Subjective differences in defense and business

Personal observers about the differences between the defense-related business and just a business not involved in government orders. Affected a bit of everything: personnel, tasks, working conditions, bicycles, romance, leaders, and much more.

Having some work experience both in places related to the defense and defense of the motherland, and in places that specialize in ordinary making money, I want to tell those things that I myself did not have when choosing a place of work, as well as the differences that were most remembered. Immediately I warn you that I am not ergodic, so all the following descriptions are rather subjective. Also, IT-shnye and engineering specialties are meant everywhere. I am not familiar with others and everything there can be exactly the opposite.

Further, for the sake of brevity, I will use the terms "defense" and "business", meaning by them companies in one way or another dealing with government orders, and ordinary commercial companies, respectively.

Non-core activities

Business, as a rule, by all means tries to give up everything that is not directly connected with the core activity of money extraction. That is, the server - in the clouds. Backups and recovery set up in the same place, or take a ready-made scheme. Accounting and cleaning at outsourcing. For any analytics, translation or other activity, enter into an urgent contract with a specialized agency and so on. In the defense industry there is no tendency to outsource, outstaff or to regular fixed-term contracts for non-core items. There, they usually either open a new department or temporarily switch existing people to a new activity. Moreover, people can be moved within quite wide limits.

For example, you can send a web developer to study and develop an ESB or reverse-engineer a byte-code of a CAD system. Well, or just temporarily turn the developer into tech support.

Multiple Standings

What is normal in the military, then barbarism in business.

Immediately after the preceding paragraph, a "wide" range of tasks and interests follows. A developer can also be a tester in half with an analyst. All developers are slightly admins, as there may not be a real admin. The tester can also be tech support in half with a technical writer. The architect imposes in his free time and front-end as needed, collecting user cases and feedback from users. Timlid is a scram-master, project and product manager in one person. The designer fun runs into the shop and turns the nuts for the installer / assembler. The developer of iron is still a bit a mathematician and ballistics thinks. The business analyst periodically becomes the account manager and secretary-referent.

In business, everything is incomparably more boring (startups and other untapped endeavors do not count). A separate scrum master, account manager, developer, tester, technical writer, office manager, several types of analysts and all these people, for the most part, do what their position implies.

Flexibility in changing processes

The point is controversial. Rather, it refers to any large enough organization, but I studied it precisely in the contrast of business and the military.

There is a lot of money in the military commissar, the remnants of the Soviet Union and it moves very slowly, because it works that way. The organizational structure in it is nailed. That is, all services, departments, sectors, and other structures are rigidly spelled out, documented, and they will be able to change the hell without a small war and a fair amount of broken copies.

In business, this is simpler: if changes can bring money, then changes will be done fairly quickly ... or everyone will live poorly and not for long, as it’s necessary to spin somehow. That is, shaking up the composition of teams or departments is quite a feasible task for a business that does not require great bureaucratic feats.

Here come out interesting moments: a rare voenka knows about the development methodology. If he knows, then there is definitely no separate post like scrum master (or isomorphic to him). The business is doing nothing but pushing up the existing scrum / kanban / waterfall / etc, or experimenting with changing one to the other.

Here are some unclear pieces with frames.

1. Since everything is screwed with nails to rigid structures, that is, there is a clear hierarchy of positions, their number and name. Therefore, you can immediately see where you can grow and develop. But there is also a minus in the fact that this information in the defense industry is very rarely advertised, and many even hide it as if this is information about the income of employees or state secret. Why do so, I still do not understand.
2. By virtue of the preceding paragraph, the inscription with a real position will be in employment and in the future it will be easier to prove who you were and what experience you have. In business, very often, they practice one position for all twenty employees. For example, a “software engineer” or simply a “programmer”, although in fact there are junior testers, leading developers, administrators of varying degrees of severity, and other zoo mixed up.
3. By virtue of the same first paragraph, the salary is tied to the post. Therefore, it is possible to get more than a certain amount only by either regular bonuses, which one doesn’t like to write out, or by changing the position to another one, which provides for the desired salary fork. Here lies the most beautiful ambush: if all the posts are occupied, then to hell with you, and not St. George's Day increase, even if for all other parameters there are no objections. In this case, tag starts with frames, or the introduction of new posts, or another whistle, which is never fast and is associated with a certain headache for the company. Here we must mention one more wonderful thing: going on maternity leave retains the position of the employee. That is, if you have 3 analyst positions: junior analyst, analyst and lead analyst, but the last two are on maternity leave, no matter how cool the new employee is, he will be a junior analyst and will receive accordingly, plus his growth prospects will be extremely vague.
4. And yet, all in the same scheme from the first paragraph, the posts have some requirements that need to be met. Most often forget about higher education. That is, if the position has the word "engineer" in the title, or at least implies some managerial duties, then without higher education it will be very difficult to get it ... or impossible.
   To be honest, the topic of personnel and finance is always painful, since this area is absolutely obvious for personnel workers, but it is a great revelation for the overwhelming majority of technical specialists. And yet, many, for some reason, do not want to understand this sphere until they come to a halt.

