[closeparen]

Silicon Valley tends to have degrees of employee autonomy, encouragement to be curious and ask questions / make suggestions outside your "lane," flexible and high quality workstations and tools, most code and documentation open to most employees, tons of foreigners. From what I understand, defense is lily white, extremely locked down and compartmentalized, you spend months wrestling with a bureaucracy to for access to basic tools and libraries, and not only do you not get to question the big picture, you might not even be read in on what it is. Given these differences, could anyone (other than maybe Apple) actually shift into defense contracting without utterly remaking their employee pool, tooling, and culture? In what sense is it even "Silicon Valley" anymore if you throw away those things?

[kube-system]

There are a ton of nonwhite people in the defense sector. Just as there are a ton of non-white US citizens.

[philwelch]

To the types of people who use terms like “lily white” in a derogatory sense, the non-white US citizens who work in the defense sector don’t really count as non-white. I think the term is “multiracial whiteness”.

[closeparen]

Silicon Valley is a globalization phenomenon. US defense R&D is not. Both of those things seem fine to me, it just limits the potential crossover.

[iancmceachern]

I know tons of people who do this regularly. Anyone who designs complex electromechanical stuff does. Robotics, etc. The wall between medical, semiconductor/automation and aerospace hardware design is non-existant, people can walk back and forth.