NSA’s top talent is leaving because of low pay, flagging morale, unpopular reorg

The other side of this is the stability that a government job provides to low to middle income classes.

The southern states where I grew up and went to college both lauded people who were able to secure government jobs. No matter how grueling or toxic a work environment becomes and no matter how inefficient workers become -- everyone stays in those jobs for the pension.

In cities and areas where education in literacy is higher it's as if the market "pushes" that desire out, and the perception around having a government job is largely negative (excluding contractors).

I wish there were a way to increase competition for gov jobs and change the perception of them without resorting to privatization.

Good?

> The brain drain has been so pronounced that at one gathering in 2016 of the agency’s elite hacking division, one individual raised the concern with Rogers directly. According to several people familiar with the exchange, Rogers disputed that there was any increase in attrition and told his employees that they should stop complaining and get back to work.

Remember this. As someone who started their professional life in 2000, lived through 2009, and went through a multinational's "reorg" (mass-firing by geography, several 10s of thousands of people), let me tell you :

As soon as you notice there is general discontent, and people no longer care enough about their jobs to ask questions like this to the top brass, it is time to make sure you have another job lined up. You can get better jobs this way, and the hammer will come down.

Above all, know that this Rogers guy is fairly honest. And yet, he directly contradicts the Washington Post. He's an exec, and he has ONE job : do exactly what his superiors say without bother them.

He (once for me it was a she) will NOT give you any piece of information you do not already have. They are there to get people to work together.

By "motivating".

By lying.

By cheating.

This means that when it comes to the health of the company and your future job prospects, a sober chat with the cleaning staff will yield more useful information than an hour long "fireside chat" with a highly placed manager. Not because they know a lot, but simply because they don't lie, and they know a little. An executive is not talking to you, except in the way a vet is talking to stray dogs at the impound. They don't respect you, they can't do anything for you, they don't like you ... and they're very, very good at hiding this (just look at financial presentations on youtube, say of the IBM CEO, knowing that she has for years, every 2 months or so, fired 1000+ people, with the constant online reports of them getting cheated out of severance. Listen to her, then think about the kind of person who does that. You half expect to get free candy and a hug every 2 minutes or so when listening to her. Or listen to Clinton talking, knowing that he's the sort of man that threatens women to have sex with him. Think about what those people he talks to really mean to him)

I work in the public sector, in Denmark, but I think a lot of the myths around public IT are just that, myths.

We have some of the best talent in our country. We pay them less, but a lot of people prefer working in the public sector for a variety of reasons. Some are idealists who want to build a better society, others like the flexible hours and the paid sick leave for their children, others again like the relative stability or safety or the fact that they get to work on big projects.

I think the bad image comes from the fact that our scandals are public. When the banking sector does a big project that fails you typically won't hear about it. When the government fails, you'll be reading news articles, blogposts and the likes as well as having researchers from prominent universities trying to pour their take on what the government needs (typically to ask said researchers).

The public sector does fail more though. I think there was a study in the 00's that showed around 75% failures on major IT systems in the private sector and around 85-90% in the public sector. But then we have to digitize an un-digitizable law, so I think this is only natural.

In my municipality we don't do complete failures often, but we don't always succeed in implementing as successful as we wanted, leading to a lack of benefit realization.

That being said, we operate around 370 different systems 50-70 of which we've build ourselves, and most of these are working fine.

I think I'm a nice example. I get headhunter a lot, and I could be making a lot more money in the private sector, but I prefer the public sector because I have Children and since my job comes with paid lunch breaks I work two and a half hours less per week. On top of that, I'm not expected to work 40-50 hours a week despite being in management. I sometimes still do, but then it's typically for interesting projects such as heading the digital voter registration process during elections.

This may be very different in America, but I suspect that the NSA would be able to attract the best of the best on image alone.

Because you can do things that would be illegal in private practice, like developing and deploying systems to hack into computers, phones, cars, telecomm equipment, etc.

There is a type of work and a class of problems that can only be legally pursued in a federal agency like the NSA.