@morbiuswilters said:
Even within the software industry, I think working on drones would be more fulfilling than teaching myself yet another of the hundreds of incomplete, feature-light frameworks that seem to flake off Google like dandruff off of a sick dog.
It really isn't. Dealing with classified info grates on you over time; imagine if the only place where you could really rant in detail about your work was within the secured area (where, by the way, you can't bring your phone) with your coworkers. You're encouraged to tell others that you "don't like talking about work", and are given a detailed slate of lies to use called an "OPSEC legend" when that excuse doesn't fly. Oh, and forget about telecommuting; networks with classified information (like your source code) aren't connected to the Internet. At all.
Further, the industry is a crooked card game where none of the major players are allowed to really lose. Ever since the big round of consolidation that followed the cold war ending, contracts are doled out and workshares are split up such that everybody gets a taste and nobody really ends up hurting compared to the others; there's frequently only two companies that can produce a given kind of system, and The Customer knows that if one of them is gone there won't even be the semblance of competition anymore.
The management hierarchy is exactly what you expect from gigantic megacorporations and the waterfall development model and useless "defects per KSLOC per month"-style metrics are demanded from on high.
(Oh, and I hope you like C and C++.)
And even though you try really hard not to give a shit and put on a cynical misantrhopic face on Internet forums and then furthermore hide everything behind a ridiculous array of acronyms and euphamisms, the fact that you're working on Dismount Moving Target Tracking (or whatever) ends up bothering you, late at night in the parts of your brain that you tried to tell yourself that you don't have.
I want to leave but I took their "free" graduate school tuition money so I'm stuck until X years after I've finished my masters degree. But I'm worried, because I keep hearing that the industry is essentially a roach motel -- the only people that will hire you are other defense contractors. It makes sense; if I'm in an interview and they ask me to describe what I've been working on for the past three years and I tell them, "well, I really can't say"; what company outside of the defense industry will understand?
You do usually get paid for the overtime that you put in, so that's a perk, at least.