Defense contractors are usually located in out of the way places. If you work for the USAF Lab in Rome, NY, you make less than a Facebook intern, but the only guy richer than you in town is the state trooper with overtime. They are also stable gigs with good benefits.
Yeah, but you also have to live in Rome, NY. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to live in a major city; but being _near_ one is pretty handy. And if the job doesn't pan out, then being in Rome, NY means your options for the next job are extremely limited. Unless your family is ok with uprooting and moving (probably _again_), the pay to move to Rome for a job would need to be catastrophically large to lure me there.
I moved from a string of coastal metropolises to a much smaller city in Alabama, voluntarily. Pay was not a factor, since I kept the same remote job; but obviously my purchasing power is higher here, especially for housing. There are certain aspects of living in or near a "world-class" city that are lacking here, but for my lifestyle, that has no impact on my day-to-day.
I'm not specifically trying to change your mind about Alabama (since as you said, everyone has a different lifestyle), but I would wager that perhaps some of what you think about these Deep South states are contrary to reality.
One of my biggest concerns of doing something like this is being too far away from specialist healthcare in my old age. I see my 70 year old mother struggling to find specialist doctors without going to the big city (which is 2 hours away). She is not even _that_ far away from the big city.
Meaning around one time per month she has to devote a whole day for a doctor trip. I am afraid when she grows older and can't do that by herself anymore. Most of her doctors are still local though, but specialists are hard to find.
When my dad had cancer he had to take similar trips for his treatment. Except it was weekly with occasional multiple times per week. It was brutal for him and my mother.
I dealt with cancer this year. I had my choice of health systems, one 30 minutes away or one 5 minutes away. By the end I was very grateful I went with the closest. At one point I had radiation every morning at 8:30 for a month. Drop the kid at school then swing by for the appointment is much more manageable than an hour commute while feeling like ass.
It's not just the specialists either. My pcp at a local health clinic is a MD/PhD from a top 5 med school. Most of the best in any field don't want to live in Podunk either.
The redneck stuff is fine with me, I lived in a small town and it has a certain charm. Good place to raise kids, etc. But I like winter… I live in a small northeast city and enjoy it.
Or, you know, any tech worker with a remote job. The point is if you have technical skills and want to live in Rome, NY you can do that and still have a better job.
> They are also stable gigs with good benefits.
Maybe 30 years ago. Today the benefits don't compare to what you get in a large tech company and I think everyone one I know with a career in a DAPRA/Defense contractor job has eventually been laid off and struggled to find new work since it's generally challenging to transition out of that industry involuntarily.
> Looks like your managers don't know who they need to hire or don't want to really hire.
It's prevalent in government-adjacent companies. It's all a completely opaque byzantine system to mask the nepotism and the fact that a lot of those people just siphon money from the government like it's a jobs programs.
Not to mention that their application systems are usually complete garbage like Workday or Taleo.
The defense industry _is_ a jobs program, I thought this was clear to everyone. It's cheaper than keeping all the vets on the payroll directly and also cheaper than letting them become another homeless crisis on top of the existing one.
That's fair enough but it's an arbitrary place to draw the line. If you pay tax in the US then you build weapons. If you live in a country that doesn't either build weapons or pay someone else to build them for you, then you'll soon be getting told what do by some country that does, and building weapons is one of the things they'll probably tell you to do.
After what went down in Ukraine I struggle with the idea that folks can still find military tech inherently problematic.
It's currently the only thing preventing a liberal democracy from being overrun and genocided because a tinpot dictator with nuclear weapons woke up on the wrong side of the bed back in 2022 and said "I want, I take."
I think he is saying that they’ll hire folks as technical writers (so you do technical writer stuff) and then help out with engineering classes if things seem to be going well.
This is pretty different from somebody who wants to go in as an engineer but doesn’t remember their intro classes.
Don't really see much of a contradiction. A good salary is not necessarily the highest salary.
> You require linear algebra but ok with technical writer.
I'm a tech writer but went to engineering school. While I assume it's not a fairly common situation, it's also not unheard of. The original comment seems to imply that they'll frown upon a candidate that will expect to be taught linear algebra at the workplace but will be ok with one that has only a basic grasp and it's willing to attend engineering school to improve.
You pay well, but not so much.
You search for qualified applicants but can hire a student.
You require linear algebra but ok with technical writer.
Looks like your managers don't know who they need to hire or don't want to really hire.