Pros
Stable income, if you are streetsmart about it and know how to cruise like most within the larger organization of MINDEF/SAF, you’ll realize you can earn by doing the very bare minimum - and get the most out of your actual per hours of work. It’s a really cushy job if you don’t care about your technical competence and just want a stable income in this job market.
Cons
Vast majority of management are technically unsophisticated as they were all transferred from non-tech related roles. Yet they still exact the same hierarchical, patronising, tell-me-your-problems-but-I-know-better-than-you leadership style, despite knowing extremely little about tech and only using empty buzzwords. They pretend to listen to technical practitioner suggestions, but do not take them seriously due to rank difference. Instead they’d rather listen to non-technical higher-ranked folks and put these people in critical decision-making positions for ‘exposure’. This results in stupid decisions made that have been well-advised for and against prior by said technical practitioners, with disastrous and already anticipated consequences. Funnily enough, they’ll still be shocked about the consequences, and in a state of panic will pander to the technical practitioner to fix the mess they created - only to repeat the cycle again. Don’t try to keep proving your technical competence thinking it’ll change things - they’ll only take you for granted and continually exploit you. The more you do to prove, the higher they see your benchmark performance to be without change to your position or pay - and you’ll only realize when you’re doing the work of a full-stack eng + platform eng + technical product manager + AI powerpoint monkey —- all for the pay of a junior software engineer. They will say they value competence over rank, but in truth they are only patronising - they would rather take the words of a non-technical higher-ranked bootlicker than a trained technical practitioner. The MDES scheme, thought to recognize competence over rank, is a sham. The additional payout recognizing skills is only tied to irrelevant certificates and bootcamps because the policy was written by non-technical folks who copy-pasted these certifications from god knows where.