US Air Force chief software officer quits
I&#x27;m honestly surprised this is on HN, but it&#x27;s good that it is.<p>I worked with Nic on and off for almost his entire tenure while I was CTO for Kessel Run and I can state with full confidence that this is at best him mis-representing his importance and the problems with the DoD IT; and at worst this is his attempt to spin his being fired (or being asked to resign ala Nixon) by the incoming Secretary (timing here is not just a coincidence).<p>A couple of core points, that are important to keep in mind that have nothing to do with Nic&#x27;s character, integrity, communication style or technical capabilities (which is a separate and important topic but not suitable for this public forum IMO):<p>- The CSO position was made up by him, it&#x27;s not related to any GSA Schedule and it had about the kind of charter you would expect for the position: Namely ill-defined and loosely empowered.<p>- There was no office of the CSO in the sense that it was not congressionally funded, had no budget, no personnel and no real authority for writing, implementing policy or actually doing engineering.<p>- Nic never held a clearance, and as a result was never actually involved or aware of most of the programs that he intended to impact<p>- His primary mission seemed to be to push any organization that was developing software for the USAF to immediately adopt microservices architectures, containers&#x2F;kubernetes and a couple of very specific &quot;DevSecOps&quot; practices - and specifically to the specifications that he approved&#x2F;suggested. Make of that what you will.<p>That said, a lot of what he says is true and IT&#x2F;network infrastructure, development and test etc... in the DoD is far from modern and in some places completely broken. Other places, where it matters a lot it&#x27;s like nothing you&#x27;ve ever seen or will likely see in the commercial sector for decades.<p>Bottom line, I suggest taking this tirade with an EXTREME amount of salt.