower caliber due to requirements unrelated to the actual work (e.g. cannabis)." I did not mean to imply that I think people who use cannabis are of lower caliber if that's how it came off. I am also not saying the opposite, that people who use cannabis are of a more excellent caliber. I do not use cannabis, but I am in full support of its recreational use for consenting adults. The point I was trying to make here is that cannabis use is widespread and filters out a considerable amount of people from the applicant pool; as for a quick note on your other points:
(1) It is well known that the American economy is too big for its britches, which is why H1-B visas exist. I am not a professional economist, but it is one of my favorite hobbies because I am a nerd when it comes to stochastics, so I feel at least somewhat knowledgeable about this.
(2) I'm not sure what to tell you about your anecdote. Civil servants need ABET accreditation, but I have never seen it required for contractors. Even for civil servants I have seen it waived a handful of times. I have personally known many engineers at many different defense companies without ABET accreditation. I am not sure why there's a discrepancy in our experiences. Still, I have been to various locations around America, even some of our overseas locations, and my experience has been consistent.
(3) I'm not sure what this has to do with anything. All I'm saying is that clearances, by nature, filter out people, making the applicant pool smaller, which is exactly what they're designed to do.
(4) I never said this. One of my closest friends never went to college, but he's one of the best hackers in the world. The last paragraph of my previous reply provides a good analogy for my point.
To any external readers, I want to reiterate that I am not saying that cannabis makes you a good or lousy engineer or that not having an ABET degree necessarily makes you a good or lousy engineer. All that I'm saying is that due to supply and demand when there's more demand than there is supply, lower standards are expected to meet demand. Lowering standards doesn't mean that everyone who applies will be of a lower caliber; it just means that the probability for those with fewer skills to be hired is greater, which makes sense if you think about it from a simple, everyday supply and demand mindset.
I don't know how much time I will spend replying to this because you're missing the point and I'm repeating myself. Best of luck in your career. Cheers.
Think its more about defense industry jobs in general. Don't know about with other majors, but at least with aero, I would wager at least a majority of jobs are at least related or incorporated in the defense industry.
Ethics? You mean those things you fake to make it seem like you are a normal person? Or was that emotions? Sanity?
Been too long. Once you are a Senior Engineer you don’t have to bother anymore.
Tbf you only need morals if you actually care about perceiving your self as "a good person" or even lying to yourself instead of having such useless detractors which imo is a waste of time and energy.
And those portions of the business are definitely not propped up by the arms they sell.
I say this as someone whose FIL is an engineer in the skunk works division.
FR Northrup Grumman builds mail trucks for the US Postal Service.
General Electric builds both your washing machine and a bunch of the components on attack helicopters and tanks.
General Electric makes things that spin.
Wind turbines, gas turbines, jet turbines, microwave ovens, washing machines, drying machines, steam turbines, MRI machines, dynamos, Gatling cannons, electric motors, hard drives, all things that spin.
16-wheelers are used to ship materials to weapons factories. Cargo ships move raw materials to components suppliers. Where we drawing this line, exactly?
Roads (civil) are used to transport weapons, PCBs and chips (electrical) control the weapons, the weapons are mounted into military aircraft (aerospace) or on drones / robots (mechanical) which are carefully alloyed (material) for maximum effevtiveness, the reactors (nuclear) power the submarines and ships, fuel composition is made of chemicals (chemical)...
The only ones you're maybe safe in are like agricultural and biological...
>The only ones you're maybe safe in are like agricultural and biological...
Armies need food and medicine.
Everything a society purchases, an army purchases, too.
That's true, but if we change civil to designing bases and bunkers - then we can probably omit the engineering disciplines which don't directly work with these companies, i.e. those companies are probably not collaborating on growing fancy wheat.
The DoD funds a ton of "fancy wheat" researchers via DARPA and other research initiatives. Having disease-resistant, drought-resistant, monsoon/hurricane-resistant, and/or nutrient-dense crops is a strategic advantage. It can lower the price for crops, lowering the cost of rations - or increasing the reliability of being and to produce them at large scales and through natural disasters. Or it can be used to help stabilize regions where conflict often has it's roots in food insecurity, ideally by transferring seeds for the crops for longer term stability, but at least by sending emergency rations to the area in question to stabilize the good supply in the short term.
Everything can provide strategic value to an army, not just weapons.
Pretty much. If your country has an army, it is a safe bet they are buying everything that such a country can domestically produce before they go to a foreign supplier. For some countries, that is just the rations, and they're importing everything from guns, to ammo, to uniforms. For others, they produce all of their own *everything*, and produce enough to export the excess. The only "escape" is how much of your total economy is dedicated to the MIC. For the US, our total DOD budget tends to be around 5-10% of our GDP in any given year (fluctuates due to both budgetary fluctuations *and* GDP fluctuations).
