They tend to use Greenhills tools. Just the memory partitioning&#x2F;object space thing in that is bizarre and buggy. But it does provide complete isolation of chunks from each other.  When I brought up the single-vendor problem inherent to that, I think it ended my career at that company. &quot;But we need our vendors.&quot;<p>RTLinux will be treated with open source FUD. Doesn&#x27;t matter if you escrow it or not - a single licensing slip would be a security breach. Since you can&#x27;t successfully argue that this is specious, you&#x27;re done before you start.<p>It&#x27;s impossible to understand the way this plays out without seeing it up close. I don&#x27;t know how it is in all DoD contractors, but the lifespan of an actual programmer in the one I saw was five years. If you tried to stay technical, you&#x27;d get a PIP and be laid off in the next round unless you made yourself indispensable to the customer. Doing that is tantamount to a life sentence - you have to actively politick to get on another program and that&#x27;s unlikely.<p>Charge numbers are life or death.<p>You might be left alone if you got an advanced degree and published certain sorts of papers. And if you do stay technical, you&#x27;ll be subject to death marches.<p>And of course it&#x27;s all processes optimized for maximum paperwork; waterfall and crushing technical debt. Each action item is budgeted and when the budget runs out, you&#x27;re done regardless.<p>You are expected to angle towards program management to feed the beast. Even then , it&#x27;s still &quot;up or out.&quot;