In short, this legal-bureaucratic opus can be continued for quite a long time. There is enough for the whole article. But this is not my profile, I have only personal practical situations, so I ask more knowledgeable people to supplement and, perhaps, to describe this extensive and important section in more detail.

Stability

This is something for which they love the military and what the business lacks (top and city-forming companies do not count). The reasons that can ruin the business a little more than dofiga: floated exchange rates, the new bill, a strong competitor, and so on. To close an enterprise connected with a military commissar, you need to either destroy the state, or mess it up so that the management of the company can no longer get government contracts. Both options are pretty fantastic.

With the observance of the TC in the military, too, better, but it is a controversial thing. On the one hand, the salary will be given by the hour (no envelopes and gray schemes), there will be honest sick leave, vacation pay, decrees, and so on. Plus all taxes, insurance, pension and other funds of starving children in Africa will be paid. This makes it possible to safely use all sorts of financial instruments such as the personal income tax deduction, go to the bank for loans and get other "benefits" of civilization. But on the other hand, if in the TK of which they tinker, then you will feel it without fail. An extreme example: a couple of years ago, vacation planning was introduced. When at the beginning of the year you need to turn on the inner Wang and say up to the day when you will go on vacation for a year. Voenka happily took it into circulation, but it was possible to agree with the business and not suffer.

Field test romance

In the continuation of the advantages of the defense industry ... kind of and "on the fan", but the advantages. It is unlikely that somewhere else it will turn out to interact so tightly with combat tools: to feel the ATGM, to shoot the missiles, to fly a helicopter, or simply to ride on the armor. And army humor and stories are one of the most hilarious things in this world. On the other hand, any business trip sooner or later get bored. Of course, someone is rushing from regular crawling inside the aircraft / tank / BMP / radar / etc and from the process of replacing modules that do not fit into the typical attachment, and someone forgets how the wife looks.

If you continue the theme with curiosities, then that could be: you could shoot through the roof of the hangar with a sudden burst of a prototype, look at her and understand that you are not the first to have such good fellows; continue the stratospheric drone or practically continue the optical observation and targeting device weighing a few tens of kg during the march to the shooting site because it was forgotten to screw it to the tank, to see how the rocket mixed up with the bottom and stuck in a carrot near the launcher and further the same spirit. Naturally, all the above cases are fictional and any coincidence with reality is pure coincidence ... but in life, usually, even more fun.

The invention of bicycles

Due to its proximity to the defense industry, everything proprietary is either very limited in use or is generally prohibited. And since domestic analogues have not yet been delivered, that is, there is a lot of room for creativity. Creativity can be expressed in completely different areas: the organization of its server instead of using the cloud, its own enterprise management system instead of implementing the existing one, its own libraries for image recognition, for ballistics, for working with geodata, etc., and its version control server instead of github even for very modest projects, your CI with its tests at its facilities instead of travis or solano and so on. In general, if you do not get scared, you can cool a lot of different skills and understand where your legs grow from many modern services and tools. The main disadvantage is that due to the existence of ready-made tools, you may get the impression that the development is useless and wasted time. A kind of "artel" labor in vain, and not a development team.

A few examples of bicycles, in the implementation of which he participated:

• a bunch of problems from iscsi, caused by a combination of its server, ancient ubunt, lack of cdn and architecture features;
• its internal certification centers and a lot of headaches with self-signed farm, mixed content and other dances around ssl;
• automated tests at their facilities and problems with the fact that one complete run is 2+ hours;
• its own reader-writer for dxf-format, although there is Teigha that allows working with dwg.

Bureaucracy

Government agencies are prone to mechanical control, business - to organic. But, in fact, it is becoming increasingly blurry and, sometimes, enchanting examples can be found of both highly bureaucratic and anti-bureaucratic procedures on both sides of the barricades.

For example, a trip to a conference in the case of a military man is a process of sluggish pulling the pieces of paper for a month and a half, which is difficult to describe without the mat and the rapid waving of hands. And in business, this can turn into vigorous email bounce during the same term. But business counts money and takes a lesson out of it, streamlining processes, but a commander does not.

