Why Are the Best and Brightest Not Flooding DARPA?

David W. White writes "Wired mag's Danger Room carried an article today that highlighted how desperate the US Military's DARPA has become in its attempts to bring in additional brain power. The tactics include filmed testimonials, folders and even playing cards all screaming join DARPA! Where are all the Einsteins who want to be on the cutting edge for the Government?"

Re:Umm... because they want to work tomorrow, too?

[morgan_greywolf]

It's DARPA. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. They do research. They don't do spying. The spooks all work for CIA, DIA (that's Defense Intelligence Agency), and NSA. And probably a few organizations we don't know about. But DARPA just ain't one of them.

Because they drastically reduced academic funding

[davidgay]

Well everything I hear says that (in CS at least) DARPA drastically cut their academic research funding. Is it then any surprise that research-minded people ignore DARPA?

Re:Umm... because they want to work tomorrow, too?

[Narpak]

I guess there is little stopping the CIA, DIA or NSA to recruit someone at DARPA to work for them covertly. But then again I suppose there is little stopping them from recruiting anyone in any position if they felt a need to do so (and it was a qualified candidate).

maybe

[niloroth]

Maybe, just maybe, people are a little put off by the current administration's habit of censoring and twisting science to it's own political stances. You can only abuse science and technology so long before the people who do the science and create the technology start to seriously resent you. Maybe we will see a change after this election, i don't know. But i hope we do.

Re:Umm, because ....

[couchslug]

"maybe smart geeks are, well, not stupid, and don't want to get sent of to die in some other country?"

In what alternate universe does DARPA deploy?

OTOH, your troll post may just be proof-testing of the DARPA "exploding clue" project.

ask slashdot for a clue

[nuzak]

Here's a free one: DARPA gives grants. Unless you want to be a grant administrator, chances are you don't really want to work for DARPA.

A little, um, research into DARPA would have uncovered that insight.

bureaucracy is killing us

[rlwhite]

No one with real expertise wants to be stuck in a bureaucratic agency, shuffling the papers and attending meetings at least 6 hours a day. I've been a low-level engineer in one of the military's RDT&E agencies (not DARPA), and everyone there who has ever had any technical skill complains of skill atrophy, boredom, and endless unproductive bureaucracy. I was very lucky to get out while I could. One of the high-level managers there had been known to say that their strategy was to bring in the best and brightest technical minds they could and keep them 3-4 years until their skills had atrophied to the point that no one else would hire them.

If the government wants to succeed here, they absolutely have to throw out all the rulebooks and start over. I've been in project groups that tried to do true engineering work within the government, and it was a resource management nightmare. It would take months to order most anything. Everytime I tried to do something, I always needed something I didn't have and couldn't get for a long time. What we have now is simply an exercise in getting people paychecks. This is the real government welfare system.

Re:More money to be made elsewhere?

[TubeSteak]

but why work as a civil servant when you could get a higher-paying job in private industry doing work under contract for DARPA?

From lowest salary to highest
military --> civil servant --> private sector --> consultant

As for why you'd work as a civil servant... it's really hard to get fired?

Don't pay for cost of living.

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe most DARPA jobs are in the DC area. As an Electrical and Computer Engineer, I was recruited for many defense contractor jobs. The problem is, they're all in the Washington DC area and pay like they're not.

Good, recent college EE graduates should be getting 80k+ to work in the DC area. Otherwise, you're underpaying them.

Cost of living adjustments for my first salary to the DC area showed that I should be paid 100k in DC.

DARPA is a contracting agency

[gatkinso]

Most of the R&D under DARPA's watch is farmed out to the big 5 American defense contractors: NG, Raytheon, LockMart, BAE, Boeing, as well as think tanks like Mitre, Rand, Battelle.

Maybe at one time DARPA was something more, but thinking back to ARPANet... that was all contractors and contracted academia as well. BBN, MIT Lincoln, Mitre all immediately pop in mind.

(And yes, I am aware BAE Systems is a subsidiary of BAE plc. With the SSA and totally separate financials, it is in all but name an American company... and soon will be totall US in fact as well. Meerkat Salute!

Re:More money to be made elsewhere?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only does DARPA not pay very well, compared to the private sector, the jobs are located in the Washington D.C. area. DC is expensive, the commute is hellish, the summers are hot and muggy and the area is very conservative. I spent 4 years working for the government in DC before I fled to California.

