Earlier quoted context omitted.
replace prison with getting fired and you have the same in the industry.
Clearly you've never been to prison.
Clearly the point is not the comparison between the impact of both experiences on the receiving end.
NSA’s top talent is leaving because of low pay, flagging morale, unpopular reorg
501–510 of 547 posts
Re: NSA’s top talent is leaving because of low pay, flagging morale, unpopular reorg
#502Or maybe anyone who understands cryptography enough to work at the NSA, understands bitcoin and blockchains enough to realize they can make a lot more money for a lot less effort in cryptocurrencies. Same with machine learning. The crypto bubble goes beyond money, it goes to creativity and brain drain from the rest of the economy.
Plus security. It's always been a skill in relatively high demand, but in the last ten years or so companies have been willing to pay whatever it takes to avoid getting hacked. My company brought in all sorts of consultants just after, coincidentally I'm sure, the Target CEO lost his job because of a hack.
Re: NSA’s top talent is leaving because of low pay, flagging morale, unpopular reorg
#503Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pensions just don't make sense mathematically. If they're solvent based on the state's investments, then the employee is getting a raw deal compared to having just invested the money themselves. If they're not, then I as a taxpayer am getting a raw deal by helping to pay for someone's retirement because they worked for a state agency decades ago. My state starts doling out pensions at 5 years. A friend of mine worked…
> I know it's a politically charged subject but I don't see why from an economic/mathematical perspective it's any better than moving the same investments to the market. It's worse on average, it's better at minimum (ignoring, for this analysis, municipal bankruptcy) > My state starts doling out pensions at 5 years. A friend of mine worked for a state senator in the 90s for 6 years. He's got something like $1200/mo g…
> that would require a base salary of $120,000 over the highest paid year of those six
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pension_spiking
piling up overtime and sick and vacation days saved over previous years, people are frequently able to 2x and more their salary for pension calculations.
Re: NSA’s top talent is leaving because of low pay, flagging morale, unpopular reorg
#504It 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…
Contractors do most of the real work. See Ed Snowden for example.
Re: NSA’s top talent is leaving because of low pay, flagging morale, unpopular reorg
#505Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're worried about living too long you can buy an annuity. It makes no sense for employers or the government to make that choice for you.
Mandatory safety net/insurance policies make sense because what we know from experience is that if you don't have a mandated program, some people will blow it off. And as long as we don't have the political will to let them die on the street alone in poverty, it'll be very expensive to try pick up the pieces of the mess once they hit the safety net. Especially if that's something like hitting the ER needing tens of t…
I fully agree with your statement, but would also like to point to the darker side of the coin, where some people managing the mandatory pension fund will probably make some nice amount of money out of it.
Re: NSA’s top talent is leaving because of low pay, flagging morale, unpopular reorg
#506Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're worried about living too long you can buy an annuity. It makes no sense for employers or the government to make that choice for you.
Mandatory safety net/insurance policies make sense because what we know from experience is that if you don't have a mandated program, some people will blow it off. And as long as we don't have the political will to let them die on the street alone in poverty, it'll be very expensive to try pick up the pieces of the mess once they hit the safety net. Especially if that's something like hitting the ER needing tens of t…
You've gone a bit off the rail here because most people in the US don't get pensions and we aren't forcing tons of people to die in the street.
I think you are confusing pensions with social security. Social security already provides that bare minimum mandatory safety net.
Re: NSA’s top talent is leaving because of low pay, flagging morale, unpopular reorg
#507Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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. Have you ever worked for government? I'm a civilian contractor in a software architecture role to a public safety agency in a state government. Half the "senior application developers" haven't written code in 15 years and don't know what a unit test is. There are…
I've worked onsite at a federal customer as a contractor (software developer). There appears to have been a big push over the last few years to replace contract sysadmins with civil servants (wonder why). So all of the good ones left for better paying jobs elsewhere, while the slugs converted into government employees.
At first I thought the sysadmins were deliberately slow-rolling all of my requests, many of which amounted to running a single UNIX command... turns out they honestly didn't know what they were doing (I asked you to fix the permissions on this directory - 6 weeks ago).
We've gone from:
Me: Can I have sudo privileges so I don't have to bother
you?
Them: No
Me: Can I have sudo priviliges so I can fix it myself?
Them: What's soo dough?
Re: NSA’s top talent is leaving because of low pay, flagging morale, unpopular reorg
#508Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. Have you ever worked for government? I'm a civilian contractor in a software architecture role to a public safety agency in a state government. Half the "senior application developers" haven't written code in 15 years and don't know what a unit test is. There are…
I have not worked in the government because I haven't been willing to submit myself to that level of inflexibility in my work. However, I know a lot of people who have worked or currently do work in government, up to and including innovation fellows at the federal level. I think you're responding to a point that I didn't make. I never said that government tech workers are top notch; in fact I know they generally are…
> And the rest of the tech industry tends to look down on government contractors about the same as government employees.
Yes, I'm still a government contractor because after doing this for 10 years, nobody in private industry will touch me. Once you get that .gov stank on you, it seems nobody else wants you (the polite term is "not a cultural fit", which I've heard over and over and over again) :(
Re: NSA’s top talent is leaving because of low pay, flagging morale, unpopular reorg
#509Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I know it's a politically charged subject but I don't see why from an economic/mathematical perspective it's any better than moving the same investments to the market. It's worse on average, it's better at minimum (ignoring, for this analysis, municipal bankruptcy) > My state starts doling out pensions at 5 years. A friend of mine worked for a state senator in the 90s for 6 years. He's got something like $1200/mo g…
> that would require a base salary of $120,000 over the highest paid year of those six https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pension_spiking piling up overtime and sick and vacation days saved over previous years, people are frequently able to 2x and more their salary for pension calculations.
> piling up overtime and sick and vacation days saved over previous years, people are frequently able to 2x and more their salary for pension calculations.
Yes—with a long career over which to save (especially since public employers tend to have vacation allocation which increases with years of service)—and an hourly wage rather than salaried job so that they are eligible for overtime, and participation in one of the systems that hasn't adopted controls to prevent pension spiking, sure.
But not with a 6 year stint in political staff position.
Re: NSA’s top talent is leaving because of low pay, flagging morale, unpopular reorg
#510> 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…
I love everything about this post. I've dealt with enough sociopaths in "leadership" positions (and can count the number of true leaders I've encountered in my life on one hand) that I automatically distrust and dislike anyone in an executive role (and such a person would have to work very hard to get me to trust them).
It's sad because I started out my adult life as a very trusting person...