Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

541–547 of 547 posts

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

#541

Post by RepressedEmu »

itronitron wrote: post #153
Tyrannosaur wrote: post #68

Might it also be because of the cost of overcoming their conscience? I understand that there are multiple groups in the NSA that do things other than illegal surveillance and hacking, but I would have an even higher price than other companies' offers I would require in exchange for my moral values if the NSA ever offered me any position at all...

still less than the cost of someone overcoming their conscience for working at Facebook

Only on HN can you find people who think the NSA is worse than Facebook.

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

#542

Post by paulddraper »

pc86 wrote: post #513
hueving wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Social Security is a pension (defined benefit after a certain point as opposed to defined contribution).

Right, but a very small pension.

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

#544

Post by jessaustin »

taejo wrote: post #532
jessaustin wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of private sector employees manage to deal with the fact that their CEO is an asshole.

For some agencies, it's not so much that the CEO might be an asshole (whether or not the president is an asshole is a fairly minor detail, IMO, as long as he can do the job). This is more like a pharmacologist working at a company making a vaccines being taken over by an anti-vaxxer.

I don't understand that analogy. I don't keep up with all the news, but my impression is that Trump hasn't done all that much. He has rolled back some regulations that originated in executive orders, left some positions unfilled, while eliminating some other positions. Do you mean to say that the conflict is between his "this bureaucracy will be smaller" and the public servants' "this bureaucracy must be larger"? The growth of the bureaucracy is not the purpose of any of these bureaucracies, even if some bureaucrats have convinced themselves otherwise. Even if you don't care about bureaucracy size per se but only want to see more regulation, "moar is better" is also not a sensible philosophy of regulation, in a government that is theoretically representative of the will of the electorate.

ISTM Trump governs exactly like any other republican would govern, which is nearly the same as any democrat would govern. His vilification and resulting election are a property of the media/content landscape more than they are due to anything particular about him. I stand by my initial impression, that the "problem" is that Trump is an asshole.

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

#545

Post by hueving »

pc86 wrote: post #513
hueving wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Social Security is a pension (defined benefit after a certain point as opposed to defined contribution).

Ok, but nobody in the US calls it a pension so when you refer to a pension everyone is assuming the one you got from an employer.

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

#546

Post by mturmon »

vonmoltke wrote: post #332
mturmon wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I worked for government contractors for almost 15 years (until October 2016) and participated in proposal efforts ranging from $750k SBIRs to a $1B+ multi-year prime contract for a radar system. Every one had established billing rates for labor, based on the type of employee rendering the labor. How is this misleading?

It's misleading because, for experienced + well-qualified people, the upper ranges of the established rates are rather high, and therefore don't significantly constrain the hourly rates of those people.

So for instance, if, within a given discipline like "security", there are 6 experience levels (1 = fresh-out undergrad, 6 = most senior), and within those, 4 maturity levels (20th thru 80th percentile, say), then the 80th percentile of, say, level 5, will be a very high rate.

Because it's HN, and the comments above were referring to boutique security consultants ("top NSA specialists work[ing] for contractor firms"), I assumed that's who we're talking about. Cybersecurity, especially, has become a domain where institutional constraints have been lifted in the last few years - it requires less on-paper experience to get up to the "level 5" above.

On the other hand, and in agreement with your comment, the aggregate labor rate for a large contract (I'm sure $1B qualifies) could not be too out of whack with industry norms, and this would be a significant constraint on rates.

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

#547

Post by yters »

someguydave wrote: post #496
yters wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do we keep secrets from enemies while telling all secrets to our citizens? Such an idea does not seem to live in the real world.

Wait, which is the greater good? Keeping government secrets or holding the government to account? To me, the latter is obviously better.

Certainly, and the government has much abused its secret keeping ability. But, sometimes secrets matter. One example I know of is we had almost captured Osama Bin Laden in Tora Bora by tracking his cell phone. Then, a senator told the media we were tracking his cell phone, and we lost him, dragging on the war for many more years. Or, during WW2 if Germany had known we'd cracked Enigma, we would have lost a tremendous advantage. And, if the Germans had stolen our nuke technology and beat us to the bomb drop, the war could have turned out totally differently.
Post reply on HN