It’s an interesting and very subjective decision, and can be influenced in either way depending on the specific project I suppose. Last night when I wrote the post I was thinking that I wouldn’t do anything military, but then on my drive to work earlier today got thinking about some of the really cool/innovative stuff that could be worked on and right away started to flip-flop on my initial opinion.
A friend of a friend is a chemical engineer at the DSTO (Defence Science & Technology), and spends all day testing new formulas for ‘maximum kill ratio’ and the like. He’s only a researcher, and didn’t have any problems at all with chatting about it (no specifics of course) but I guess they develop a disconnect from the engineering aspect to the real-world purpose of their work.