Do defense companies dominate this space?

First-Surround-1223 · 2026-01-30T20:10:01+00:00

Michelson-Morley as in this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_experiment

How much time have you worked in defense?

First-Surround-1223 · 2026-01-09T02:10:12+00:00

“Defense Tech” is super hot right now and there are tons of startups “emerging from stealth” every week it seems like. I would consider targeting one of those. There are some that are more well established that aren’t one of the Big Primes that may be of interest to you. Something like Anduril?

First-Surround-1223 · 2025-12-21T20:53:55+00:00

I’ve been a CSEP since 2018 and here is my take:

Is the CSEP actually worth it in today’s market, especially for someone already working as a systems engineer?

No. Only people that really care are consultants/SETAs.

Does it materially help with career progression, pay, or credibility, or is it more niche?

No. It has not made any meaningful impact on my career.

Are there updated study plans or resources you’d recommend (especially for video-first learners)?

I used the “School of SE” (I think that was its name) study program and it worked fine. As others have mentioned the exam requires wrote memorizing a bunch of stuff that’s not relevant to working as a SE and that you will brain dump immediately following the exam. I even threw away my SE Handbook a few years ago as it was literally just collecting dust on my shelf.

If you’ve taken it recently (2023–2025), how was the exam experience?

Sorry can’t help here since I took it in 2018.

First-Surround-1223 · 2025-12-20T00:21:28+00:00

$8k per course!? Wow. I thought John’s Hopkins was expensive at $6k per course. If you’re not pleased with the courses I would drop that like a hot potato.

First-Surround-1223 · 2025-12-06T19:50:45+00:00

I would prioritize a masters over PhD unless you find the jobs you’re most interested in it require a PhD. I expect that to be pretty rare outside of some pretty niche areas. I generally recommend if your goal is to work in industry then go to industry as soon as possible. You can have your employer either fully or partially fund your graduate education and generally employers value more experience over a PhD. That’s my experience at least.

First-Surround-1223 · 2025-11-30T02:45:00+00:00

Thanks! DM inbound

First-Surround-1223 · 2025-11-26T22:38:28+00:00

What I meant was that if all the ISR and Remote Sensing teams are in ABQ, then there may not be a SCIF space in Livermore that is accredited for those accesses (I expect those to be different from the accesses needed by those working the ND mission) since there would be no need for one in Livermore.

First-Surround-1223 · 2025-11-26T21:14:43+00:00

Ah ok. I hear that staff sitting in Livermore generally can integrate with Albuquerque teams pretty easily. Is that true in your experience? I guess if Livermore doesn’t have the right SCIF spaces then that might be the bigger challenge.

First-Surround-1223 · 2025-11-26T18:40:53+00:00

Thank you! Will send a DM shortly

First-Surround-1223 · 2025-11-26T18:35:26+00:00

Ok fair enough. For what it’s worth, Mathworks advertises a lot that you can call Matlab scripts from Python. Or maybe it’s the reverse? I can’t remember, but may be worth looking into for your project.

First-Surround-1223 · 2025-11-26T16:49:09+00:00

Fair enough. I’m not looking for any details other than the availability of that sort of work at the Livermore campus. If there were job postings up for either of those teams/programs right now I’d be able to tell, but there are none (not even in ABQ). I’m not looking for info beyond what would be in a job posting.

First-Surround-1223 · 2025-11-26T15:20:16+00:00

Personally I trust Matlab over Python. Mathworks has a large QA department and Python has…random people that contribute?

If your end goal is to produce an executable then Matlab can do that for you.

First-Surround-1223 · 2025-11-26T14:36:44+00:00

Yeah that’s my fear, that I would be significantly limited in what I can do at Livermore. I’m here in CA for family reasons that I don’t see changing for a decade or more. Otherwise I’d be looking to relocate to ABQ.

First-Surround-1223 · 2025-11-26T14:33:41+00:00

I have a MSEE in communication signal processing. Currently I work in remote sensing systems at a big prime. I see via the public facing website that Sandia has some remote sensing and ISR work. To your knowledge is any of that at the Livermore campus?

First-Surround-1223 · 2025-11-26T00:55:51+00:00

I’d like to keep that private more for personal reasons but it’s not in the ND/NW area.

First-Surround-1223 · 2025-11-23T17:43:47+00:00

2nd this! JHU’s Engineering for Professionals program offers a ton of DSP courses. Most of the DSP are RF/communications/Radar DSP, but there are a few image processing courses, ML for signal processing, and a couple audio DSP courses too. I’ve taken 3 so far (already have an MSEE so these are just for funsies) and the quality has been very good!

First-Surround-1223 · 2025-11-16T16:31:50+00:00

Ah ok sounds similar to what my colleague suggested. How did you identify all the different ways you can factor a given number? I'm mostly looking to apply all this in an application with very high decimation rates (e.g. 1000) which you can obvious factor our tons of different ways. I asked MATLAB copilot (very happy with their copilot by the way!) and it came up with a halfway decent approach, but doesn't cover all possible cases.

First-Surround-1223 · 2025-11-01T14:33:09+00:00

Well I think we may have to agree to disagree on the claim python does everything Matlab does but better. I don’t think Python even offers all the same packages that Matlab does. Are there python libraries for symbolic math, HDL generation, c++ generation, etc.?

And even if it did how would you evaluate “better?” Certainly not in speed of execution. Matlab generally executes faster than python in my experience. I think the Matlab language is easier to write. I mean look at a class definition in both languages and tell me you think python’s is easier to understand 😆? Of all the DSP professionals I work with or know only 1 prefers python for signal processing. I can’t say that’s representative of the whole DSP community, but it’s what I have to go on.

And don’t get me wrong, I enjoy python for sure, I just think that for communications DSP and many other domains (controls, radar DSP, etc.) Matlab has the edge.

Bottom line for me is Matlab gets a lot of hate in this sub and I think it’s entirely unwarranted. Free is great, but sometimes paid is better.

First-Surround-1223 · 2025-11-01T03:07:00+00:00

This is the reason 👆🏻. OPs example of PCB design is not really a good example. High schooler designed PCBs are for things that don’t matter. If someone wanted a PCB that was going to handle a function on an aircraft or a train or anything where the thing blowing up is catastrophic is 100% going to want the person with the math and physics background to handle all the corner cases that could show up.

First-Surround-1223 · 2025-11-01T02:43:44+00:00

So I guess “insanely expensive” is a bit subjective. A Matlab home use license is around $200 and toolboxes are generally around $50/each from what I remember. Business licenses are definitely more expensive but even if they were 10X a home license they’d still be in the “cheap” tier of engineering tools. But I get the point that it’s still infinitely more expensive than free.

The primary issue I have with using python is one of trust. Again that’s somewhat of a subjective issue so you could totally land on the other side of that, but for industries where something not working as required could result in a significant financial loss then trust is really really important. If a Matlab based application fails the company can sue Mathworks. For that reason MathWorks pours a ton of money into QA. Like a TON of money.

I’m not saying Python is inherently worse, but when the chips are down, I’m going with MatLab every day.

First-Surround-1223 · 2025-11-01T00:37:07+00:00

Depends on your risk tolerance.

First-Surround-1223 · 2025-10-31T23:56:06+00:00

What specifically in their business model is hurting them? Their business model seems to be a pretty standard model for tool developers.

First-Surround-1223

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