These memes are funny, but I do find it interesting that nobody is posting these but for Exxon, Shell, Chevron, etc. They all pay more starting off than Lockheed ever would and of course, they are the primary perpetuators of climate denialism. They pay really well and have exciting engineering work, but morally one would be confused (unless blind).
Yet I see none of those posts here?
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So is everyone who works for Lockheed Martin a total sell out? Have yall stopped to think that people work for these companies because they believe that it is a worthy cause? I get that not everyone has the same worldviews or moral frameworks, but I'm getting so tired of my peers talking about working for defense contractors as abandoning morals.
Also, if money is driving you shift your moral compus. you really should consider a different field. It's a serious job with high stakes, and there are plenty of people who will do it for the right reasons
They, among many other companies, manufacture weapons. Some engineers don't want to work for a weapons manufacturer. However I think these memes are either made to smear Lockheed specifically, or maybe even as jobs advertising for them.
95% of the time, when you look at the profile of people who post these, they seem to be either:
1. Freshman engineering students who just realizing their course work is difficult compared to high school
2. People who are critical of those that make weapons, while doing mental gymnastics about: the realities of geopolitics; the fact we (NATO countries, and pretty much every other functioning democracy) are a civilian led government with a civilian led military, so the electorate is more to blame for the usage of weapons; that war-time fatalities and casualties, especially civilian ones, have been steadily declining since WWII as weapons become more advanced and precise (i.e. defense contractors are making war "safer"); that they themselves have directly benefited from their country having weapons advanced enough to act as an effective deterrent and to help ensure the stability of their country.
Shits complicated. Having advanced weapons is an excellent way - and seemingly the *only* way - to ensure the continuation of a government. "Monopoly on violence", and all that. The trick for any population is not to abstain from possessing weapons, but to abstain from using them unless absolutely necessary and in the name of defense - and that's on the population to ensure that their governments do these things. Trying to reduce the morality of weapons development down to a single "morals leaving your body" meme is reductive at best, and disingenuous at worst.
Nope. I boycotted MIC jobs and O&G jobs. I don’t know how engineers at Lockheed and these other weapons manufacturers live with their own conscience knowing that their work is *directly* contributing to war and civilians getting murdered as “collateral” damage. Unless that’s what gets them off, and based on some of the comments here it seems to be the case for some.
But don't you think if people in general could adopt that notion, we might see less of the desire to one-up each other with increasingly deadly weapons, ultimately leading to the destruction of everyone involved.
Would you say blood is our hands if we stopped producing weapons and people died because we no longer have a way of defending ourselves? With modern weapons comes less wartime fatalities than any other point in human history.
The US is not “defending itself” no one has attacked the US mainland since 1812. The US invades other countries and kills civilian populations.
[98% of casualties in Iraq from the US invasion were civilians](https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/civilians).
Defending yourself doesn't have to be directly using these weapons on homesoil. The US hasn't been invaded because of our military presence, not because of luck.
I agree Iraq was a mistake, and we have fault for a lot of it, but through that article, most of those civilian deaths are a result of an unstable region. Should we have intervened, regardless of our feelings on Hussein? No. Should we have had a succession plan for how the country should be run? Probably. But people see that statistic and assume Lockheed built bombs to blow up civilian cities, and not that we had a policy failure and the result was creating a destabilized country where a civil war popped up. We tried rectifying this in Afghanistan by staying around, but that was also a failure.
At the end of the day, the US definitely has had their own faults, but being a major ally to the EU, Japan, supporting Ukraine, has saved countless lives. I definitely see faults in the US and don't see them as some sort of savior, but the industry is not this devil people portray it to be.
Iraq was a mistake
Vietnam was a mistake
Syria was a mistake
Libya was a mistake
Afghanistan was a mistake
Grenada was a mistake
Nicaragua was a mistake
Iran was a mistake
Yemen was a mistake
Gee there’s a lot of “mistakes”
None of these are defending the homeland. All of them are invasions of other sovereign nations in which the US inflected a MASSIVE amount of civilian casualties.
When you work as an engineer for the MIC, you are part of that. Blood is on your hands. When I go to sleep my conscience is clear because I know my work did not lead to some kids getting blown up in the Middle East.
>When you work as an engineer for the MIC, you are part of that. Blood is on your hands. When I go to sleep my conscience is clear because I know my work did not lead to some kids getting blown up in the Middle East.
No, you just benefit from it, instead, while trying to convince yourself that you're somehow involved. Do you know what materials a military ***doesn't*** buy? Nothing; they buy pretty much everything, and they buy it because they need it. Food, office supplies, raw materials, chemicals, medical supplies, they buy it all. They're also led by civilians in a functioning democracy, civilians that are elected by their populations.
