[austin-cheney]

> If DoDEA demonstrates sustained K-12 excellence, the military’s technical training programs showcase something even more striking: the ability to take 18-year-old high school graduates and transform them into operators of extraordinarily complex systems, safely and at scale.

What I found most striking is that last word: scale. Most people employed to write software cannot write original applications of any size. They certainly cannot thus scale solutions forward if they cannot author solutions in the first place. This is supremely costly for these profit oriented companies. The military on the other hand must scale because while they do not have profits or revenue margins to chase they do have budget constraints. The result is an organization that can do more with less.

[terminalshort]

The military training programs have exactly one goal and that is to train. They have the ability to set their standards and enforce them ruthlessly. Public schools have many goals besides education, have to keep their students (and more importantly the parents of those students) happy, and have no ability to select their students and very little ability to fail them out and remove them, and can be sued for anything at any time. It's pretty clear why military training is superior.

As for software, I have never heard the military or government accused of being good at building it, so I don't really see your point there.

[rtpg]

Do military K-12 schools not face similar dynamics? It's not like the kids are who are in the military, right?

Obviously there are still different dynamics between an arbitrary public school and a school on a military base in Kanagawa for many reasons, but I have to imagine that there are similar diversity of goals and lack of "throwing out" the kids in these schools.

Just seems like the flavor of challenges that public schools face and k-12 mil schools face are a bit similar, except for a huge one: the kids in the mil schools are much more likely to have three square meals a day(etc etc).

[austin-cheney]

The Army software developer is 170D and supposedly they are vastly superior at training developers. There are only two factors to this: better selection of students/candidates and excellent training formulation.

My experience in corporate software is the opposite where it’s all about hiring/firing for the lowest common denominator. It’s not about being good. It’s about speed and not training.

[terminalshort]

> supposedly they are vastly superior at training developers

Based on what sources and using what metrics? And vastly superior to what alternative? If you're saying better than schools, I wouldn't be surprised. But I would be surprised if it's better than the experience you would get as a junior at a major tech company, and shocked if it was better than experience at a small startup.

[thaumasiotes]

I don't think you're looking at this the right way.

I would say that the training programs illustrate that the military generally treats its workforce as the result of external factors. Someone else decides who will be in the military, and the military has to figure out what to do with them.

Companies usually see things very differently. They feel free to say that they won't train because they want to hire someone who's already trained. If that approach doesn't work well, they can put even more effort into searching for The Ideal Employee and taking advantage of the fact that, if you ignore the time you spent searching for him, his time-to-become-productive is so low.

[hshdhdhehd]

Everyone has budge constraints. I think this is a bit unfair to SWE. Of course sometimes you ship bad performance code quick and pay extra cloud bills to chase extra revenue sooner.