I graduated with a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and/or Mathematics) degree, but no job offers. Science, Technology, and Maths are broad with no obvious applications. Engineering is very specific, so only one or two engineering fields are in great demand in any given year, then engineering students flock to those fields and those fields become overcrowded with job seekers and largely devoid of job openings, while new fields open up with huge demand and no graduates. So almost all of us STEM graduates were not seeing the vast array of jobs we'd been promised when we chose our majors.
But then I got an offer: the US government was offering defence companies $20,000 in cold, hard cash for every STEM graduate they hired, so they hired me.
My first day on the job, I was sent to Orientation with a Vice President. He told me, 'We don't need any T or E, only S and M, Sales and Marketing. Your quota is $250,000. If you don't bring in at least $250,000 in a year, you'll be fired. Now where are you going to go to get a contract for at least $250,000???'
I said I didn't know, did he have some numbers I could cold call? He handed me a thick book.
'You want me to start cold calling these numbers?' I asked.
'NO!' he thundered. 'These are numbers of customers who are already claimed by one of our salesmen, and we do not allow any of our salesmen to poach another of our salesmen's customers.'
(This was a long time ago, now he'd have to say 'salespersons' or 'salesmen and saleswomen', but back then, we had a few saleswomen, but very few, and you don't correct a vice-president over his gender usage.)
'Then whom do you want me to call?' I asked.
'You can call any number that is not in this book,' he answered, then added, 'I can see you're not a salesman, so I suggest you resign immediately. All the time you stay here, you'll just be wasting your time and ours. This interview is over.'
So I left his office. But I had read my contract, and if I quit, I had to repay the US government the $20,000. Or else. I wasn't sure if I could go to jail if I couldn't pay, or just hand over whatever money I got from a burger-flipping job, or what, so I did not resign, and they had me dig holes and fill them up, hoping I'd quit, but I didn't quit, I stayed for a year, then they fired me.
During that year, I met Chuck, and I asked, 'So how, exactly, so you get contracts?'
Chuck told me, 'My best friend in high school got a job as a government contracting officer, and he always gives me $100,000 a year, and that's my quota. I work just two months. I have to help my friend write the Request for Proposals, then he helps me write the proposal, then he recommends me for having the best proposal and coaches me on how to defend my proposal. Then I have to defend the proposal, and the committee has always accepted his recommendation, since he accepts their recommendations to give their contracts to their friends. That takes one month.
'Then, 10 months later, he coaches me on how to write the final report, and I have to present the final report saying we accomplished far more than we promised in the proposal, far more than what was required by the contract, and I get my $100,000 payment made out to the company. That takes the second month. My boss and his boss keep telling me, "Look, you only work two months a year and earn $30,000. If you worked 12 months, you'd earn $250,000 a year, and you and the company would be much better off." '
I looked up the company salary and bonus policy myself. Basically, the company policy was that, if you bring in $100,000, your salary and bonus come to $30,000, but if you bring in $600,000, your salary and bonus go way up, so you get $250,000. My friend continued:
'But I know I only have one friend who's a contracting officer, so if I worked my tail off for 12 months, I'd still earn just $30,000. So why would I waste my time working, when I won't accomplish any more or earn any more than I do barely coming into the office for ten months?'
We had card punch operators back then, and programmers. Officially, the US government did not want salesmen, they wanted STEM graduates doing advanced weapons research, coming up with formulae for new, advanced systems, but really, they just went to lunches and dinners with their contracting officer friends and talked and talked and got contracts, so the US government said they wanted STEM researchers, but the system only rewarded good salespersons.
For a real line of code that was part of a program that solved difficult Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematical problems, the total cost of research, development, programing, and punching the card really was at least $100, and that's what the company charged the government (a $100,000 contract meant 1,000 punch cards).
In reality, the programmer's only job was to write the code that would print out all the numbered lines of code, and, at the presentation of the Final Report, the salesman projected page after page of the print outs of the punched cards, showing there were 10 cards for every $1,000 the contract was worth (million dollar contracts had to have 10,000 lines of code, none of which would compile or run, except the few lines that got the computer to print out the lines punched in the cards, and no one knew enough about programming to know anything was wrong, or if they did, they had every incentive to say, 'I can see that this is brilliant science and coding that will lead to a new, very advanced weapon system.'
Our company did what was called 'basic research,' the underlying scientific research that would later be the basis for the development of actual weapons systems.
I saw the laser: they packed the target with explosives and a radio-controlled detonation system. As the target flew by, some distance away and fairly high up, they shot the laser at the target, someone pressed the button on the detonator, and the target exploded, 'totally destroyed by the advanced laser weapon.'
Ditto the advanced particle beam weapon system.
So the US will have a public defence budget of $1.5 trillion this next fiscal year, and weapons systems less capable than the Iranian weapons systems, let alone the Russian or Chinese weapons systems. And that $1.5 trillion is only the public part, the Classified TS/SCI/NOFORN//BBR part of the Defence Budget is almost certainly much, much larger (but we'll never know how much it is or how it is used).
And because of the huge budget overruns and deficits, gold has gone from $2,000 an ounce a few years ago to almost $6,000 an ounce this year, and this is likely to continue as the real value of the US$ keeps dropping and dropping, thanks to the US government wasting all the money needed for real research and development on fake weapons research.
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