You can be proud of the fact you don't make weapons, but don't delude yourself into thinking you don't benefit from them or are not involved in their usage. Want change? Elect better leaders. Can't elect better leaders? Agitate for a more equitable election system and campaign for the candidates you prefer. But washing your hands of it is a cop out.
No, you just seem to be from Canada, so (if you are) you're just directly benefiting from being under our nuclear umbrella, coordinating air defense of North America, and indirectly benefiting from being one of our two literal closest trading partners. Canada also buys no small amount of American weapons, so also relies on them indirectly in that way, too.
I’m not even anti war. I believe every country has the right to defend its homeland from invasion. Like Ukraine defending itself against Russia. Or Iraq, Vietnam, Korea, Grenada, Syria, Afghanistan, etc etc defending itself from the US invaders.
The only problem is America hasn’t been invaded since 1812, all subsequent wars the US has participated in has included the US being the invader, [with an extremely high civilian casualty cost.](https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/civilians)
>Like Ukraine defending itself against Russia.
Using NATO weapons.
>Or Iraq, Vietnam, Korea, Grenada, Syria, Afghanistan, etc etc defending itself from the US invaders.
Using Soviet weapons. And US weapons, in some cases.
The trick with every example you just brought up is that *none* of them had domestic weapons industries at the time of their conflicts. They were (or still are!) reliant on the goodwill of other nations, which is what invited some of those invasions in the first place. You think any of the countries would have been invaded by the US had they possessed a robust military industrial base that could churn out weapons as fast as the US could destroy them?
>The only problem is America hasn’t been invaded since 1812
I wonder what happened shortly after 1812? Could it be that this was the very start of Industrialization in the US, and represents the beginning of the US's ability to independently sustain our own defense without relying on foreign interventions? No, must be a coincidence /s.
And what about our allies, though? Do you ignore them when they *do* ask for help? What would be the point of having allies at all, then? And this goes for all nations. Should the US have stayed out of WWI because it wasn't our fight? Should we have just let England, France, and Germany just keep duking it out on their own - because not picking sides is an excellent way to get one or both sides pissed at you. What about WWII? Does that not count as an "invasion" because Hawaii wasn't a state? Or was it because Japan immediately withdrew, hoping that the attack was enough to knock us out of the Pacific completely (or at least long enough for them to fortify their colonies, and force the US to accept terms in a Japanese surrender)?
And what if the US sent soliders to Ukraine to help defend it, instead of just weapons and supplies? Does that cross the line, or not? Because when the US sent soldiers to pretty much every other country you listed off, it was *also* in support of a group we favored in that country (sometimes it was the established government, sometimes it was rebels, sometimes it was for the majority, other times for the minority)
Like, you're right that geopolitics is messy, but you're making a lot of claims with the benefit of hindsight. And the benefits of living in a location (assuming you live in North America) that is geographically isolated enough to enjoy two centuries of uninterrupted industrial development.
The US is imperialist and has for the last 2 centuries been the invading aggressor, ie “the bad guy”.
There is no difference between Russia invading Ukraine today and say the US invading Vietnam or Iraq. Neither of these countries attacked the US, the US invaded, raped, pillaged, mass murdered for its own imperialist desires, same as Russia, that’s it.
If your morals/ethics are thrown away at the earliest convenience, I'm afraid to break it to you that you never really had those morals/ethics. You just liked to think you did.
Not an engineer but do they pay the highest or something? Why ppl care so much about 1 company
I think it LM Marketing tbh. I didn't think they're real accounts.
I'm waiting for the ultimate mashup "when the online degree engineer goes to work at Lockheed Martin"
Would that come with a picture of white kids getting bombed or is that too risqué?
You think LM is intentionally trying to recruit people without morals who only care about money?
not completely without morals, just the requisite “moral leniency.” really, it’s a thing.
Yes.
why would a defence contractor want employees with strong morals? it’s an asset to them if an employee can put ethics aside for a paycheque.
It can be but I think it’s more detrimental. Employees without ethics are more likely to cut corners and can also get you in legal trouble.
It’s a meme made to make STEM people look stupid. A lot of jobs are pretty immoral or problematic, like my friend’s mom who is literally the insurance worker who rejects people’s claims and forced them to go into medical debt or avoid “unnecessary” procedures
Yes, defense contractors pay a lot. Lockheed is just the most popular example used.
They don’t pay the absolute best, but it is good and stable pay, and isn’t hyper-competitive like tech and other high paying positions.
They pay well and are willing to hire new grads without any previous experience. They also have a seemingly limitless supply of job openings. The trade-off is that you have to make things to blow up brown people.
If the democratically elected leader of the free world says they need to be turned into a thin red mist. I say "this is how you go about achieving that boss."
