I'd like to talk about something that I very rarely hear anyone talk about. I have worked in software with the defense industry at times in my life, and there is a phenomena that very few seem to realize.
In virtually every defense contract I have seen, employees work based upon 'billable hours'. You have a charge number that you use with your time card - you just fill out what charge number you worked under and enter your hours. Seems innocuous enough.
These billable hours eat up a portion of the budget for the program - this is by design. Essentially, when the program is bid, the company involved will say something like "We will need $10,000,000 for the software portion of this task". The government says "Okay - fine - but we want to see a record of all those billed hours before we will pay you."
This means the government will only pay those funds as the hours are billed. For each hour billed, the company will get (something around) a couple hundred dollars, out of which they pay the charging employee a portion as the employee's salary.
Again, this may seem innocuous - but the phenomena that this creates is a terrible thing. Companies now make money by billing hours. A billed hour is profit. This means it becomes extremely important to get those hours billed, regardless of whether there is actually work to do or not. Schedules for software are structured around how many hours are available - not how long it is to do the task - which often leads to way too much time. It is a near opposite to the commercial industry in this regard.
Many times, I have seen engineers - typically lower ranking engineers - moved to programs where there is little to no work but are rich in budget, and this is done just so those engineers can be used to burn billable hours. The workers are in a sort of languid hell - they are required to come to work, are required to be available - but they have nothing to do. Nothing. They are payed to sit around and languish. Their job is to bill hours.
This may sound "great" in theory - who wouldn't want to get paid for doing nothing, some might say. In practice, it is a demoralizing hell. I have seen so many miserable people in the defense industry. I have seen people sleeping at their desks. They'll come in and sit around as required; nothing much to do but they still need to make a living. They are bitter, depressed, and unhappy.
This awful phenomena leads to other wastes, a big obvious one is meetings. Since those billable hours need to be eaten up in someway, a popular means to do it is crapload of meetings. People get really good at talking to eat up the time. I have had to attend so many worthless meetings with people going blah-blah-blah to no value or progress, and it's just all time wasting bullcrap so we can claim we did something in billing more hours.
Now, these companies do have 'overhead' charge numbers that are their cover story. Employees are 'officially' told that, if they have nothing to do, then they should charge these overhead numbers. However, unofficially, employees are told "but, if you do that, it will look very bad on your performance reviews and you will find a lot of trouble...". This means of course that no one is honest about it and everyone charges billable hours. Charging even a single hour on overhead without talking to your manager first will get your manager irate at you. It's just not done.
I believe it is quite reasonable for a country such as ours to have a powerful defense industry - I doubt many would disagree. However, the means through which we have implemented it is awful, wasteful, immoral, and terrible. The industry needs a deep restructuring and the repercussions of the 'billable hour' needs to be evaluated and changed.
I hope this post wakes a few people up to this wasteful aspect of the defense industry. This needs to be known.