Ask HN: Has anyone worked at the US National Labs before?
Briefly worked at Johns Hopkins APL.<p>- PHd professors were basically seen as demi-gods. It was their way of the highway, down to the micromanagement level, and they make terrible managers<p>- Worked seemed pointless. "Here is some money to look into this, this will likely never get implemented"<p>- Implicit push for producing positive results rather than saying this won't work.<p>- Just dreary environment overall.<p>Also worked at NavAir at Paux River.<p>- salary was absolute shit for the amount of technical knowledge/work required. I feel like setting up the instrumentation (hardware/software) for an experiment in a wind tunnel is orders of magnitudes harder than writing a web service, but maybe thats just me.<p>- Got to work on some cool things, but gov culture and nepotism is too much. People with military experience automatically put ahead career wise above those without. No thanks.<p>>but nowadays I find their performance-review and promotion obsessed cultures to be really draining. Worse, those negative feelings seem to be leaking into my personal life and slowly alienating friends and family.<p>As someone that has worked for FAANG for 6+ years, this isn't an issue with FAANG but an issue with you. Its fairly easy to move around FAANG (although probably not right now) to find a niche job where you can cruise control on your salary without anyone bothering you too much.