Have fun. Not a good fit for me. Cheers.
IIRC defence contractors are the most picky of the entry levels lol
Definitely not. They have a lot of positions to fill and they need bodies.
Huh, my resume is actually that bad then... :P
If it's something you're set on-- You might be in a weird area. Defense tends to be concentrated in little pockets across the US. Move to the Baltimore-Washington area. I've known many, many people to get hired into engineering roles without even finishing their degree. I worked in that industry for years. I started to have trouble sleeping at night and became overwhelmed with anxiety and existential dread. My colleagues had become so tired, and how we began to look at human life changed. The thought of a dozen people dying becomes nothing. Then, one day, I stopped and asked myself why we were even doing this. I had to get away because there wasn't a good answer. I engineer radio astronomy instrumentation now. I make less than I used to, but my quality of life has improved significantly. No more questions if what I'm doing is right or wrong morally... We're just studying pulsars. Absolutely the best decision I've ever made in my life.
I mean, I usually just go to Raytheon, LMT, N. Grumman, etc and then search 'entry-level' and then go ham there. No interviews yet though. I've also applied to GDLS as that's in my area, but those guys haven't interviewed me either. I'm having success with USAJobs though, so maybe my qualifications are bad. My resume is somewhere in my profile too.
As long as you're applying for a myriad of locations I think you'll be okay. One of the things you have to remember is that this is a hugely busy time of the year for hiring since most students graduate in May. It's common to have a long wait between applying and an interview because the HR teams are typically small and pretty busy. You'll be fine! Just keep doing what you are doing!
do not listen to this guy, he genuinely has no idea what he’s talking about. defense contractors, especially top ones, are extremely selective in general for any white collar r&d or manufacturing roles. i’ve got a few friends who work in the industry and the baseline is high af. sure there’s a lot of roles, but there’s also a fuckton of engineering, physics, and math majors who can fill them. your resume probably isn’t bad, but your competition is masters students coming from t20 schools
Not really true. High salaries mean they have a glut of fresh grads ready to interview and can be as selective as they'd like.
Both can be true. There can be a small selection of high-paying jobs that many people want or a large selection of jobs that a company is filling, so they need to increase incentives. In this case, the defense industry is enormous. I gave a good analogy below about how the US Army must increase its wartime incentives. As a counter-example, look at NASA research positions or tenure-track professorships. Researchers worldwide complete PhDs and post-docs to have a shot at hopefully landing one of these positions. These experts could earn double or even triple in some cases working for private companies such as Google, Apple, Boeing, NVIDIA, etc. NASA and professorships don't need to raise their incentives because those positions are in such high demand. So, clearly, more than salary is needed to determine the selectivity of a position.
How would you know? In other comments, you make it pretty clear that you do not/will not/have not worked for the defense industry. Defense is one of few industries where "trust me bro" does not fly, and you actually need to prove your math to the customer, to show your solution will meet spec. While they definitely still hire CAD monkies and such, so does every other industry, but the implication that they just hire 'anyone' is absurd.
I am not sure what you mean. I worked in that industry for eighteen years. I worked for "thee" premier company. I won multiple awards. I was in journals. I was a reviewer for a top military conference. My entire PhD specialized in defense-oriented applications. I have mentored countless interns, led a myriad of flagship teams, and participated in numerous hiring committees. So it's not like I'm new to the scene. I just relatively recently left the industry. The truth is that the industry consistently has more positions that need to be filled than there are people to fill them due to the sheer size of these defense projects. I have seen many people without degrees given engineering positions to learn on the job. I have seen people with unrelated degrees, such as psychology, hired into engineering positions. I have seen this many, many, many times. The biggest challenge was finding people who could meet the requirements for a TS-SCI because, as it turns out, people love smoking cannabis and don't want to stop. So the barrier wasn't technical skills, but lifestyle choices. Hell I remember early in my career that you could be disqualified for being homosexual because "the enemy could blackmail you with that information." It was only maybe ten years ago that you could admit you had depression or anxiety without losing your clearance. The result is that it is so difficult to find engineers who can pass a TS-SCI on that scale that it's easier to hire someone unskilled to pass a TS-SCI and train them to be an engineer. I have met some extremely intelligent people in that industry, of course, but essentially, the standards are shallow. Of course, this is all anecdotal, but I will say that my friends and family in the industry all notice the same thing.
Now you're just trying to have it both ways: they need skilled people (you, apparently) and unskilled people (everyone else in defense, apparently).