Re:Young Techies Hate Bush.

[nickhart]

I get the feeling that a darpa under Obama will grow and prosper.

It is possible that DARPA will grow and prosper under Obama. After all, he wants to increase military spending, increase the size of the military by up to 80,000 troops and send even more cannon fodder to Afghanistan. Possibly to Iran as well. Maybe he'll decide to increase funding for DARPA too. After all, regardless of what their PR department claims, the purpose of DARPA is to help the US military. Destroying countries and killing people is what the military does best.

Frankly, I think most people give Obama too much credit. He's a hawk and he's pro-empire. [socialistworker.org] Electing him isn't going to change anything except the rhetoric used to justify the US's imperial ambitions.

Re:Because management is boring

[Octorian]

This is what most people here simply don't know about DoD/Gov't employment. The people who work for the gov't in that world aren't doing interesting technical work. They're managing projects at a high level, sifting through requirements, sitting in meetings, and setting up contracts.

Oh, and they've also taken lots of excruciatingly boring courses on understanding this process [dau.mil]. (ok, DARPA gets an exemption from that, but everyone else doesn't)

Whenever you hear about a cool new DARPA/DoD project, its not the DARPA/DoD folks who are actually doing the cool work. Its non-gov't people working for some company the gov't has a contract with that actually have all the fun.

It's the funding, stupid!

[Anonymous Coward]

As a young professor at a top CS program, I can give a simple reason CS interest in DARPA has waned: because DARPA funding as waned, both in the amount of available grant money and the attractiveness of the terms.

While NSF grants have little oversight, require few deliverables, and have 3-4 year terms, DARPA grants increasingly have 1.5-2 year horizons, require regular reports and site visits, and have go/no-go mid-term decisions. Furthermore, DARPA projects increasingly want deliverables and seek classification. Thus, while NSF still allows you to engage in more blue-sky, high-risk research, DARPA is interested in advanced development. Not quite the thing academics and grad students signed up for. No surprise most DARPA funding has switched from universities to contractors.

Most academics I know would love to return to the DARPA gravy-train of pre-Tony Tether days; the funding terms and dollar amounts just aren't there currently.

This CRA post summarized it well:

    http://www.cra.org/govaffairs/blog/archives/000624.html [cra.org]

Are you kidding?

[thermowax]

As a veteran of several Federal institutions, both as a contractor and a Fed, I can tell you that there are a multitude of reasons why the government has a hard time getting people:

1. The hiring process for Federal employees sucks. It is byzantine and SLOW. One of the more progressive agencies was able to bring me on in a couple of months, but another took a YEAR. The average is somewhere in the middle. I had reasons to wait at the time (had to see what was behind that big NSA fence) but why would anyone wait under normal circumstances when contractors/the private sector moves so much more quickly?
2. The pay sucks. The GS scheme tops out at around $120K right now. There are grades that pay more (SES) but without going into detail, good luck with that. Anyone with solid experience in security/enterprise IP engineering/etc can smoke that as a contractor or in the private sector.
3. The atmosphere sucks. The government may be trying to change, but everything you've ever heard about the stereotypical gov't employee is generally true. Some agencies are better than others, but at most the fat guy with the polyester leisure suit lives on.
4. The positive reinforcement sucks. Managers have little ability to give raises or promotions. In some agencies, spot awards are used, but most still view them as evil.
5. The benefits suck. Is there any other employer in this day and age that doesn't have maternity leave? The rest (medical, 401(k)) are par. The pension is nice, if you stick around long enough to qualify.
6. The culture sucks. No matter how much they try to change, years of hiring the sub-par have infused the gov't with a culture of sluggish bureaucracy. This will take decades to undo. Also, this is precisely the kind of environment that will drive a decent technical person raving mad in short order.

Noone who [knows|can do] better would ever work for the Federal Government.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Umm, because ....

[Ortega-Starfire]

This is correct. The best and brightest US citizens are not US born, and not eligible to work for these groups. The first example I could think of off the top of my head is the story of the student who builds rail guns and laser guns for fun and for his doctorate, the DOD approached him with 2 jobs and then found out he was not a born US citizen.

