[metaphor]

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.

[dvdbloc]

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?

[Spooky23]

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.