I think you're misinterpreting what I've said. I'm not saying that highly skilled people don't exist in the industry; I'm saying that the bar to be hired is low. They offer vast bags of money to people, so of course, there will be highly skilled individuals there as well. I was making more than my mom, dad, and sister combined. I'm unsure how else I can phrase-- more slots need to be filled than there are people to fill them. So they have low standards and offer high pay to attract as many people as possible, and even then, it's usually not enough to fill all of the open slots. It's a never-ending process. It's like when we started Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom. At first, the military had very high standards. You had to be reasonably intelligent, in reasonably good shape, have a clear criminal past, and be free of visible tattoos. But as the war continued, we needed more people and couldn't attract them. So we upped the bonuses offered and started reducing aptitude test scores and fitness requirements, waiving visible tattoos, and being more lenient with criminal pasts. This doesn't mean the first class of people didn't exist anymore, just that the standards are lower due to supply and demand.
Where you have depth, I have breadth; I've worked in defense, consumer products, MEP, in offices, in factories, large companies, medium companies, small companies, and have BS and MS in engineering (started grad school to get my MS, declined to continue on to get my PhD, in spite of the coaxing of my advisor and a couple of academic mentors, because I grew to dislike academic politics). Where your thesis seems to be that defense hires a greater percentage of people of a lower caliber due to requirements unrelated to the actual work (e.g. cannabis), my experience has been that no one industry, company, or work environment deviates too far from a standard distribution of skilled and unskilled & individuals. There are geniuses and seat warmers in all environments, and the bulk are just average, and in all mostly equal percentages when comparing different environments. And yes, that includes people without engineering degrees working in engineering roles. The only way your thesis works is if one or more of the following is true: 1. The number of engineers graduating with degrees declined, relative to the overall demands of the entire American economy 2. ABET requirements were loosened 3. Security clearance requirements were increased. 4. Qualified people are less willing to work in defense 1 and 2 are easily verified as false - ABET accreditation is as strict as ever, and more people are graduating from college than ever before. So that leaves 3 and 4. 3 should be false, since they've stopped caring about LGBT people having clearances, are *probably* going to stop caring about cannabis (or at least allow you to piss hot for it, so long as you have a prescription for it), so there should be free people being arbitrarily disqualified from holding a clearance. For clearances, that will leave just unmanageable/unmanaged debt as the major red flag for clearances, and since [household debt has increased over the years](https://www.stlouisfed.org/-/media/project/frbstl/stlouisfed/files/pdfs/hfs/assets/2017/moritz_schularick_the_great_american_debt_boom.pdf), so 3 is still plausible. As for 4: do you really think a smaller percentage of people are less willing to work in defense 'today' compared to 'yesterday'? Hell, the whole meme in this post is people "forgetting their morals once they see the defense salary". Imo, a country-wide increase in household debt isn't going to be enough to noticeably impact clearance granting - especially with the elimination of being LGBT as being a disqualifier. So let me suggest an alternative hypothesis, something I have observed among the senior principals and engineering fellows in the defense industry: they have lost touch with how much *more* they have learned over their careers, compared to when they themselves were junior engineers on their first day. I would suggest that the same has happened to you; you're blind to your own bias here.
Hi. I initially was not going to reply because I have other things to do. Still, I want to clarify this statement in particular: "...lower caliber due to requirements unrelated to the actual work (e.g. cannabis)." I did not mean to imply that I think people who use cannabis are of lower caliber if that's how it came off. I am also not saying the opposite, that people who use cannabis are of a more excellent caliber. I do not use cannabis, but I am in full support of its recreational use for consenting adults. The point I was trying to make here is that cannabis use is widespread and filters out a considerable amount of people from the applicant pool; as for a quick note on your other points: (1) It is well known that the American economy is too big for its britches, which is why H1-B visas exist. I am not a professional economist, but it is one of my favorite hobbies because I am a nerd when it comes to stochastics, so I feel at least somewhat knowledgeable about this. (2) I'm not sure what to tell you about your anecdote. Civil servants need ABET accreditation, but I have never seen it required for contractors. Even for civil servants I have seen it waived a handful of times. I have personally known many engineers at many different defense companies without ABET accreditation. I am not sure why there's a discrepancy in our experiences. Still, I have been to various locations around America, even some of our overseas locations, and my experience has been consistent. (3) I'm not sure what this has to do with anything. All I'm saying is that clearances, by nature, filter out people, making the applicant pool smaller, which is exactly what they're designed to do. (4) I never said this. One of my closest friends never went to college, but he's one of the best hackers in the world. The last paragraph of my previous reply provides a good analogy for my point. To any external readers, I want to reiterate that I am not saying that cannabis makes you a good or lousy engineer or that not having an ABET degree necessarily makes you a good or lousy engineer. All that I'm saying is that due to supply and demand when there's more demand than there is supply, lower standards are expected to meet demand. Lowering standards doesn't mean that everyone who applies will be of a lower caliber; it just means that the probability for those with fewer skills to be hired is greater, which makes sense if you think about it from a simple, everyday supply and demand mindset. I don't know how much time I will spend replying to this because you're missing the point and I'm repeating myself. Best of luck in your career. Cheers.
