The Divide Between Silicon Valley and Washington Is a National-Security Threat

This is a must read article for IT people working for DoD. Interesting reading and very telling of the differences between the DoD world and the private sector IT world (aka "Silicon Valley").

The article speaks to the three main divides/gaps between Silicon Valley and Government service that I instinctively knew, but never saw detailed all in one place:

1. The civil-military gap - only 0.5 percent of the population serving on active duty. The viewpoint between Silicon Valley and military defense is skewing.

2. The training gap - gap between US policy (law) and reality. Most people in Congress passing the laws never spent a day working in the IT world - most are lawyers who don't know how private industry works as evidence by the Facebook headings in April 2018

3. The generational gap - young minds in the business sector are starting global companies (Facebook, SpaceX, Microsoft, Apple), while in Washington they are making copies and getting coffee.

The line that stood out to me the most was in the civil-military divide section. "It should come as no surprise that when people live and work in separate universes, they tend to develop separate views." This is something I hadn't thought too much on until I started my retirement transition a couple years ago and had to "civilianize" my LinkedIn profile and resume. I started realizing that the military does indeed speak a different dialect that's slightly different from private section English.

It's a very interesting article and I highly recommend reading it.