There may also include the process of purchasing software. In business, he said what he needed, justified why, estimated profit and sent to the purchase. And the developer continues to write code. In a military woman, it is very difficult to prove the need for something, because now you are somehow working, it means that you don’t need it very much. Plus, you can’t just say “buy software for such and such”, you also need to find where to buy, where it is cheaper, who works under the framework agreements with specifications and other obscurantism.

As for the standard procedures such as obtaining information, vacation, raising / lowering, changing positions, and the like, it’s the same everywhere: a paper statement, several autographs and a couple of cabinets. Electronic document management, at least internal, not seen anywhere else.

Clean toilets

Now let's go a little on the other, non-standard side. In the book "Rockets and People" Chertok wrote:

Ustinov mercilessly dealt with the heads of workshops and industries for dirt and lack of culture. When visiting the factory, he started with toilets. Usually in the shops long before the approach to the toilet, the characteristic "fragrance" was spread. In the toilets themselves had to walk through the puddles. Ustinov flew into a rage and thundered: “What a toilet, such is the foreman. Until you achieve exemplary cleanliness in your toilets, there will be no cleanliness in the workshops. ”

It may sound strange, but it is so. The scale of the disaster, of course, is different everywhere, but the promise of the above quotation is relevant to this day. Business in this regard has succeeded much more than defense.

From a personal one: the analyst lady, who was capable and promising high hopes, lived with us. It worked well, but not for long, and one of the reasons for leaving was the very unfortunate toilets.

It all depends on the head

In voenke especially. Since the business is pretty good at following the successes and jambs of the employees, and in the military commissar everyone resolutely don't care and only the immediate supervisor can do something if he cares. Any evolutionary practices, regular conversations of the manager with the employee and other similar events are not about the military woman. There is not pripret yet, no one will ask how are you. All major initiatives in the area come from executives, not laid down at the enterprise level and / or business processes. So, paying attention to your future boss is always important, but in a military woman it is doubly important.

Attitude to Juny

Voenka loves the junes because they are cheap and there are many of them. Business - when how. Either he has concrete plans for their accelerated pumping (for example, the Technosphere, the Academy of Yandex and smaller projects), or he is focused on the middle and higher.

In my practice, there was a strange case, the roots of which I did not understand. Voenka had access to a large array of June. Filtered them, trained them, pumped them to the middle ones, but absolutely could not hold them. That is, there were interesting tasks, there were people who trained, but there was no apparatus for holding. People beat their heads to the ceiling and went to another job. And the company did not even soar at all, only the development teams suffered, as the forces for training went away, and the average level in them invariably dangled at the same level due to routine. Why am I doing this? To the fact that the ceiling can suddenly sneak up around the corner and need to be ready for it. This is also a good question for the employer at the end of the interview.

Staff turnover

In continuation of the previous paragraph. There is very little work with the staff and the desire to keep people in is not very large, therefore the turnover is more than in business. This is a plus and a minus. Plus: you can learn a lot of interesting people and participate in many interviews. Minus: it can be hard to put together a friendly team that will throw bugs around with a shovel and deliver features by wheelbarrows. The same thing, as mentioned above, limits the skill of the whole team from above.

Work with frames

Since voenka, often, it combines both software development and the production of physical hardware, that is, the nuances in the selection of personnel. The personnel department works much better with those whom it searches for more often. That is, finding a good turner-milling machine is not a question. But with programmers - an ambush. If they are in the minority, then the frames for them will be looked for mediocre. For example: regularly bringing a summary of C-shnyh, embedded and verified developers to the position of web programmers is normal for them. As a result, it's easier to search for people in the forums yourself and dig the same hh in search of candidates.

There is also an interesting feature. I don’t know whether the disease is military or everyone else does it. If there are glimpses of reason in the eyes, then you can be harassed during the "bonus" mini-talks. From personal practice: I came to the programmer, and on the way to the study I was dragged through another 2-3, and they offered some game in the form of iron. Already enrages.

Do business, in this regard, better. Since the company specializes in one thing. Eychary are looking for specific narrow specialists and know how to do it. In addition, they know what the applicants need to say and save time for developers who don’t have to tell a lot about what the company does and why. Well, job seekers are easier, because they are told about the case and about their future work, and not about birds and other abstract things.