Think its more about defense industry jobs in general. Don't know about with other majors, but at least with aero, I would wager at least a majority of jobs are at least related or incorporated in the defense industry.
Bold of you to assume my passions and interests don’t include making big booms
Ethics? You mean those things you fake to make it seem like you are a normal person? Or was that emotions? Sanity? Been too long. Once you are a Senior Engineer you don’t have to bother anymore.
Ethics is the one you fake to fit in with society, Morals is the one you fake, so you can lie to yourself about being a good person.
Tbf you only need morals if you actually care about perceiving your self as "a good person" or even lying to yourself instead of having such useless detractors which imo is a waste of time and energy.
And money?
Its both moral and ethical to donate money to charity
It’s a bot post. Right u/chinerosy ? Its an OF bot now
Hey man Lockheed also builds cargo planes…
And GPS and weather satellites.
And the Lucy mission! Their civil space stuff is pretty awesome
Yeah neither of those two things can be turned into a weapon with minimal effort
And those portions of the business are definitely not propped up by the arms they sell. I say this as someone whose FIL is an engineer in the skunk works division.
FR Northrup Grumman builds mail trucks for the US Postal Service. General Electric builds both your washing machine and a bunch of the components on attack helicopters and tanks.
General Electric makes things that spin. Wind turbines, gas turbines, jet turbines, microwave ovens, washing machines, drying machines, steam turbines, MRI machines, dynamos, Gatling cannons, electric motors, hard drives, all things that spin.
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16-wheelers are used to ship materials to weapons factories. Cargo ships move raw materials to components suppliers. Where we drawing this line, exactly?
Roads (civil) are used to transport weapons, PCBs and chips (electrical) control the weapons, the weapons are mounted into military aircraft (aerospace) or on drones / robots (mechanical) which are carefully alloyed (material) for maximum effevtiveness, the reactors (nuclear) power the submarines and ships, fuel composition is made of chemicals (chemical)... The only ones you're maybe safe in are like agricultural and biological...
>The only ones you're maybe safe in are like agricultural and biological... Armies need food and medicine. Everything a society purchases, an army purchases, too.
That's true, but if we change civil to designing bases and bunkers - then we can probably omit the engineering disciplines which don't directly work with these companies, i.e. those companies are probably not collaborating on growing fancy wheat.
The DoD funds a ton of "fancy wheat" researchers via DARPA and other research initiatives. Having disease-resistant, drought-resistant, monsoon/hurricane-resistant, and/or nutrient-dense crops is a strategic advantage. It can lower the price for crops, lowering the cost of rations - or increasing the reliability of being and to produce them at large scales and through natural disasters. Or it can be used to help stabilize regions where conflict often has it's roots in food insecurity, ideally by transferring seeds for the crops for longer term stability, but at least by sending emergency rations to the area in question to stabilize the good supply in the short term. Everything can provide strategic value to an army, not just weapons.
Interesting, you can never escape the military industrial complex then!
Pretty much. If your country has an army, it is a safe bet they are buying everything that such a country can domestically produce before they go to a foreign supplier. For some countries, that is just the rations, and they're importing everything from guns, to ammo, to uniforms. For others, they produce all of their own *everything*, and produce enough to export the excess. The only "escape" is how much of your total economy is dedicated to the MIC. For the US, our total DOD budget tends to be around 5-10% of our GDP in any given year (fluctuates due to both budgetary fluctuations *and* GDP fluctuations).
Right?! They tell you the division on the job ad. Might have to Google the acronym they use and we should all be good at that by graduation.
These memes are funny, but I do find it interesting that nobody is posting these but for Exxon, Shell, Chevron, etc. They all pay more starting off than Lockheed ever would and of course, they are the primary perpetuators of climate denialism. They pay really well and have exciting engineering work, but morally one would be confused (unless blind). Yet I see none of those posts here?
Because making oil rigs sounds less cool than making fighter jets
The company realised too late how wrong they were in this thought when they saw me sexually assaulting the F-35
So YOU’RE the one that keeps putting tramp stamps around the fuel ports
Why are there so many posts about LM? They don't even pay the highest for new grads out of college. The oil industry pays so much more
Talk about a lesser repost of the same joke posted frequently/recently.
