What do you do?

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Jackie Treehorn

<Gold Donor>
2,759
6,372
Just speaking of defense contractors, my cousin’s husband works for Harris in Melbourne, he says it’s hideous. Horribly low employee morale. Lots of awful stories on Glassdoor I saw.
 

Vinen

God is dead
2,782
486
Just speaking of defense contractors, my cousin’s husband works for Harris in Melbourne, he says it’s hideous. Horribly low employee morale. Lots of awful stories on Glassdoor I saw.

Defense Contractors are all about mediocracy enforced by process.

I worked at one for 2 years as a Software Developer. Never again... never again...
Apparently LOC (Lines of Code) was a metric used by the government to validate the companies productivity.
 
  • 2Worf
Reactions: 1 users

Crone

Bronze Baronet of the Realm
9,690
3,201
It's been a while...

Where do you work? Patient monitoring/Healthcare side of a global company.

What do you do? (Title/keywords) Field Service Engineer 2. Follow sales team around and install, upgrade, or sometimes repair patient monitoring equipment in hospitals.

What field/industry? Healthcare

Wages? $80k base, but with overtime should hit low 6 figs.

Bonuses/SEP? Yearly bonus, which this year was like 1% or something.

Benefits? All the basic heath, dental, vision, with a 6% 401(k) match.

I'm in the Northwest region which covers WA, OR, MT, ID, WY, AND AK and so the jobs I'm on are never local hence I'm in a hotel all the time. Been doing it a little over a year and pretty sick of the travel. About a year away from getting my first bachelor's in cyber security and will see where that can take me.
 

ZyyzYzzy

RIP USA
<Banned>
25,295
48,789
Just speaking of defense contractors, my cousin’s husband works for Harris in Melbourne, he says it’s hideous. Horribly low employee morale. Lots of awful stories on Glassdoor I saw.
Uh if I recall Harris no longer exists, got bought up by Peraton or something. Or a good portion did at least
 

Jackie Treehorn

<Gold Donor>
2,759
6,372
Uh if I recall Harris no longer exists, got bought up by Peraton or something. Or a good portion did at least

Apparently that’s only one segment of the company. My cousins husband works in some kind of military communications engineering. Still Harris. He’s an electrical engineer not a programmer / in software.
 

Jackie Treehorn

<Gold Donor>
2,759
6,372
Defense Contractors are all about mediocracy enforced by process.

I worked at one for 2 years as a Software Developer. Never again... never again...
Apparently LOC (Lines of Code) was a metric used by the government to validate the companies productivity.

Hmm, purely lines of code. That’s...reassuring.
 

Vinen

God is dead
2,782
486
That seems like a retarded metric

It is. I refactored and deleted dead code (All Unit, Integration, etc tests passed without issue). This during the process of implementing new capabilities that required me to clean-up ancient logic that was written by a typical defense contractor coder (IE sucked)
Boss comes to me the next day asking me to check the dead code back in because I would appear to have negative productivity to the Government.
I quit shortly after and cited this as one of my reasons.
 

ZyyzYzzy

RIP USA
<Banned>
25,295
48,789
Defense Contractors are all about mediocracy enforced by process.

I worked at one for 2 years as a Software Developer. Never again... never again...
Apparently LOC (Lines of Code) was a metric used by the government to validate the companies productivity.
That's a badly written contract, managed by someone who essentially knows nothing about what they should to manage it.
 

Noodleface

A Mod Real Quick
37,961
14,508
I've never run into that situation.

The government is all paperwork and paper trails. They need something like SLOC to measure productivity. There's just no other way to measure what we're doing. You could measure bug reports I guess but that doesn't give you much.

Internally I've never heard SLOC mentioned except when I created a massive new capability and they wanted to know my SLOC.
 

ZyyzYzzy

RIP USA
<Banned>
25,295
48,789
I'm essentially the other sidside of government contracting. Trusted Agent to perform inherently government functions the civies are too lazy to do. I'd fucking kill a KO of PM that wanted such a metric in a contract.
 

alavaz

Trakanon Raider
2,001
713
GD is one of the bigger contractors now (probably the biggest IT contractor). They just bought up CSRA which was a big merger between SRA and CSC.

The company doesn't really matter all that much though. I love my job, but the customer is what makes it great. GD is just who signs my checks and if they lose the rebid then I'll just work for whichever company wins.
 

Alex

Still a Music Elitist
14,466
7,382
Everything on this page except for maybe Crone's post sounds awful. Fuck I scored by going into tech in SF before it really blew up.
 
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Kuriin

Just a Nurse
4,046
1,020
You new here? It's his MO

Kuriin also has a husband (I think) that works too.

Yes. My hubby is a FNP and he makes about 150k working 4 days a week (32 hrs). We run an AirBNB as well which ranges anywhere from 40 to 90k (really depends on the year). My Kaiser position a per diem, so I don't have to work this much. I could just do 3 shifts a month...but, money. Y'know. lol.
 

Vinen

God is dead
2,782
486
Everything on this page except for maybe Crone's post sounds awful. Fuck I scored by going into tech in SF before it really blew up.

No shit. I'm glad the company I worked for got acquired by a Bay Area company. Getting near Bay Area pay in Boston is amazing.

Best choice in my life was leaving a Defense Contractor to gamble on a startup.
 

Noodleface

A Mod Real Quick
37,961
14,508
I don't hate my job, It has benefits - being 20 minutes away, not paying for the commute + parking in boston, not paying boston housing prices, not working in fucking Cambridge (although, Alex would fit in fine). Like anything, I only post the negatives here.
 

Khane

Got something right about marriage
19,790
13,298
The biggest problem with my job right now is I am losing a lot of my marketable skills. I work maybe 20 hours a week and haven't been able to keep myself motivated to learn new tech or stay current over the three years I've been contracting here.
 
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Reactions: 2 users

Volto!

Lord Nagafen Raider
412
333
Kuriin Kuriin making me feel like the laziest fucking RN in the world right now. Holy shit.

I work outpatient surgery as an operating room nurse in Southern California. Monday-Friday, 40 hours a week, no weekends or call. I’m making about 87k a year with 2-3% bumps in pay each year so far. I could make 100-110k a year if I were to work in a hospital and take call but I value my life outside of work too much to do something like that. Benefits are the standard 401k, health, vision, dental, etc. Best job I’ve ever had in my life.