Former tailhooker, current reserve aviator, and civilian Scrum Master chiming in. I'm not a developer. I just herd them for a living, kind of like one does with cats . . .
To all the young techies here . . . what kind of job
would give you an end goal or meaningful purpose? I presume you interviewed for the internships or jobs. Did they promise things they didn't deliver? Did you just pick an internship because your major said you had to (no disrespect; I did that as an undergrad)? Did you end up in "any port in a storm" during the job hunt? Again, no disrespect. That's how I got my current job; I still learn a lot every day, and most of my co-workers are nice people.
The corporate world will always be there. Should you choose to pick Navy Air, you will gain skillsets that are extremely valuable in the private sector, but not ones that are immediately marketable. You'll gain life skills that put you head and shoulders above your peers in a lot of ways. Tech loves to talk about Agile, and in Naval Aviation, you will be immersed in THE gold standard of it. PBED is the acronym I believe the weapons school types use nowadays; Plan, Brief, Execute, Debrief. But the private sector will largely be too ignorant of the military (or even opposed to it) to appreciate those skills until you demonstrate them in person.
And make no mistake, it will be at the expense of your technical resume. If you choose the Navy, you are choosing to commit 8+ years to another industry. Folks who continue in the industry will be bucking for senior dev or maybe architect positions by the time you've got your feet under you again. And if you can keep up your skills as a side hustle, great, but there will be a LOT demanded of you in the interim that will take priority. You'll come back with experiences you can sell as a Scrum Master/Agile Coach/people manager to a point, but expect to have significant rust technically. I got my degree in 2003. Facebook didn't exist outside campus. Google was a startup. I went on the job market again in 2014. Git? Oh, that's a thing now. CI/CD? Oh, that's a thing now. Waterfall project management? WTF is that, old man?
What matters is that to me when I was 23 . . .
none of that mattered. I was blessed enough to have a dream to fly jets as a kid, and get to chase that dream on into my 30s. There's an air museum in Northeast Ohio not 15 minutes from the house I grew up in. I went to it growing up when it just got started. It now has a Prowler in its collection. Depending on what the active runway was the day it landed there, that Prowler may have spent its last minutes or seconds of flight over the house I once grew up in dreaming about flying jets. And to top it off, as fate would have it,
I've logged flight time in my own hometown's Prowler. There's a lot of randomness that led to that bit of synchronicity, but I never would have been able to say that if I flew a desk in my 20s.
You have to ask what it is that you really want. If you are not creating something that you intrinsically find valuable with people and processes you enjoy working with, well, as a Scrum Master, that bugs me, because my job is to try to make that happen. If you've been bitten by the flying bug, chase it! Now! But understand two things. First, you will pay a price compared to the person who follows the prototypical Resume Golden Path. Your rewards will come like mine did, with things like a logbook that may have flight time in your hometown's museum piece, the missions you flew, the people you flew with, and the impact those had. Second, most aviators know who they are from a very, very young age. If you want gold wings, you will be competing against folks for whom flying is a calling, and that level of sacrifice is needed to earn them and keep them.
Ultimately, I can't tell you yes or no, because you either know in your gut that you are called to Naval Aviation or you aren't. This isn't a job, it's a lifestyle, and you can either commit to it or go find a better company to do dev work for. Neither is wrong; it's what is best for you.