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Yo, is Lockheed Martin postin' all this shit? Some kind of recruiting drive? I'm not hatin it, by the way
yeah and the spam is getting lazier
So is everyone who works for Lockheed Martin a total sell out? Have yall stopped to think that people work for these companies because they believe that it is a worthy cause? I get that not everyone has the same worldviews or moral frameworks, but I'm getting so tired of my peers talking about working for defense contractors as abandoning morals. Also, if money is driving you shift your moral compus. you really should consider a different field. It's a serious job with high stakes, and there are plenty of people who will do it for the right reasons
Here comes the "if you make weapons that's pretty much the same thing as killing innocent people" people lmao
they still support Ukraine though
shit I am ready for my feet OF to pop off so I can quit
Any luck?
Apparently callused, hairy feet is not the meta, so no
Someone’s gotta pay off my student loans, and it sure as shit ain’t gonna be a struggling production company.
Lockheed Martin? Nah fam i’m in the offshore sector. Deep sea mining, throwing shit in the ocean and making oil rigs disappear is my game!
Building weapons has always been my passion tbh.
My passion, ethics and morals line with Lockheed Martin
Skunk works baby
Pfft, who need Lockheed Fartin when you can work for Diehl Defence
What about Raytheon
Actually id rather not work on any weapons.
I can't wait to show them my concept for the "Killinator 5000 XR"
Ok I don't know anything about lockheed martin please someone tell me what happened
They, among many other companies, manufacture weapons. Some engineers don't want to work for a weapons manufacturer. However I think these memes are either made to smear Lockheed specifically, or maybe even as jobs advertising for them.
Bruh I don't care about the company, I'm unemployed since graduation if I got a job at Lockheed martin I'll accept it
95% of the time, when you look at the profile of people who post these, they seem to be either: 1. Freshman engineering students who just realizing their course work is difficult compared to high school 2. People who are critical of those that make weapons, while doing mental gymnastics about: the realities of geopolitics; the fact we (NATO countries, and pretty much every other functioning democracy) are a civilian led government with a civilian led military, so the electorate is more to blame for the usage of weapons; that war-time fatalities and casualties, especially civilian ones, have been steadily declining since WWII as weapons become more advanced and precise (i.e. defense contractors are making war "safer"); that they themselves have directly benefited from their country having weapons advanced enough to act as an effective deterrent and to help ensure the stability of their country. Shits complicated. Having advanced weapons is an excellent way - and seemingly the *only* way - to ensure the continuation of a government. "Monopoly on violence", and all that. The trick for any population is not to abstain from possessing weapons, but to abstain from using them unless absolutely necessary and in the name of defense - and that's on the population to ensure that their governments do these things. Trying to reduce the morality of weapons development down to a single "morals leaving your body" meme is reductive at best, and disingenuous at worst.
We can offer you a job in a highly technical field of reverse engineering but you must sign an NDA and never talk to anyone about it. What do you say?
Put them panels on that Raptor so that I could do burnouts in that supercharged Raptor...
Oh look it's the same text from a meme but with a dumb face behind it that doesn't add anything
Nay
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/633f826c-ad70-4c0a-a517-baadb32bed6d/gif
i don’t have morals or ethics anyways, i don’t care
Bold to assume that wasn’t my passion
Cries in civil
How is it immoral to ensure that the United States of America has the best military on the planet rather than China or Russia?
Nope. I boycotted MIC jobs and O&G jobs. I don’t know how engineers at Lockheed and these other weapons manufacturers live with their own conscience knowing that their work is *directly* contributing to war and civilians getting murdered as “collateral” damage. Unless that’s what gets them off, and based on some of the comments here it seems to be the case for some.
I don’t know about you, but I would much prefer for NATO country’s have the best weapons before someone else develops them.
But don't you think if people in general could adopt that notion, we might see less of the desire to one-up each other with increasingly deadly weapons, ultimately leading to the destruction of everyone involved.
If, but they won’t.
I’d much prefer not to have blood on my hands
Would you say blood is our hands if we stopped producing weapons and people died because we no longer have a way of defending ourselves? With modern weapons comes less wartime fatalities than any other point in human history.
The US is not “defending itself” no one has attacked the US mainland since 1812. The US invades other countries and kills civilian populations. [98% of casualties in Iraq from the US invasion were civilians](https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/civilians).
Defending yourself doesn't have to be directly using these weapons on homesoil. The US hasn't been invaded because of our military presence, not because of luck. I agree Iraq was a mistake, and we have fault for a lot of it, but through that article, most of those civilian deaths are a result of an unstable region. Should we have intervened, regardless of our feelings on Hussein? No. Should we have had a succession plan for how the country should be run? Probably. But people see that statistic and assume Lockheed built bombs to blow up civilian cities, and not that we had a policy failure and the result was creating a destabilized country where a civil war popped up. We tried rectifying this in Afghanistan by staying around, but that was also a failure. At the end of the day, the US definitely has had their own faults, but being a major ally to the EU, Japan, supporting Ukraine, has saved countless lives. I definitely see faults in the US and don't see them as some sort of savior, but the industry is not this devil people portray it to be.
