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Vet hiring and the civ/mil divide: in which nittany03 threadjacks a threadjack
- Thread starter Jim123
- Start date
exNavyOffRec
Well-Known Member
disgruntled nukes on midwatch with access to an eductor?
Never found out. Don't care anymore.
exNavyOffRec
Well-Known Member
should have been a period not a question mark, if you were on a nuke ship it probably was, I worked with some idiots and some later confessed to doing shit like that.
I am currently struggling with pronouns. In my class of three, the other two dudes are very kindly and patiently teaching me about the AF. Naturally the Navy comes up, either because I have a question about how X is done here in the AF or because they ask me something about the Navy. I keep saying "we" in regards to the Navy and have to correct myself. "They." It's tough and very confusing.
The reason she thinks you were on a cruise doing nothing is because WE deploy to Italy, Greece, Malta, and Spain for two months at a time drinking beer! ?
My uncle (Gulf War Vet) invited me to join a large Veterans FB group after my retirement. The group is closed, invite only, and focused on vets supporting each other through info sharing. Anyway, someone posted last week asking if anyone else gets their PTSD/anxiety triggered by fireworks and hundreds (no exaggeration) of veterans responded with emphatic affirmatives. Even some who had never been in combat. So, it’s a thing. Even if most of us on AW aren’t affected. Not saying fireworks shows should be altered/cancelled. But I wasn’t aware it affected so many veterans until I had seen those reactions and read the comments.
It's definitely a thing for some people, some worse than others and some not much at all (the distant thump-thump of AC-130s doing their training used to freak me out a bit too). I still love my fireworks.
I got off active duty a long time ago (mid 90's) and as others said above, it was definitely one big step backwards in order to take two steps forwards. Not gonna lie, it was a difficult few years, and humbling but it turned out great eventually. Within a few years I had surpassed what i would have been making in the navy, and a few years later I ended up with a VP job with a fortune 100 software company, managing a division of engineers and developers - I am not a developer or an engineer, I was a business major prior to AOCS.
I've had a generally good experience with the civilians who had no clue about the military. As most NFOs would attest , the first thing to get used to is "so, you were a navy pilot? cool!". Then the inevitable discussion about what an NFO is, followed by "Oh! so you were Goose!" after a while, you get numb to it and just shrug.
I haven't experienced much negative military bias in my career, but that's not to say that it doesn't exist (i had a few awkward anti-military conversations, but i chalk that up to ignorance vs. malice) . In each of my positions since leaving the Navy, I've been given a lot of resume credit for experience as an officer, and a well placed sea story has a lot of value in the right context/audience. One time, a colleague introduced me to a client and said "he used to fly attack planes and drop bombs", and the client responded with "for who?".
Generally speaking, I think the biggest thing vets have going for them is the perception (accurate or not) in the civilian world that military guys can deal with a lot of crap, handle stress, and just get shit done. I was shocked to see how rare a skill that was in the civilian workplace. That and the general lack of accountability, and honestly an outright lack of character is far too common.
In my experience, one of the most common phrases that hiring managers say is "we can teach them how we do things, we can teach them the skills we need them to have, but they need to be the right kind of people to bring them on board." The fact that the military is one of the few institutions in the country that still has a positive approval rating works in your favor.
I've had a generally good experience with the civilians who had no clue about the military. As most NFOs would attest , the first thing to get used to is "so, you were a navy pilot? cool!". Then the inevitable discussion about what an NFO is, followed by "Oh! so you were Goose!" after a while, you get numb to it and just shrug.
I haven't experienced much negative military bias in my career, but that's not to say that it doesn't exist (i had a few awkward anti-military conversations, but i chalk that up to ignorance vs. malice) . In each of my positions since leaving the Navy, I've been given a lot of resume credit for experience as an officer, and a well placed sea story has a lot of value in the right context/audience. One time, a colleague introduced me to a client and said "he used to fly attack planes and drop bombs", and the client responded with "for who?".
Generally speaking, I think the biggest thing vets have going for them is the perception (accurate or not) in the civilian world that military guys can deal with a lot of crap, handle stress, and just get shit done. I was shocked to see how rare a skill that was in the civilian workplace. That and the general lack of accountability, and honestly an outright lack of character is far too common.
