Hope you're prepared to swallow; I can think of several dozen young engineers across 5 states (California, Indiana, Florida, North Carolina, and New Jersey) with VAX/OpenVMS domain expertise, myself included. Legacy systems with 30-year lifecycles are a thing...they're just not what most of commercial industry is accustomed to supporting. If you think LM would have an issue filling this position internally (for the right price), you'd be mistaken.
So a couple of the comments here have been mentioning the high pay of people with specialties like this in the context of LM and other defense contractors. My impression from Glassdoor and general conversation with software developers has been the DCs pay pretty low for software in general compared to FAANG or even other engineering companies. Is it true that people with obscure specialties at places like LM can command high salaries? Or have I been misled that LM pay is on the lower side? Or is it all relative?
I don’t work in the space or DC, but have worked with people who are in this industry. It’s a career job usually, and many of these folks work in out of the way places. If you’re pulling down $120k in some suburb of Omaha, you’re doing very well.
The career path and security is important as well. A FAANG won’t hire a 45 year old technical SME.
There’s also an academic/industry connection. You may wear multiple hats if you're affiliated with the university, a lab, or a company. I met at least one person who was a professor at a major school, did work at a sponsored lab or think tank (ie. MITRE, RAND Corp, etc), and did some work over a sabbatical for a big name-brand defense contractor.
I'm 46, and my first real job was as a computer operator (sysadmin-lite) for VAX/VMS systems back in 1991. At the time, VAX/VMS systems were computing powerhouses. In comparison, almost all Unix-based systems outside of AT&T were toys or performed light computing work (even DEC's own VAX/Ultrix). VAX systems were still high-end mainframe computers well into the 90s. VMS had some great features back then which Unix only adopted later.
Similar story - I'm 53 and was a VAX/VMS sysadmin during my apprenticeship years working for a flight simulator company in the UK; that would be around 1984. I miss my 11/750.
I'm 56, and my first job out of college was at General Dynamics Fort Worth Division, which is now part of Lockheed Martin. I did not work on the F-22, aka Advanced Tactical Fighter, but I did work on avionics software for the A-12, aka Advanced Tactical Aircraft, which got cancelled by Dick Cheney in January 1990. I had some contact with ATF engineers because at that time (I can't speak for later), ATF and ATA both used IBM's Common Module computing hardware and the Ada '83 language. We used MicroVAX workstations for our Ada compiler as well as our CASE (Computer-Aided Software Engineering) and documentation software. I was not on the program when the software tools decisions were made. I do know that other programs at General Dynamics used Apollo and Sun workstations, which were Unix based. I can only assume that either someone thought the VAX environment was better, or DEC made them an offer they could not refuse. I was a Unix fan at the time and would have preferred Sun, but the VAX was not a bad system.
Cheney has plenty else to rot in hell for, but canceling A-12 has to count more per unit victim.
But Apollos at the time would not have been running Unix. They had Aegis, which was much better. In some ways. (It took inspiration from Multics.) Some excellent features of Aegis have still not been mainstreamed. But Dragonfly BSD finally got variable expansion in symbolic links! Sort-of.
Or very much not admitting to it ever. Like their Cobol experience. cough
(I write Pascal for an obsolete VAX11/780 in around 1985... I wrote COBOL in a WANG VS in the mid 1990s. No _way_ am I ever gonna let recruiters or employers know any of that...)
Well, I'm forty and sadly not yet able to retire and spent some considerable time working on VMS clusters. I even run one at home for fun, very civilised operating system.
I also have VAX experience, but definitely not in recent decades, and I am neither extinct nor retired.
Still look back at how some aspects of VAX/VMS were so much better than what followed. Aware that Windows NT was written by Dave Cutler as a (poor) clone of VMS.
Also looked up some stuff about running VMS cluster nodes on a Raspberry PI setup, interesting view of how things were.
Not remotely, assuming you mean VMS and not VAX (ie vs. Alpha).
Lots of places were using them into the 20th century, so folks with VMS experience don't even need to be especially old. I have a friend here in Houston who works at $BigNameOilCorp, and they had VMS in production until 2005 or 2006.