Defense Industry Jobs

People contracting for DoD sometimes aren't "in industry"?

Maybe look for jobs at defense contractors?

That's the "royal you", not you individually.If you go looking around on linkedin or crunchbase, you'll find numerous 10-50 employee defense contractors. Having known a few individuals employed this way, I would rank them as smart, capable, highly technical and easily capable of working at FAANG. They're getting comparable compensation/benefits with far less stress, and probably work on more interesting problems than the average Googler.

There's a TON of great jobs out there in defense tech! You could get paid well to build interesting projects (that occasionally are used, if you're lucky, to whack bad guys) and none of those jobs/founders GAF about credentials, they just care if you can do the job.

Most get recruited right out of college, many people take the job on strong recommendation from an advisor or professor. The perks aren't on Google scale, but the pay is better than you'd expect and the feeling of purpose and patriotism is something no valley company can really match.Once you are on the inside, you have daily interactions with technology that is 10 years ahead of anything on the outside, which is really hard to walk away from. Not to mention you probably married someone else

As someone who has spent many years working in defense / government contracting, I think you're touching on a really big reason a lot of people work in this world.Many years ago, when my career first started, I was an idealist who thought the way I could give back (as someone who couldn't get into the military for physical reasons) was to work in the defense sector. I also tried very hard to get interviewed by an SV company, but I didn't qualify for an interview due to goi

the cynical side of me says "that's okay, the generals and such can still get cushy jobs at companies that manufacture hardware used by the DoD"

I can’t speak for Israeli tech, but the pentagon has an image problem in the valley, I don’t believe they are getting the best recruits even for contracting companies like Palintir. Our generation is closer to Iraq and Vietnam than WW2, and many of the bright minds are first generation immigrants. Despite the more recent image problems ad tech has (now that people are seeing more of how the sausage is made), it’s still sexier to work on big consumer companies than defense. You’d have to pay my c

Work for a defense company. There's a lot of hardcore engineering there.

Try working for the defense industry. They tend to treat engineers like they should be lucky to have a job.