In my experience, one of the most common phrases that hiring managers say is "we can teach them how we do things, we can teach them the skills we need them to have, but they need to be the right kind of people to bring them on board." The fact that the military is one of the few institutions in the country that still has a positive approval rating works in your favor.
Nittany how was the tech boot camp experience? Strongly considering getting out and was considering going to a coding boot camp. Any benefits coming from a military / aviation background?
What do you want to use it for? I was a PM of a 50+ person, $12M cyber program.
BT BT
I am an 1835 reservist with only a couple hundred days on actual paid duty, and I still get the civilian colleagues telling me “Well you’re military so just do it like the military way” for whatever task or project is at hand. Ok boss. I’ll do it the military way like you said... which is just me drawing on experiences of me and a couple dozen other civilians (with normal but impressive day jobs) who pretend to be in the Navy one weekend a month, two weeks a year.
The better response, rather than look down on fireworks, is to encourage people to get treatment. PTSD is a curable disorder.
exNavyOffRec
Well-Known Member
I know there are those that are bothered by fireworks, I won't tell someone they should or should not be bothered, but don't use vets as a way to try and get rid of fireworks.
We all have our "thing" from when we were in, smells or noises that remind us of good or bad things.
I worked with a guy who was subs then got out and came back in but went surface, something had happened when he was on the sub such that the sound of running water when he was asleep would cause him to immediately be wide awake.
Did you mean to say treatable? Curable is not a word I’d use for any mental health issue. https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/post-traumatic-stress-disorder-ptsd/index.shtml
Yeah, having the gold standard in what the private sector refers to as Agile, which is the primary way software teams deliver value. Mil aviation and combat arms types are well familiar with the whole plan-brief-execute-debrief cycle that Scrum is essentially based on, and Scrum is the most common way of implementing an Agile mindset. Go figure, one of the people who developed Scrum was an Air Force F-4 pilot. My personal view is if you're a competent fleet aviator and you're willing to get your geek on and learn software, you can crush it as a Scrum Master and then decide where in the industry you want to go.
That said, bootcampers are generally at a disadvantage applying to straight-stick developer roles behind folks with a 4-year CS or CompEng degree. It's not impossible to overcome, but you're just not going to be able to get the same level of immersion in 4 months as 4 years. It's not just being about to write "Hello, world" or a basic script; it's being able to write (relatively) bug-free code that does the job and does it efficiently. Scalability is a thing; what happens when that code you wrote gets run tens, hundreds, thousands, hell, maybe tens of thousands of times in rapid succession? That's where the CS math geekery comes in.
Plus, depending on the shop, you may be responsible for the test automation of your own code, too; some shops don't have dedicated developers in test anymore. So now you need to understand how continuous integration/continuous delivery pipelines work, what test coverage is, and what needs to be hit in unit, regression, and integration tests. And make intelligent decisions about what gets tested when.
It's a whole nother industry, and in less than three years I've learned a shit-ton. Smart aviators with enough CS chops can thrive here. But I would highly recommend figuring out what your planned entry point is. Scrum Master? Product Owner? Junior developer? Then take the classes that will get you there. If you don't have a CS background, a tech bootcamp will at a minimum get you enough CS stink on you to be able to look at developer-adjacent roles, junior dev roles, or possibly junior QA/software tester roles at places that still make that distinction.
Manifesto for Agile Software Development
The Scrum Guide - The Definitive Guide to Scrum: The Rules of the Game
Spotify Engineering Culture - Part 1
Spotify Engineering Culture - Part 2
What @nittany03 said +1 about military background, scrum/agile, and everything. I ran the early career recruiting and programs team for an enterprise cloud software company. We actually did hire some junior developers and software engineers out of bootcamps. What set them apart from the pack and allowed them to compete with the CS majors from Michigan, Harvey Mudd, and Berkeley was that they had real-world project experience on teams and they could show their work (or parts of it) on platforms like GitHub. They had built stuff like grocery delivery time optimization programs or free games that people actually played and generated ad revenue. It can be done, but you gotta “speak the language” so you can make it through multiple rounds of technical interviews (now virtual) and also come across as someone the interviewer wants to spend time with (see the “McKinsey airport test”).