Why I'm in the Army Reserve – an explainer for my friends in tech
The DoD could certainly use some technical help, and the leadership from ex (or current reserve&#x2F;national guard aka &quot;R&#x2F;NG&quot;) officers and NCOs in tech jobs benefits the tech industry.<p>The issue is this - the American military Reserve&#x2F;NG is not very truthful, in my experience, with the time commitments. The marketing slogan is &quot;a weekend a month, two weeks a summer&quot; of time commitment, or something to that effect.<p>In reality, as a National Guard member you&#x27;ll see commonly see month-long &quot;activations&quot; to go supplement active duty military training in Louisiana in February. You&#x27;ll see 9 month deployments as R&#x2F;NG are in fact part of the military and will deploy, and you&#x27;ll go over there with a fraction of the training, funding and equipment but the same mission requirements as the funded, trained, and equipped active duty unit you replaced. This is somewhat akin to a FAANG hiring a suite of contractors and subbing them in to take over Google Search for a quarter or two. When your R&#x2F;NG Soldier has domestic issues, you as the R&#x2F;NG are on the hook to go help them quite literally. The list goes on... All for pretty bad pay, so-so healthcare, and a civilian employer who starts having an aneurism about the lack of managed expectations from you as it&#x27;s not a weekend a month and some summer vacation time.<p>To bring this back to tech - the situation above is very well known, and it coincides with the military&#x27;s efforts to heavily ramp up its technical expertise via &quot;software factories,&quot; civilian corps, direct-commissions into elevated ranks at higher pay if you&#x27;re a technical SME like the military does with civilian doctors, and reserve units focusing on cyber or software development.<p>Unless the military is able to fix that above, which anyone who has spent a shred of time in active duty military can confirm exists in one form or the other, the upside-down logic of R&#x2F;NG service will keep good technical hires out... unless they really need the healthcare. The talented ex-military who go into tech stay out of R&#x2F;NG efforts because of this, as serving actively would damage their career.<p>I hope it is different in the UK!<p>Edit - I will put a hopeful ending to this: the PLA&#x27;s (CN mil) hackers go to &quot;work&quot; in an officer tower in a city, wearing civilian clothes, and (at the risk of speculation I don&#x27;t enough about probably) work a 9-5 or if they&#x27;re up late, it&#x27;s for a mission. I say this with some background in the US version of ex-mil in tech: the moment the DoD and Federal agencies enable its technical hires to go to work in NY, Seattle, or SF in a fiber-equipped office building (or really just not rural West Virginia&#x2F;North Carolina&#x2F;Alabama&#x2F;Mass), can meet at least 60% of private sector pay with some tax benefits perhaps, and gets sane about past civilian marijuana use re: getting a security clearance, they will have more technical patriots signing up than they can handle processing. It&#x27;s really just this simple. The FBI was trying to hire talented CS students out of college with a great opportunity to go work in their brand new facility for tech that they built in.... Huntsville, Alabama.