As firms from startups to Big Tech continue to lay off workers by the tens of thousands, the Pentagon and its defense contractors see a once-in-a-generation chance to fill their ranks with tech talent—and newly unemployed workers aren’t opposed to the industry switch.
According to a recent survey by Morning Consult, one-third of tech workers say they are more likely than they were a year ago to consider working for the military-industrial complex, and nearly half of tech workers are reportedly okay with their work being used on the battlefield.
Mike Kanaan, a U.S. Air Force fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and a prominent defense technology commentator, says the survey “quantitatively affirms” a shift he’s sensed for months. Last November, when Kanaan wrote a LinkedIn post calling on laid-off tech workers to consider defense jobs, he received a slew of messages from interested workers—many of whom had no government or defense experience—asking where to find government job postings. “And that was just characteristically new,” he says.
That gives military recruiters a rare window of opportunity to snap up tech talent. “These people have lost their livelihoods; they can’t wait a year to find a new job, so we have to seize on that moment,” Kanaan says. “The faster you move, you create this nice, virtuous cycle where others are seeing the stories of people being hired in government, and then they will apply.”
In January, the National Security Agency (NSA) announced what it called “one of its largest hiring surges in 30 years with openings for over 3,000 new employees”; nearly half of those roles were in tech. That followed a three-month campaign during which the agency reached out to laid-off tech workers over LinkedIn. “We absolutely are trying to take advantage of these tech layoffs,” Molly Moore, the agency’s deputy director of workforce support activities, told Nextgov. The Department of Veterans Affairs also launched an IT hiring spree last December, during which it also contacted laid-off tech workers. That’s on top of an expected new federal government rule that will soon pay special higher rates for IT roles.
The defense sector, with its buttoned-up culture, rigid pay scales, and controversial war ties, has historically struggled to lure workers away from shiny, remote-friendly tech companies swimming in VC cash. Last year, a McKinsey report found that as many as 50,000 positions were unfilled across the 15 largest aerospace and defense companies, with “the overwhelming majority” of those vacancies in tech roles.
The biggest reason is probably money. “There’s a disconnect in what the government and defense sector pays versus what the private sector pays for talent,” says Chris Rice, an executive search partner whose clients include tech companies and defense firms. A Google senior developer’s total compensation, for example, is estimated at $375,000. That’s well beyond the highest possible civil service salary—$226,300—and that’s for the Defense Secretary.
But there are signs that for tech workers, pay is no longer everything. According to the survey, 60% of tech workers say they’re actively or passively looking for a new job, and the factor that they’re most likely to consider as important isn’t salary or benefits, but job security. Rice says that’s “absolutely an opportunity” for defense employers, where there’s “a lot more stability because you’re not going to have as many fluctuations with the market. Pros tend to be at those companies for 20, 30 years.”
And while tech workers have made headlines for protesting military contracts at companies like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, “we don’t actually see that come up as often” while recruiting, says Rice. Even when technologies end up used on the battlefield, “it’s typically framed around preservation for the soldiers using that equipment.”
Still, the defense sector has a long way to go before it can resolve its tech-worker shortages, says consultant Matt Schrimper, who authored the McKinsey report. “If you look at the number of lines of code in aerospace platforms, it’s doubling every four years, and that has enormous implications for the talent needs of A&D (aerospace and defense) companies,” he says. “But if you look at the actual flows of talent to A&D companies, they’re losing twice as many people to tech companies as they are attracting from tech companies.”
So don’t expect the layoffs to send a flood of programmers into the military, he says. “Whatever happens in the current environment is a blip in the larger trajectory of the talent challenge that A&D companies face.”
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