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by terminalshort 243 days ago
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.
2 comments
rtpg 243 days ago
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).

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austin-cheney 243 days ago
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.

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terminalshort 242 days ago
> 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.

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