[vonmoltke]

> iterative process horrors (Rational Unified Process anyone?)

I lived in that world on a DoD program for 3 years. I still have nightmares.

We also had a customer who didn't want to "pay for the same code twice". That meant signal processing algorithm research had to be done in the operational real-time code, and that we could have one and only one codebase (including branches but not including engineer/scientist working copies). The "experts" from Mitre and elsewhere who were managing us were so clueless they didn't realize this was costing them more and adding more risk than allowing the scientists to do their algorithm development in Matlab and Fortran, then have the engineers turn the algorithms into an operational system. Of course, we still had to have requirements and design documentation up-front before we could implement code, so...

[raverbashing]

This is one of the reasons if I see anything "rational" about a job post I ignore it

[vonmoltke]

Wise policy. I keep getting tempted by that dark world, though. The subject matter I was working on was awesome (real-time radar signal processing) and I had a great 60/40 balance of EE/CS knowledge focus. I can't find any jobs like that out in the real world, though. Everyone out there seems to want either a CS expert or an EE expert, not a hybrid.

[raverbashing]

You may try some embedded devices work, there's a nice mixture of EE (for when things don't work, usually) and CS

It may be related to the dark world as well, but it seems to be waning.