Some progress. Finished sorting all the loose scraps of paper in the bottoms and backs of drawers; all that remains is... DUNN-DUNN-DUNN... THE SHOE BOX.
mnem
Dewski time.
I hate tax - need to do my return actually and I owe them a rather large sum this year and my accountant got himself killed in a donorcycle accident earlier this year
Having worked in the defence sector that is the status quo. As you probably know I don’t work in that sector any more. No one with half a clue does because the money is so much better elsewhere. So much so that the first job I had out of the defence sector was basically server bitch and my salary doubled overnight from “grade F salary with grade C job” to “wow I can actually afford to eat suddenly”.
I worked for the Navy for almost 25 years in the civilian sector. Our facility was staffed with lifers like you describe, plus a batch of pretty capable young engineers who jumped at the opportunity to build some near state-of-the-art gear. Surprisingly, the combo gave us the ability to be pretty efficient at what we did; our labor rate was low and our successes at building working, easy to maintain gear was as good as anyone in the command. [brief aside: my group built 4 full-spec airborne countermeasures pod prototypes with spares and support for under $3M - probably less than it would have cost to merely build one of them in production at the time. I flew with one of them installed under the wing of the target plane and our customer was really happy with the results. It could be done.] But our efficiency was costing other, more "profitable" work centers business so they closed us down over 20 years ago and moved all the work to an east coast facility which charged considerably more for their work. It all got farmed out to contractors - sound familiar? Certain admirals who invested in land on the east coast near their facility made out like bandits.
I got into the telecom business just in time for AT&T to start firing or retiring all the knowledgeable people who kept the business afloat for decades; watching the company implode was not pleasant. They started sending all of our proprietary network info and support for the internal databases overseas to people making far less money than we were. Of course, profits soared and customer service plummeted. I retired before the inevitable axe descended.
So not only the government but also the telephone system has been sacrificed to the god of profit; I wouldn't trust the equipment/software of either one to be safe from intrusion by people who want to disrupt our infrastructure.
Lucky you. No one know what state of the art gear was where I worked. Literally sod all clue. Literally as I was bailing out of the door there was an "anti FPGA resistance movement" starting. Literally Xilinx had dropped the Vertex-2's with PPC core which is basically an excuse not to have to sit there and plug out big, heavy, expensive discrete and CPU based designs usually on m68k. Now I had the job of testing some of that shit. ugh. Interestingly was also in the "ECM" space albeit the friendlier side of interrogation
Outta there like a roadrunner though.
I know someone who's job is active defence on a large mobile telco here. They are constantly under attack 24/7 from all over the world including local actors.
I slightly envy you for at least getting a look in at AT&T. Some of the most interesting stuff happened there with the trunk and carrier development. I had a couple of Ciscos running T1 from one side of the house to the other and my own PBX once
(another geeky hobby I had back in the early 00's apart from collecting old Sun kit).