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

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

#281

Post by bonesss »

snowwrestler wrote: post #126
eadmund wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's popular to say things like some government employees are "folks who can't hack it in civilian life," but there's basically no evidence this is true. First of all, let's make sure we look at the full scope of civilian life with a sober eye. Anyone working the counter at your local Post Office could easily work the register at any grocery store in your town. And any medium to large company has plenty of internal p…

> Why? Because everyone loves to believe the worst about the government, so it's easy to sell voters on the necessity of a shitload of burdensome rules.

There's also a fundamental difference between you being cavalier with your money, and me being cavalier with our money.

Being tax payer funded changes accountability, investment horizons, and access to capital. The CEO of Twitter gets to put whoever he wants in wherever, and eats the costs if it works bad, but to ensure responsible fiduciary practices with our collective wealth we, the taxpayers, demand less aggressive and efficient practices to limit corruption and incompetence.

This is a conscious social decision, to move slower and more carefully, and will hopefully be minimized with increasingly robust Civic Tech. Alternative federal structures would historically point towards oligarchies and widespread corruption.

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

#282

Post by walshemj »

snowwrestler wrote: post #179
smallnamespace wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no data to offer, but I do have a simple, heuristic model that might hint at GP's thinking process: 1. tolerance to short-term career uncertainty varies greatly between individuals (e.g. changing jobs, moving, having money in the bank to cushion the cashflow turbulence) 2. the gov't largely underpays in dollars in return for high career stability 3. if level of tolerance to short-term disruption is strongly po…

The movers and shakers of government in the U.S. are the elected officials and their political appointees. A lot of them actually do come from private industry or academia. The staff of government have to work within whatever decisions get handed down to them from the political process. The political process does not always prioritize staff flexibility and initiative. To the contrary, it's a favorite pastime of polit…

Which is a problem with the US civil service that relatively large numbers of mangers are political appointees rather than career civil servants - the blatant abuse of handing out diplomatic postings to unqualified campaign donors is deeply corrupt.

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

#283

Post by vidarh »

walshemj wrote: post #272
vidarh wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or termination in the private sector is rarely and indicator of quality. In 23 years in the private sector, I've only once had reason to fire someone because they didn't do their job properly, and I've seen exactly one more developer fired in the companies I've worked in for similar causes. The thing is, in most cases you can move people "sideways and effectively down" - there are always grunt work that needs to be d…

Yes I was a branch secretary for the M&P union in BT and in all my time I only came across 2 cases where making some one redundant on grounds of NCI was probably correct and one of those was probably due to health issues which leaves one real case. what I did see on a major scale was manipulation of the performance system to force people into leaving.

My ex works HR in a major bank, and they have scheduled redundancies every 3 months, whether or not things are going well or not. A large part of her job is to reign in managers that create too great legal risks by coming up with total bullshit made up justifications. E.g. they'll come and insist someone isn't "performing" a month after having given said person a glowing annual review and without having tried anything to get them to improve, and it turns out there's been some conflict or other, even though they insist that has nothing to do with it. People can even convince themselves that someone is suddenly totally useless even when the paper trail they themselves has created to demonstrate that the person in fact performs very well is sufficient to get them crushed at tribunal...

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

#284

Post by vidarh »

UncleEntity wrote: post #273
majewsky wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know that's just anecdata and not representative, but: Donald Trump.

Dude got himself elected while being opposed by both political parties and the media...and he's a billionaire to boot.

He's a billionaire who has spent decades producing a return worse than if he'd just put the money he got from his dad in a fund. His fortune is not a demonstration of ability.

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

#285

Post by sofaofthedamned »

ENOTTY wrote: post #109

By way of comparison, GCHQ personnel seem to be leaving for 4-5x salary from big tech companies[1]. So do the math and figure out what the GCHQ folks are being paid. Also, GCHQ has hired 494 contractors for 71m GBP[2]. [1]: https://sites.google.com/a/independent.gov.uk/isc/files/2016... , page 40 [2]: Ibid, page 70

I live in Cheltenham and pre-Snowden may have entertained the idea for working there. I tracked a job they were advertising for nearly a year - they were offering ~32k for a Linux expert with years of experience. Good luck on that one. I think they eventually converted it to a contract role, but even then I wouldn't entertain it.

Another friend worked at the big James Bond building in London, was regularly taken around the world at short notice to do security things, and was on less than 40k. He loved that job more than anything in the world but literally couldn't afford to live there so went contracting for 5x the money. Apparently in the government a large part of salary reviews is based on (age + seniority), so you're waiting a long time for a decent uplift that may never arrive.

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

#286

Post by fergie »

vonmoltke wrote: post #16
speby wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one cares about government pay scales. You don't have to work FOR the government to work for the government. Many top NSA specialists work for contractor firms and do earn tremendous compensation from their employers. Those employers contract with our government for totally uncapped contract sums. Obviously the contracts have to be reviewed for budget and capex limitations but otherwise no such thing as a salary c…

> 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…

I recently got roped into one of Palantir's recruitment events (because I am a pathetic sucker for free beer), and they were making a really big deal of how they billed by _outcome_ rather than _time_. At the time I just thought that they were trying to differentiate themselves from Accenture/KPMG/Deloitte/etc. but I see now that billing by outcome is also a nice way to get around billing caps on hourly rates.

