I wrote a feature article on conspiracy theories among engineers.

What if, instead of “paranoid,” those engineers are really just “perceptive”?  Conspiracies like these folks are suspecting would obviously require a large number of excellent engineers to perpetrate.  No meaningful black helicopter operation could ever get off the ground without some good solid engineering behind it.

So, how about it conspiracy engineers… are you out there?  Are you retired? Have you left the fold?  Talk to us!

How does a conspiracy career in engineering compare to a more conventional one?  Is the pay better?  Are there benefits?  Do engineers ever leave conspiracy employment and join the mainstream?  Does your company employ both “regular” engineers plus “black ops” engineers whose job it is to monitor and control the “regular” ones?  If so, do you park in the same employee parking?  Do you eat in the same cafeteria?  Does your company softball team always let the other ones win to avoid attracting unwanted attention?

Are there technical conferences?  You know, ones where you’d present papers like: “An improved method for simultaneously monitoring source code progress and inflicting emotional damage on subject software developers.”

Are conspiracy engineers trained alongside more mainstream “planned obselescence” engineers?  (The guys that go in at night and plant fatal flaws in between the high-reliability elements the REST of us are trying to design into our systems?)

Surely some of you are retired or otherwise no longer encumbered by the need for secrecy – so fill us in.  We want to understand how some of this stuff works.