When was the last time you were a paid developer?
Never.
I’m a retired engineer.
I was taught my whole career
that everything presented
needs to be challenged.
If they can’t back it up with
facts and data, the proposal
isn’t for real.
I’ve managed muli-million dollar
projects that met the requirements
under cost and were successful.
Retired former Boeing Engineer.
GTo
I was a paid developer continuously from May 1983 until June 2025. I was working on a DTRA contract that had just progressed to its final year. The "surge" funding present in the first four years was funding my tasks for the customer. Funding ran out and internal job openings became very tight with a funding cutbacks from the current administration. I was the only person on the contract leveraging AI to address customer desires. Part of the activity in the final year included a re-bid on the project. I wasn't part of the proposal effort. Finding no openings that didn't require me to physically move to northern VA and apply to upgrade to TS/SCI, I opted to retire. I recently learned the re-bid failed and the rest of the team would be seeking new contracts.
While I was getting some good value out of AI and my team mates had done some stellar machine learning work on seismic data processing, our contract was not written to incorporate AI. That would have to be a customer requirement with funding to support it. It would also require dedicated classified instances of the AI tools to keep the code isolated as required. It simply wasn't an opportunity that could be exercised.