Recent Developments

Eran is not feeling very well and he could not sit today to finish the VHDL experiment. Nevertheless, we have till the end of May, and we don't have too much left to do. I stayed at Haifa today, because I thought I was going to meet Liat (my Algo Design partner), but I now got a call from her telling me she would not be able to make it, because there isn't a ride to the Technion from her workplace, today.

So I'm returning home, after I eat lunch today. I did not sleep very well today, so I'm a little unfocused and cannot concentrate. I should remember to send everything that I worked on the Technion back home. Let me se: the LM-Solve CVS repository (which I'm sending back and forth), the extra-new FCS lecture summary, homework in SICP 2, the previous homework in CG...

Hmmm. Better keep the computer on, just in case I forget something. I wish the Com-Net Lab had a publicly accessible source control server, on which I could put all my stuff.

Working in a Defence-Oriented Workplace

I keep getting contradictry opinions on what will it take to work in a company that oriented around military projects. According to Orna Agmon, I can forget about it because I did not serve in the IDF. According to my mother, I need to volunteer for one year in the IDF. Now, Roy said that all I need to do is pass a security clearance test.

Many of the Israeli Info-Tech jobs have something to do with the Army. Someone I met who works in El-bit said that some things are developed in five different places in the world at the same time, while three of them are in Israel. :-) That sounds a bit too illogical for me.

In any case, I'm not sure I'd like to work in such a place due to the high secrecy factor involved. I like to tell people about what I do or what I did. So far, I can tell everything I ever did in the past without me proving to be illoyal in some ways to my previous workplaces. I don't think secrets scale, but the army seems to think they are a necessity. It is also possible I'll become nervous because of something that happened in my workplace, which I'll have trouble telling about to my friends and family.

The Ironic thing is that some "Atuda'im" (People who do their university degrees before the army service, and later serve as officers for a longer time) are allocated as administrators in something that requires little if any of the scholastic knowledge and proficiency. And then the army complains that it still lacks engineers, even though, there is a surplus of them (at least in some areas) in the Israeli market.

Check the following link for something I wrote regarding why I think there should be a voluntary recuirement into the Israeli army. And ironically, the latest situation has only made it clearer for me on why it is necessary.