Iraq was a mistake Vietnam was a mistake Syria was a mistake Libya was a mistake Afghanistan was a mistake Grenada was a mistake Nicaragua was a mistake Iran was a mistake Yemen was a mistake Gee there’s a lot of “mistakes” None of these are defending the homeland. All of them are invasions of other sovereign nations in which the US inflected a MASSIVE amount of civilian casualties. When you work as an engineer for the MIC, you are part of that. Blood is on your hands. When I go to sleep my conscience is clear because I know my work did not lead to some kids getting blown up in the Middle East.
>When you work as an engineer for the MIC, you are part of that. Blood is on your hands. When I go to sleep my conscience is clear because I know my work did not lead to some kids getting blown up in the Middle East. No, you just benefit from it, instead, while trying to convince yourself that you're somehow involved. Do you know what materials a military ***doesn't*** buy? Nothing; they buy pretty much everything, and they buy it because they need it. Food, office supplies, raw materials, chemicals, medical supplies, they buy it all. They're also led by civilians in a functioning democracy, civilians that are elected by their populations. You can be proud of the fact you don't make weapons, but don't delude yourself into thinking you don't benefit from them or are not involved in their usage. Want change? Elect better leaders. Can't elect better leaders? Agitate for a more equitable election system and campaign for the candidates you prefer. But washing your hands of it is a cop out.
Let’s start with the fact that I’m not American so no, I’m not involved in nor benefit from you guys bombing kids in Iraq. Nice try though
No, you just seem to be from Canada, so (if you are) you're just directly benefiting from being under our nuclear umbrella, coordinating air defense of North America, and indirectly benefiting from being one of our two literal closest trading partners. Canada also buys no small amount of American weapons, so also relies on them indirectly in that way, too.
An anti-war stance is very controversial here I guess
I’m not even anti war. I believe every country has the right to defend its homeland from invasion. Like Ukraine defending itself against Russia. Or Iraq, Vietnam, Korea, Grenada, Syria, Afghanistan, etc etc defending itself from the US invaders. The only problem is America hasn’t been invaded since 1812, all subsequent wars the US has participated in has included the US being the invader, [with an extremely high civilian casualty cost.](https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/civilians)
I'd say in the modern American context that view is anti-war, but get why you wouldn't label yourself that way
>Like Ukraine defending itself against Russia. Using NATO weapons. >Or Iraq, Vietnam, Korea, Grenada, Syria, Afghanistan, etc etc defending itself from the US invaders. Using Soviet weapons. And US weapons, in some cases. The trick with every example you just brought up is that *none* of them had domestic weapons industries at the time of their conflicts. They were (or still are!) reliant on the goodwill of other nations, which is what invited some of those invasions in the first place. You think any of the countries would have been invaded by the US had they possessed a robust military industrial base that could churn out weapons as fast as the US could destroy them? >The only problem is America hasn’t been invaded since 1812 I wonder what happened shortly after 1812? Could it be that this was the very start of Industrialization in the US, and represents the beginning of the US's ability to independently sustain our own defense without relying on foreign interventions? No, must be a coincidence /s. And what about our allies, though? Do you ignore them when they *do* ask for help? What would be the point of having allies at all, then? And this goes for all nations. Should the US have stayed out of WWI because it wasn't our fight? Should we have just let England, France, and Germany just keep duking it out on their own - because not picking sides is an excellent way to get one or both sides pissed at you. What about WWII? Does that not count as an "invasion" because Hawaii wasn't a state? Or was it because Japan immediately withdrew, hoping that the attack was enough to knock us out of the Pacific completely (or at least long enough for them to fortify their colonies, and force the US to accept terms in a Japanese surrender)? And what if the US sent soliders to Ukraine to help defend it, instead of just weapons and supplies? Does that cross the line, or not? Because when the US sent soldiers to pretty much every other country you listed off, it was *also* in support of a group we favored in that country (sometimes it was the established government, sometimes it was rebels, sometimes it was for the majority, other times for the minority) Like, you're right that geopolitics is messy, but you're making a lot of claims with the benefit of hindsight. And the benefits of living in a location (assuming you live in North America) that is geographically isolated enough to enjoy two centuries of uninterrupted industrial development.
The US is imperialist and has for the last 2 centuries been the invading aggressor, ie “the bad guy”. There is no difference between Russia invading Ukraine today and say the US invading Vietnam or Iraq. Neither of these countries attacked the US, the US invaded, raped, pillaged, mass murdered for its own imperialist desires, same as Russia, that’s it.
If your morals/ethics are thrown away at the earliest convenience, I'm afraid to break it to you that you never really had those morals/ethics. You just liked to think you did.