[kortex]

I worked for a few years for a contractor and we did several DARPA projects.

Pros: work on really exciting stuff. I worked on cutting edge squad-embedded robotics platforms and media forensics to fight fake news. Got to travel a bit for demos. It's very rewarding to know your work is making a real impact.

Cons: they don't call it DARPA-hard for nothing. Timelines are tight, the problems are research heavy with no guaranteed results. I did a lot of work bridging grad student quality code to production systems, which is its own kind of hell.