I want to read more of this later. After 4 years in DoD contracting, at a quick glance, some of this hits the nail right on the head:
>Software is made by people and for people, so digital talent matters.
The company I was at did not acknowledge this. To them, engineering hours were fungible. Two weeks from an engineer who is doing the bare minimum and coasting to retirement (in DoD contracting, there are lots of these type) is the same as a mid-level engineer who is up-to-date on the latest technology and working their hardest to push the project forward. The latter is usually paid less than half the former in the industry.
>Software is different than hardware (and not all software is the same).
What works in other industries doesn't always work in defense. It's a unique space. CI? Good luck running automated "intercept a hypersonic missile" tests. This doesn't get enough attention. However, there is a lot that can be done in pure software testing, even for DoD applications. They view it too much like hardware development and that hamstrings their software efforts.
The bigger issue that is industry-wide that I noticed in my time there, is that the incentive system in the industry is broken. Contractors take an educated guess up front on what it will cost them to build a system for the government, and the government chooses from those bids, weighing capabilities, cost schedule, etc. The contractor who wins, then tracks their progress to completion by how many hours they have worked on the contract, relative to their total. This is how they get paid. For instance, if it is predicted to take 100 hours to deliver a system, and that system is $1 million, each hour would earn the contractor something like $10,000 (obviously there are other non-labor costs and this is a hand waving simplification, but to an extent is true). So, there is limited (bonuses that are tiny relative to the value of the contract) incentive to come in on time. There is a great incentive to over-hire, pay staff to sit around doing nothing, and collect money for it. This disincentivizes innovation, because you don't want to have a predicted cost that is astonishingly low for your next contract; you want it to be just low enough to undercut your next competitor. That's how you maximize profits, and us taxpayers get a terrible deal.
>Software is made by people and for people, so digital talent matters. The company I was at did not acknowledge this. To them, engineering hours were fungible. Two weeks from an engineer who is doing the bare minimum and coasting to retirement (in DoD contracting, there are lots of these type) is the same as a mid-level engineer who is up-to-date on the latest technology and working their hardest to push the project forward. The latter is usually paid less than half the former in the industry.
>Software is different than hardware (and not all software is the same). What works in other industries doesn't always work in defense. It's a unique space. CI? Good luck running automated "intercept a hypersonic missile" tests. This doesn't get enough attention. However, there is a lot that can be done in pure software testing, even for DoD applications. They view it too much like hardware development and that hamstrings their software efforts.
The bigger issue that is industry-wide that I noticed in my time there, is that the incentive system in the industry is broken. Contractors take an educated guess up front on what it will cost them to build a system for the government, and the government chooses from those bids, weighing capabilities, cost schedule, etc. The contractor who wins, then tracks their progress to completion by how many hours they have worked on the contract, relative to their total. This is how they get paid. For instance, if it is predicted to take 100 hours to deliver a system, and that system is $1 million, each hour would earn the contractor something like $10,000 (obviously there are other non-labor costs and this is a hand waving simplification, but to an extent is true). So, there is limited (bonuses that are tiny relative to the value of the contract) incentive to come in on time. There is a great incentive to over-hire, pay staff to sit around doing nothing, and collect money for it. This disincentivizes innovation, because you don't want to have a predicted cost that is astonishingly low for your next contract; you want it to be just low enough to undercut your next competitor. That's how you maximize profits, and us taxpayers get a terrible deal.