Excerpted from his site, powerlabs.org:

From its conception, the original PowerLabs Linear Magnetic Accelerator ("Rail Gun", or "Railgun") was conceived for the primary goal of simply proving that it could be done; on a low budget, with common materials and powered by a never tried before electrolytic capacitor bank.
  In that, it was extremely successful: Not only did the gun fire flawlessly over 30 times (it is not uncommon for research rail guns to break down in the first shot), but it also attracted vastly more attention than I could ever have hoped for:
After its page generated hundreds of thousands of hits, the gun was featured on Discovery Channel, TV6, numerous newspaper and magazine articles, and earned me several job offers from the private sector, research institutes, and industry. The highlight of the popularity of this project came in the form of two separate offers from laboratories associated with the department of defense (DoD), which, apparently can't hire me because I was not born in the USA (someone must have forgotten that the majority of the best scientists and engineers in the world weren't born here)...

Not just for the military

[Khelder]

It's true that DARPA is part of the DoD, but the research it has sponsored in the past has given benefits far beyond the military. Examples of things it's sponsored include:
  * Networking (the Internet)
  * Graphics
  * Timesharing systems
  * VLSI
  * RISC
  * RAID
  * Parallel and high-performance computing

As for not wanting to work there, it's like other comments have said: DARPA program managers don't *do* research, they manage people who do (and really it's more like: they manage people like professors and company project managers, and *those* people manage the students and scientists who actually *do* the research). People get PhDs for different reasons, of those who got one to do research, few of them want to be that far removed from actually doing it.

Re:Is this really a mystery?

[thegameiam]

To be fair, "reinventing government" which basically translates to "hire contractors to do what government employees used to do" was a significant policy program of then Vice-President Al Gore. This approach has certainly continued under the current administration, and it may be causing a problem in this area, but it isn't just a Republican problem.

Re:Young Techies Hate Bush.

[nickhart]

If you don't see the difference between his platform and mccain, you need some serious readjustment of perspective.

National Intelligence Estimate: Iran does not have a functioning nuclear weapons program.

Bush: Iran is developing nuclear weapons, we must bomb them!

McCain: What he said.

Obama: Iran is developing nuclear weapons, so let's try some sanctions first and if that fails, bomb them!

People of Iran: WTF? Is there any candidate that doesn't want kill us and justify it with another lie?

The differences between Obama and McCain are more about style than substance. They both support using the US's military unilaterally as they see fit. Obama has said this [foreignaffairs.org] many [counterpunch.org] times [counterpunch.org]. If you believe that Obama isn't going to do whatever he can to maintain and extend the US's hegemony then you are the one who needs some serious readjustment.

Re:Umm... because they want to work tomorrow, too?

[the_pooh_experience]

Read the DARPA wiki [wikipedia.org].

DARPA has been responsible for funding the development of many technologies which have had a major impact on the world

The operative word is that they fund the development...

DARPA has no research laboratories. They have no computational computer network. They are program managers. They are no more researchers than the PHB is a programmer. They are good at moving money around and have a great BS meter. The closest thing to research I have seen in SETA contractors working for a DARPA Program Manager. They do some background work, determine the state of the art, and potential for different research areas.

Re:Umm, because ....

[profplump]

If that's not racism, I don't know what is

I'm gonna go ahead and say that discrimination based on, you know, race is a better example of "racism". Discrimination based on national origin is called "nationalism". Note the common root words in both cases.

Now nationalism might still be a bad time, and might even lead to racism if people of a particular nationality commonly share a race, (see the use of "Mexican" as a racial slur against all latinos regardless of national origin) but it is not racism in and of itself.

So much vitriol from such ignorance

[GLTirebiter]

I'm there -- a contractor, not a government employee. So I get to speak with some first hand knowledge. Very little written thus far bears any resemblance to the truth of DARPA.

DARPA PMs are researchers, though they are rarely *doing* research while at DARPA. Instead DARPA offers them the ability to pursue their hare-brained, pie-in-the-sky ideas and to do so with budgets of millions of dollars a year. So they get to try to make their vision a reality but at the cost of not getting to do the research themselves. This is not unlike being a senior research scientist at an R&D lab or a full professor at a University. You can be in there directing and interacting with the front-line researchers, but you rarely get to be in there doing the front-line research.

