By the Numbers: What it Means to be a Coder at Lockheed Martin

Quick. What comes to mind when someone mentions coding? Computer nerds and math geeks hunched over, staring at their computers for hours at a time? Boring, tedious projects reserved for the less creative among us? That’s probably because, to outsiders, that seemingly jumbled mix of letters, numbers, spaces and symbols might not be the most welcoming of sights. But coding has been making the work world comeback of a lifetime lately. There’s a reason Glassdoor named Data Scientist (and a bunch of other coding-focused jobs) to its “50 Best Jobs in America” list for 2017.

Whether or not you’re already convinced of coding’s cool factor, we’re celebrating this underdog-turned workplace rockstar with a by-the-numbers breakdown of what it means to be a coder at Lockheed Martin.

8 Million: Lines of software code required to power Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Lightning II.

About 150: Number of high school students who compete in the Code Quest hackathon each year.

44 Zettabytes: The amount of data expected to be in the world by the year 2020. That’s 44 trillion gigabytes for some perspective. Data scientists at Lockheed Martin are charged with interpreting that data to make the company’s innovative ideas a reality.

One Million: The number of web attacks that happened in 2015, according to Symantec’s latest Internet Security Threat Report. They also found that a whopping three quarters of websites were vulnerable to an attack. Lockheed Martin’s budding Incidence Response Team is on a mission to decrease that number with—you guessed it—coding.

80 Percent: How many fewer hours it now takes employees to find and repair damage to Lockheed Martin’s Hybrid Airship. It’s all thanks to a robot named Spider that roams the airship’s surface to find and patch small pinholes. Spider frees up time so employees can focus on more creative projects. Behind all the smart robots helping Lockheed Martin’s humans do their jobs better is a whole lot of smart coding.

Just About Everything: The amount of amazing work happening at Lockheed Martin that boils down to science and math.

Suddenly have the urge to code something? Log onto WayUp and apply to work at Lockheed Martin now.