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

#287

Post by pferde »

vidarh wrote: post #255
peoplewindow wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is fine if the performance is low but positive and if, as sibling comment points out, your organisation can absorb large amounts of waste. When an employee's performance is actually negative, i.e. they make things worse rather than better e.g. due to personality issues, then moving them around isn't going to work well.

It's worked well in every company I've worked in. The one person I fired is the only one of hundreds of developers I've worked with whose performance was actually negative once we'd tried to shift people around, and while some were probably "wasteful" for a while until we found work they could do that justified their salary, most were not. A lot of the time people are just not in the position that's right for them.

> A lot of the time people are just not in the position that's right for them.

And a lot of the time the right position for such a person is in a different company.

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

#288

Post by bonesss »

kodablah wrote: post #158
snowwrestler wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Folks interested in a taste of how the federal government manages people can take a look at: https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/ Much of the information in there carries the force of law; that is, a hiring supervisor cannot legally deviate from the process even if they think it is dumb and hurting their chances of getting the best candidate. My example of the subordinate who can't just get promoted has happene…

Wouldn't all of these (legal) rules, red tape, stories from your two personal friends, etc support the original argument that they employ patriots or the less qualified? Otherwise, why would a highly qualified person without any preference towards civic duty subject themselves to all of this when they have their pick of jobs? Especially in IT.

> why would a highly qualified person without any preference towards civic duty subject themselves to all of this when they have their pick of jobs?

Well, all other things being equal they wouldn't. We cannot infer that those who are civic minded are more/less competent from that though.

In practice there are numerous reasons why highly talented people are willing to sacrifice from organizational flexibility and freedom of expenditure work in those organizations. The easy one is meaning. You don't have to be civic minded to get more out of helping cancer researchers get research data than making Accounting Excel Plugin v12.3. Variety and scope of challenge is another. Few companies can offer the kind of influence that being on a national standards org can. And since the gov can't really be salary competitive, it tends to compete on work/life balance - pensions, paid vacation, flexitime, sane office hours, no unpaid time on-call over weekends, etc...

For people like us though the answer is even clearer: cool toys. Oak Ridge National Laboratory works at scales so large I've literally had to google what the metric prefixes they were using meant as they were so huge as to be unfamiliar. Data centers, tools, software packages, etc chosen for cost and market fairness, and not just because some VPs golf buddy got wood from a slide deck...

--

Me, personally, like many here could be making roughly an extra car a year by working at RandomConsulting Co. I would wake up earlier, yell at my family more, be sitting in random office environments with smelly people constantly, lie-smiling while blowing smoke up customer asses in dumb meetings routinely, travelling 15 hours more every single week, be in airports all the time, and fundamentally trying to trick customers into building my resume while also being forced to follow their crappy tech choices and crappy tech environments...

Instead I'm building highly scalable open source, license free, BigData solutions on Kafka, Kubernetes, and Akka driven by F#. We're saving stupid money we get to use for schools and hospitals instead. I can tell my boss to suck an egg if I want, wear comfy clothes, and there are formal processes in place to protect my decision-making... Worth the financial "hardship" to have a pure, tech-driven, position, IoW.

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

#289

Post by fergie »

MrFoof wrote: post #146
DontGiveTwoFlux wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The contracting company takes a significant cut of that.

For hard numbers, 80% markup of wages paid out is typical (at least for large contingency recruiters and IT contractors), though it can be higher. $250/hr billed usually results in $125-140/hr in the contractor's pocket, and $110-125/hr for the place that sent them out.

In my experience its about 30%(ish) to the worker gross, which means that the worker gets about 20% after tax. It can be slightly higher or lower depending on the situation.

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

#290

Post by Faark »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #150
natch wrote: post #122

There's a lot of blaming of external factors being injected into this discussion. Namely, government pay scales, and the Trump factor. But let's not forget the NSA's own self-inflicted wounds as well. Let's see, here's what I remember: * mission creep * overreach * LOVEINT * massive collection of bulk intelligence with dubious justifications * withholding information about 0 days it wanted to stockpile for its own us…

Yes, you forgot one thing: * We need a powerful spy organization to compete on the world stage. This is an unpopular truth that people in our circles tend to forget. Rome was an influence solely due to the success of their military. What do you think will happen when ours becomes ineffective? And the NSA is a key part of our military. Intelligence is everything. I think it's good the overreach was exposed, but I was…

Spy organizations are indeed a necessary evil.

But not at all cost. There has to be effective oversight, checks and balances and public discourse about its limits. Not sure about the first two in the US, but here in Germany they fight that tooth and nail. And their certainly wouldn't be any discourse without Snowden.

They certainly did that mostly to themselves and i hope the only lesson they learned isn't "next time we shouldn't get caught"

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