There is very little bureaucracy at DARPA. That is not a reason to avoid the job. On the other hand, the current director has a choke-hold and veto over every idea that goes forward. One man, $3+ billion a year, and he personally decides annually on the fate of projects ranging from quantum entanglement to cybersecurity with side orders of robotics, space vehicles, microelectronics, flying things, floating and swimming things, neural interfaces, advanced vaccines, ... (There is most assuredly no good ole boys network of academics controlling what DARPA will fund!) The director also hires and fires every government employee at the agency. Some people don't like that model...

While there are some "usual suspects" who win a lot of DARPA business, the only inside-track they have is their past-performance and doing good marketing to an existing customer. I suspect every company's business development people focus significant attention on their existing customers too. And if they're any good they get more business from those customers. "So let it be with Caesar."

It *is* expensive to live in the D.C. area. But a DARPA PM can earn over $175K/yr with bonuses. Not all do, to be sure, but they can. So that's not a reason to avoid considering DARPA.

A DARPA PM job lasts about 4 years. Some stretch it to 6 years. But then you're done. Gone. Bye bye. Find another job. Most don't have any trouble finding another job, but in the interim they have either left their families behind for a few years or they have uprooted them for a few years. Some people don't like that...

The minimum daily adult requirements for sitting in the building and doing work is a SECRET clearance. It usually take a few months if you haven't been too bad too recently and don't have a lot of family living in other countries. Much of the work requires much higher levels of clearance, but if you are targeting intelligence work in the first place you have probably already bitten the security clearance bullet.

PM's are government employees and DARPA is a part of the Executive Branch of the US government. Bashing the incumbent administration publicly would be politically un-astute, much as publicly bashing to CEO of your current employer could be a career limiting move (CLM). Privately, DARPA employees are republicans, democrats, and even the stray libertarian-leaning independent.

In my experience -- opinion and conjecture here -- the reasons DARPA finds recruitment a challenge are (in my subjective order):
1) Only the director can hire. If he doesn't like you or your idea, nothing and no one else matters.
2) Only one person can approve programs. Your good idea will never fly if you can't sell it to him.
3) Taking a temporary job of 4 years (and possibly less if the director decides he doesn't like you anymore) to move to an expensive part of the country is not always a good personal or professional decision.
4) Some people have moral objections to working for the military -- regardless of whether their research area involves blowing things up or protecting computers from hackers.

But most of the PMs I have known loved the opportunity and very rarely wanted to leave when their time was up, even with the frustrations.

Re:Because DARPA is a government mess

[fourthspace]

Isn't DARPA the real founding agency (or at least the funding agency) for the first backbone of the internet in the early 1970's?

Re:Because DARPA is a government mess

[runexe]

It is pretty well established that he did in fact invent [lakdiva.org] them in 1945 - and although many people lament the fact that he never bothered to file for a patent - he would often retort that even if he had, the patent would have long expired before the first commercial geostationary communication satellite was launched (Intelsat 1 [nasa.gov]). The first geostationary satellite of any type was the Syncom 2 [nasa.gov].

I'm against arrogance, academic arrogance

[Louis Savain]

You seem to believe yourself to be some kind of grand revolutionary - smarter and more capable than those fools in the universities.

Nope. There are many others who share my ideas. They are just not as upfront as I am.

It's far more likely that you're nothing but a simple kook.

ahahaha... Well, at least I am not an anonymous kook, nor a coward. I face the music, unlike some other people, right?

Who wants to just get rejected?

[Theovon]

Ok, I'm not trying to say that I'm the best or the brightest. But I do have 12 year of industry experience, and I'm working on my Ph.D. in AI right now. I've applied for DARPA grants before, only to be rejected. I get enough funding from other sources, so why waste my time?

I think the problem is with DARPA, not the bright people.

two words -- security clearance

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually they have a worse problem -- people leaving the government sector for industry because of security requirements.

I also have friends who tell me that if they had it to do over again the would not get involved with defense.

Re:Because DARPA is a government mess

[Ambitwistor]

I call shenanigans. DARPA doesn't let you use research funding to construct buildings! Unless the building itself is the research project.

Fun!

[Anonymous Coward]

We all had a little too much "fun" in college. And the current set of clearance policies don't agree with "fun".