Honest question: What's the skillset of a hacker at NSA?
Not that I'm targeting to become one, just curious as to how someone would become a hacker.
NSA’s top talent is leaving because of low pay, flagging morale, unpopular reorg
111–120 of 547 posts
Re: NSA’s top talent is leaving because of low pay, flagging morale, unpopular reorg
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Those employers contract with our government for totally uncapped contract sums. No, they don't. Billing rates are fixed based on the experience and education levels of the people working on the contract. If the government says they won't pay more than, say, $250/hour for a security expert that is all the contractor is going to get, and that in turn limits the amount the contractor can make. Pay at government contr…
You have glossed over and simplified how contracts and billing rates work, your synopsis is not accurate.
You have been down voted, but your observation is correct, and the parent comment is misleading as to rates. Source: I’m a government contractor and line manager.
Re: NSA’s top talent is leaving because of low pay, flagging morale, unpopular reorg
#113Not surprising. They’ve gone from having the perception of being the most elite organization for hackers to more of what is described in Good Will Hunting [1]. Perception is everything. I say this as someone who dreamt of working at the NSA for most of my high school years, but would now never even consider it. Edit: although I bet a lot of it is the 4x-5x salary jump you can get in cyber security jobs by having the…
I think it's become pretty clear recently -- looking at what Snowden leaked and at the trouble the Iranians had with their centrifuges or at the way Comey knew that Sessions was going to recuse himself -- that the NSA _is_ the most elite organization for hackers/crackers. It's hard to be certain from the outside, of course, but when I look at what Henninger et al have written about what they're doing... well, it's a…
The NSA leaks we're at once impressive in their technical scope, but largely just things we knew we're possible if you threw engineers at the problem.
It's likely we didn't get the really juicy bits, but the vast majority of the stuff we learnt about was just operationalizing things we already knew.to be possible.
Re: NSA’s top talent is leaving because of low pay, flagging morale, unpopular reorg
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Serve Trump and the runaway deep state, or serve spam. That's bleak. That's not the only two options though.
Not to get into the politics of it, but isn't the"deep state" supposed to be the entrenched government employees that work against Trump?
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Re: NSA’s top talent is leaving because of low pay, flagging morale, unpopular reorg
#115It seems like it's pretty hard for the government to compete with private industry in compensation. Federal pay grades are capped by Congress, and the top grade is around ~$150k a year [1]. And note that since it's the top of the scale, you have to start people off lower so that there is salary progression. Pretty sure a top cryptographer or security expert should be worth several times that, especially if they are a…
The problem is that we can (and should!) raise government pay scales, but we must also make it easier to fire people (or manage them downwards) for incompetence. Government work is for two types of people (and there's some overlap on the Euler diagram): patriots, and folks who can't hack it in civilian life. It's not just a 'perception of gov't incompetence': it's a widespread phenomenon. Government employees tend to…
Pedantic addendum, many government employees are still civilians.
Re: NSA’s top talent is leaving because of low pay, flagging morale, unpopular reorg
#116It seems like it's pretty hard for the government to compete with private industry in compensation. Federal pay grades are capped by Congress, and the top grade is around ~$150k a year [1]. And note that since it's the top of the scale, you have to start people off lower so that there is salary progression. Pretty sure a top cryptographer or security expert should be worth several times that, especially if they are a…
NB, that article is slightly out of date, the current top rate for GS-15 step 10 in the DC area is $161,900:
https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries...
Re: NSA’s top talent is leaving because of low pay, flagging morale, unpopular reorg
#117It seems like it's pretty hard for the government to compete with private industry in compensation. Federal pay grades are capped by Congress, and the top grade is around ~$150k a year [1]. And note that since it's the top of the scale, you have to start people off lower so that there is salary progression. Pretty sure a top cryptographer or security expert should be worth several times that, especially if they are a…
The problem is that we can (and should!) raise government pay scales, but we must also make it easier to fire people (or manage them downwards) for incompetence. Government work is for two types of people (and there's some overlap on the Euler diagram): patriots, and folks who can't hack it in civilian life. It's not just a 'perception of gov't incompetence': it's a widespread phenomenon. Government employees tend to…
The legal floor of difficulty will always be greater with Federal employees as opposed to private employees as Federal employees have a property interest in their job. In other words, no Federal employee can be fired without some sort of paper trail. This is a constitutional Due Process issue and not something that Congress can easily address.
That said, I think the difficulty--or at least the consequence of the difficulty--is exaggerated. As a practical matter every large organization must contend with red tape, much of it self-imposed. Most government agencies, much like most corporations, impose more red tape than the applicable law necessarily requires. Consistency and repeatability demand process. Red tape is merely an epithet for process that appears wasteful, especially out of context.
IMO, government salaries suck because of the politics: Congress is more likely to increase expenditures if that money is laundered^Wfiltered through private contractors. Bureaucratic inefficiency is just a convenient narrative for why Congress prefers outsourcing. Over the past 50 years almost all the increase in expenditures for Federal work has gone to private contractors. The size of the federal civil service has increased by about 20-30%[1] since the 1960s, but budgets have increased several times that[2].
[1] https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/data-analysis-docu...
[2] See, e.g., https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/omb... from https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/omb/budget/Historicals
Re: NSA’s top talent is leaving because of low pay, flagging morale, unpopular reorg
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
> if the NSA is going to spy on us, wouldn't you like that to be as secure as possible? I have a friend who worked for the NSA. We had a heart to heart over drinks about a year ago. She asked what I thought about her working there. I responded, honestly, that if I didn't know her personally I'd be starting to wonder if she was, for whatever reason, unable to pass muster at Google et cetera . Not the best decision to…
> if I didn't know her personally I'd be starting to wonder if she was, for whatever reason, unable to pass muster at Google et cetera. Not the best decision to drop that after a day of drinking together. But I'm glad I did--it was apparently the nudge she needed to quit. So she stopped being an indirect servant of popular will, and started selling ads. Great. > She now works in the private sector and is thrilled wit…
Would you please not post this sort of nasty snark? Even if you're right, the acid rots the container here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You break the HN guidelines quite a bit like this, so we'd appreciate it if you'd clean up your act.
Re: NSA’s top talent is leaving because of low pay, flagging morale, unpopular reorg
#119Might expect this to ultimately lead to privatization of these services. Which is black mirror territory.
Re: NSA’s top talent is leaving because of low pay, flagging morale, unpopular reorg
#120the CIA funded Washington Post sullying the good name of those noble domestic spying NSA'ers? Faker News
Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments here?