Oh totally, I had some really fun times and met some great friends in the Navy, and I'm glad I did it. I also gained a ton of technical knowledge in a very short amount of time, which was fantastic.

It wasn't the rank structure or chain of command that left a bad taste in my mouth, it was the layers and layers of approvals and paperwork needed to do something as simple as run a security audit on my servers, or set up an intrusion detection system on a spare PC, or even keep an extra set of backup tapes in a separate location on the ship.

I wouldn't expect it to be crazy like that at Google or any other progressive tech company, of course.