US DoD heavily controls what can and can't be installed on their stuff. To make matters worse each branch and organization has their own approach to how they control what gets installed.
Sometimes it's just the path of least resistance to use what you already have.
I remember putting in a request to install Python. It took me 6 months to get a response of no. I had the opportunity to appeal with more information on the use case, but I just did it in VB for Excel at that point.
What platform do you use to teach the course? I've been teaching an ML from scratch course for junior devs at my company and think it'd be useful for others.
Dude run from your current employer. I actually transitioned into software dev after working as a Mech Eng after 2 years and I started at $120k. With you experience I feel like you could do way better.
I've tried pitching similar roles in Government on the DoD side of the house for knowledge workers like Software Dev and Data Scientists.
It's hard to get traction though when the folks making the decisions feel threatened that a 25 year old is going to be making the same as them and be the same "rank".
I think part of the solution needs to be creating it on a separate scale than GS, similar to an SL or ST position, but geared specifically towards knowledge workers. That's a solution that would probably require congressional involvement though...
I've come to realize that the promise of a 50/50 split between technical work and management after getting promoted to a data science technical lead manager is not something that is feasible within my org. Unfortunately, I'm at an organization in which the only way up is for ICs to move to management. So I'm leaving to another company that has much more runway for IC career progression.
I've got a great relationship with my current employer, so I've mentioned this career progression issue to them in my exit interview and it's something that middle management is tracking, but getting corporate leadership on board to change their thinking is difficult since our revenue is driven by billable work on a man hour basis. This creates an incentive for people to build teams of direct reports under them and grow a business line/contract to increase revenue in order to show value and accelerate career growth.
Until the company can get more service contracts where they're selling software/licenses/support instead of butts in seats, I don't see this paradigm changing any time soon.
Very interesting how business models drive things like this. Obvious in hindsight, but still interesting to think about in terms of incentives driving org structure.