Overtime

All of them suffer, but, in personal opinion, there are a little more of them in the military commissar. Chertok also described an interesting piece in the second part of "Rockets and People" when they rushed for the first launch of the AMS to Mars:

On September 15, the state commission arrived at the test site, its chairman Rudnev asked Chertok: “Every night, when we arrive at the MIC, I see the same ass sticking out of the apparatus! Will she fly to Mars too? ”

Of course, comparing avraly of that time with modern conditions is not entirely correct and since the times of the USSR the situation has improved slightly, but the trend, I think, has been preserved. As for the payment of the overhead projector, it is equally modest for everyone, I often saw x1-x1.5 of the bid.

Safes

In the military it is, most often, stubborn guys, reminiscent of paranoids of the KGB-Schnick and using Soviet methods: prohibit everything, a piece of paper for everyone, and no constructive dialogue. In business it is different: if you are not a bank or something similar, then there are no security guards, as such, and admin-devops simply distribute access to the VPN upon request. If there are security guards, then they are more sane, they understand the goals of the business and do not limit much in their needs, although they can heap the wrinkles of access to gentle necessary resources.

But, thanks to these guys, you can learn a good deal about the basics of exploiting vulnerabilities, implementing backdoors, unconventional ways of organizing tunnels and other tools to combat "safe" pests. And all this is solely in the context of the performance of official duties. Sometimes it comes to ridiculous and without any of the above hacks, it is simply impossible to fulfill my direct responsibilities for debugging a piece of iron in a field or accompanying a product during operation.

In my practice, from the most innocuous, there was the following case: access to the internal network was strictly by cards and from the whole heap of internal servers via VPN there were things 3 available, and for full development it was necessary a few more, to which access was not given under any pretext. But at the same time there was a permit for remote work and the need to pick something up in the evenings. Therefore, it was necessary to forward the reverse tunnel and, using the VNC, sit on a work computer that has access to all the resources needed for development. It seems like doing what was allowed, but the way is contrary to common sense and safety rules.

Internet access

Voenka loves to limit him and cut in every way. It also does business, but it rarely experiments with programmers, since their productivity is greatly reduced without the Internet. In any case, for people with Unix, a root and at least one open port to the world - this restriction is a small problem, but you still have to pervert. From the pros: a great motivation to explore the network. Thanks to the limitations, I learned how to forward ports, make reverse tunnels, repeatedly put tunnels into each other, I understood why a user-agent is needed, and even learned about icmp tunnels .

Requirements

The defense industry has GOSTs and OSTs - this is very good and very bad. At GOST, you can refer to it and, most often, it is the ultimate truth, but in the business there is no such hard point of support and it turns out "the law is what the drawbar is: where you turn - it turned out there." Another question is that GOSTs sometimes conflict (an example, unfortunately, I will not give, I remember the fact itself), and in places it is directly infuriating what is written (as it was relevant 10-15 years ago, but the new edition has not yet been released), but In general, it is possible to live and common sense is significantly present there (the whole experience is based, for the most part, on the study of GOST related to ESKD, ESPD, in particular GOST 2.106, 2.112 and their surroundings).

In fairness, in business instead of GOST there are product managers and customers. But I still do not know who is more insane: a client or a government customer. For they both give out truly masterpieces. For example, in one of the TK there was a clause (not literally): "The software must promptly adapt to any changes in the requirements on the part of the customer."

With regards to GOST: life was the only time when there was an attempt not to follow them. In one of the contracts it was stated that it is necessary to arrange the documentation in such a way, despite the requirements of GOST and such. This entailed a considerable amount of time and effort, since all the processes associated with the documentation were worked out over the years and all the GOSTs were quoted by the staff as “Our Father”. When they began to find out how this is so, everyone looked at this agreement as a devil's manuscript and almost began to be baptized. As a result, discussed with the customer and cost. After this incident, I got a very clear idea of ​​the power of GOST.

The reasons

Still, I want to say a few words about why, as it seems to me, such a separation.

First, in the military office, physical production and software development are very often mixed in one place. And in the same manner, these things cannot be managed at all. What, however, does not prevent the military woman from doing just that.

Secondly, the Soviet ferment. As the saying goes, "the Russian spirit is there, it smells of Rus". Maybe this is purely subjective and does not seem so to others. Perhaps this is due to the banal painting of the walls to the middle with a characteristic line of darker paint at the interface. Or maybe it is because of the processes and standards that were laid in the USSR and have reached our time in a slightly modified form.

And finally, it is the main thing. Voenka more often adheres to the rule of "work - do not touch" (the quality of the "work", in this case, is not taken into account). Therefore, to shake and push it to change is much more difficult.