If you work as a contractor on a DARPA program, you generally get to keep all IP rights. I've used these programs to fund companies before.
You can always look at the latest programs - https://www.darpa.mil/work-with-us/opportunities
The people doing the actual research are independent research labs, universities, and small business. These are a combination of scientists and engineers publishing papers and taking the technology from papers to the field.
Also, darpa has real use-cases and those use-cases tend to be hard to solve ones, they aren't VCs looking for the next trend to vampire like a national security version of the TV show shark tank.
Granted, it is 2023, it is the govt, and it is tech/eng/sci holy trinity of profit so I wouldn't be shocked if I am off the mark with my assessment.
Edit: typo
My experience with them was positive. They ran that challenge really well and created a good environment for teams to compete. It was fun and memorable.
Pros: work on really exciting stuff. I worked on cutting edge squad-embedded robotics platforms and media forensics to fight fake news. Got to travel a bit for demos. It's very rewarding to know your work is making a real impact.
Cons: they don't call it DARPA-hard for nothing. Timelines are tight, the problems are research heavy with no guaranteed results. I did a lot of work bridging grad student quality code to production systems, which is its own kind of hell.
Like someone else said, timelines are tight, budgeting is a mess, and every phase you have to continue to justify your team's existence to bureaucrats or you get cut. The updates are in presentation form as well, but you have to abandon the "show don't tell" because the presentation is sent out to a bunch of people that don't attend the meetings afterward.
Overall it's a lot of money to work on cool stuff but I'm happy I'm not managing any of it.
I think there is a misunderstanding about what "show don't tell" means.
In a presentation like that tell means: "Our underwater robot is very stealthy." while show means "Our robot spent 2 weeks trailing a nuclear submarine of ours without the submarine being aware of our presence. Here is a picture we took of the submarine's sail, and here is the statement of the captain saying he had no idea." (Obviously this is a silly example, please don't spook people with the biggest, meanest sticks.)
Show means showing your results and tell means describing how awesome you think you are without evidence. It has nothing to do with whether or not your audience attends the presentation.
This is similar to fiction writing, where tell means that you describe what someone is like, while show is describing how that behaviour/emotion appears. For example tell would be "George was angry", while show would be "George banged on the door with two fists, his veins bulging with barely contained rage."
Or a secret recruiting method to weed-out those who wont pull whatever narrative is rq'd around said *'needs of the department head'*?
Recruiting is never secret and DARPA, DoD, and the IC are just like the rest of the tech industry and _always_ looking for scarce talent (except they have to pay less than commercial sector thanks to congressional laws).
You seem to have convinced yourself of only negative interpretations as being options, but there really is a lot of overtly beneficial research done by DARPA and a lot of people who really believe in the good they do involved. Not to say that there isn't also occasional bad actors, bad policy, or mercenary transactions, but those are the exceptions, not the norm.
I appreciate your reality check on this - I dont exclusively focus on negative, but I am sensitive to efforts which ultimately result in negative (sociallogically - such as deeper surveillance) outcomes, and while darpa does awesome science, and great leaps in tech - every one of these steps /tend/ to feed surveillance-state paradigms.
That being said, I'd like to hear stories from anyone who has worked there as well.
They have a nice model. The program managers (those who set research directions) are fixed-term IIRC, so they have very little incentive to politic, and instead can focus on seeing their pet program through to completion in the given time / funding.
One of their main "jobs" (aside from above), is to be an advocate for emerging tech among the military and civilian industrial partners to make sure it actually "becomes something".
To work at DARPA in this capacity usually requires a lot of successful R&D program management experience and some sense of grand vision. To work in a lesser, administrative capacity, including interacting with research partners, requires just a tad less, but on the average they've been exceptional, intelligent, and responsive partners for all the work we've done for them.
I don’t know about the admin vs director types split you’re talking about (at least in the PM ranks). Office directors generally provided top cover and some very sweeping research directions, but as a PM it was your job to come up with research programs that were roughly compatible, convince the office director it was, and then manage the technical execution with the performers and doing dog and pony shows when the pentagon called.
This guy was in grifting senate/etc for 48!!!!! YEARS...
https://www.ranker.com/list/facts-about-strom-thurmond/micha... (I do not know if these are true - but its not the first time hearing about some of these allegations)
Hear absofuckingloutely nothing back.
Get paid obscene levels of money.
Repeat.
Also, I'm assuming you need some kind of background related to the projects you apply to work on right?