What's your day job?

[JesseK]

I program submarines for a living (for the past 6 years). It's a 27-million-SLOC system that has had a lifecycle of 20 years with 1000's of developers and multiple companies. We typically have to develop software technology "before it's time", like multi-casting in the 90's, real-time storage of terrabytes of data in the early 2000's, real-time on-demand audio, integration of Fortran, C, C++, and Java into 1 product, etc. There are literally 10's of thousands of sensors that are integrated into the final product, and literally no single company seems to want things to work the same as the other companies. It's both a nightmare and a joy at the same time.

Day by day, I generally solve the hard cross-platform problems. While I've moved away from pure development, I've found a comfortable niche in the government's initiatives to extend the life cycles of legacy systems by transplanting features and functions into areas they weren't originally designed for.

When I get to the robot during build season, I don't want to see a single line of code.