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Notes -
Ha. One of these days, I might do a full-on effortpost ("Office Space: Confidential Edition! All the jokes you've heard about government contracting are at worst imprecise and at most significant understatements"), especially if I leave, but TL;DR: we're the only lab in the country that performs a high-priority task for the government (and, in some ways, has a deadman's switch: things will not be great if we vanish, although they'll be far less bad than your average MoP would assume). We're not federal employees, and so not subject to cuts there, but are a permanent fixture, and the only reason people get fired or let go are for violations of actual policy like "flushing a cell phone down the toilet instead of reporting it to security, and then lying about it when given a chance to come clean", or "falsifying time cards". As I said, we're a top priority, so even if the government cuts back everywhere else, we'll at worst be in a hiring/salary freeze. And its combination of "classified information systems", "work that if done wrong causes major disaster potential" and "deliberate tradition and founding of being more focused on details, safety, and human responsibility than NASA even before NASA existed" makes it impossible for us to be replaced with AI on any reasonable timeframe, based on what I've seen of internal rollouts and hinderances. I think last time a formal submission with any amount of GPT content went up the chain, the response from on-high was... rather scathing, even by their standards.
As for what I do, I'm a bog-standard technical project manager, but everyone there is about as immune to the future as I am.
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