I was part of this history, when I graduated in 2003 (marginal timing) I took a gig at Northrop in Sunnyvale. I grew up in Silicon Valley as the grandkid of fo

I was part of this history, when I graduated in 2003 (marginal timing) I took a gig at Northrop in Sunnyvale. I grew up in Silicon Valley as the grandkid of folks who lived in orchards (long gone by the time I showed up) and between this not-that-secret history of SV and idolizing the Skunk Works as a kid, I was pretty sure that I needed to be in the military industrial complex when I grew up. I consider it the nadir of my engineering career. I got to stare at an aging brown cubicle wall for 8 hours a day twiddling my thumbs, literally. I had joined a group of old timers (only) who had designed the Trident D5 submarine missile launcher 25 years earlier and had basically just been generating paperwork since. Along the way they had "cleverly" learned how to earn quarterly bonuses by just barely overspending their budgets, ~5% over, which then got renewed at whatever got spent. Over a few decades that's a lot of compound interest you gotta spend to get those bonuses, especially if you're doing absolutely nothing all day. You couldn't even read a book or check the net because it was a classified area and everything was locked down. Just you watching your life ebb away. The machine they created to burn cash was a paragon of government waste, it represented everything that's wrong with that industry and I hated it. After George W. Bush realized that what he wanted was more tomahawks and fewer nukes, the military budget for strategic weapons was decimated. (If you're gonna blow up Afghans in caves you should mete our force more judiciously, don't just turn the Himalayas into irradiated slag.) I got called into the bosses office and told "davee5, our budget got cut and you're the newest guy here, so unfortunately this is your 30 days notice." I was mad I got laid-off, but later profoundly grateful to be shoved out the door. I ended up pivoting into consumer electronics, which was an excellent move (and has since provided another ~18 years of career). I still have a pretty cool diagram of the [redacted] that I'm 90% sure was never classified and a Zip drive disk that I definitely should destroy, because it means nothing to me and I'm not sure if it would be a problem.