[_huayra_]

Does anyone work (or worked in the past) for a defense contracting company? I'm curious what the environment is like (e.g. is it a pressure cooker using ancient coding standards where everything requires a bunch of people with shiny metal on their work uniform to approve?).

I worked for a startup where DARPA had given a fairly generous grant when I started my career (they made a medical training device that the military was interested in). I was jr, so I wasn't privy to the financial details of things, but overall it was very "waterfall-y" and a lot of form filling and box checking. WLB was overall pretty fair, but the key thing is that processes really hamstrung everyone (think MISRA style of coding standards) and morale was rather low. Pay wasn't great either so I left.

I just wonder now that I am more senior and have more financial responsibilities, is defense a financially safe space in case more tech keeps RIFing, even if overall comp levels are low.

[b_mc2]

I work as a data engineer for a Defense company. It's not always stable but depends on the contract you can get on, some have a pretty broad scope and arent going anywhere, others are small projects with less stable funding.

Most of what I work with is Databricks, Python, Pyspark, etc. So most coding is done in notebooks. I haven't felt that there was a lot of restrictions coding wise, but getting access to different databases, clusters, and especially on boarding can be a pain.

Environment wise its been pretty good, you find even the clients are often contractors themselves, but if you dislike them you can always roll off and onto another project, it seems everyone needs more devs