u/almondcroissant96

I'm not in defense contracting (I'm a fed) but with how bad the general swe job market is right now I see a lot of people in the industry talk about wanting to go into defense because clearance gives job security.

But it also seems like basically no one is sponsoring software/cybersecurity anymore. Are uncleared engineers actually getting hired into the industry anymore or is it pretty much just a closed loop at this point?

I’ve noticed the young guys in my org behave very differently from how juniors have historically acted.

First, I suspect these guys could not survive at all without llms. They don’t have the metal models to problem solve and work through tasks to develop domain expertise. They have some kind of token induced learned helplessness. I think they might not even have code editors on the systems; literally all work they do is typing into the prompt box of codex.

Despite this, they have extremely high confidence and no filter. They will throw out bizarre business and architectural ideas that are just totally nonsensical to anyone with domain expertise or even just some general engineering battle scars. The proposals will often be ai filtered to sound plausible and look impressive but they make no sense. They will initiate meetings with vendors and other teams, go above peoples heads and get management and directors involved in random stuff.

They will also frequently do low value extracurricular work. Like if the senior engineers are working on a system, the juniors will vibe code a reimplementation of the system (that doesn’t do what we need it to do), in a language/stack the team doesn’t use, and then dump thousands of lines of code for review. Instead of asking how they can help, asking if they can learn the details of current system or business problems from other devs, they just throw slop over the wall. They have ZERO instinct to learn.

I’m starting to think ai has brain rotted the new grads to the point they just won’t make it. It would honestly be easier and more productive to work with contractors and/or outsourced devs and we would probably get the same or better quality.