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

Believing in what the organization does (which could include several different narratives about why its work is good and/or legitimate and/or necessary)

Recruitment via channels that civilian firms aren't using and offering people an educational and career path they didn't expect to have

Recruitment via family, friend, and teacher channels

Wanting to get to know lots of secrets

Wanting to work with smart people

Wanting to work with fancy hardware (for some subspecialties)

Wanting to have one's unusual abilities appreciated and put to use

Wanting to be paid to work on cryptography at all before the 1980s

Wanting to be in a spy movie/novel

Wanting to get to perform real attacks against real people and organizations and not go to prison for it

I know I've met people in all of the first three categories, and I imagine I've met people in the other categories and not known it.

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

LOL @ the idea of anyone in private industry giving me the opportunity to do that.

These are some of the smartest, yet most normal people in the world. They don't go apeshit about free food or Silicon Valley startups. You'll never get fired, and you can raise a family perfectly fine, especially with the great schools in the area. After about $70k in salary, people are generally happy anyways. They're perfectly happy with dealing with pure tech challenges, because it's interesting to them.

It should also be clear that the NSA does everything per law. The NSA doesn't spy on US citizens. Remember the Snowden leaks revealed filters that removed US citizens communications. Why would a TOP SECRET program have filters to remove US citizens communications if they were trying to skirt the law?

I can't recommend the NSA enough. NSA caused me to understand that nothing is impossible and that everything in tech is small stuff and manageable. After the NSA, I rapidly did impossible things. (want me to list them?) I honestly don't understand why anyone would do obvious & routine things at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc., when they could be doing more awesome & surprising things at the NSA. It's always fun to see Google come out with something the NSA did years earlier.

Finally, and it should be obvious, going to work in a tie is a lot cooler than going to any job where people wear hoodies... but the NSA doesn't make you do that.. I do hate badges though.

It's the opposite of Silicon Valley, and it's great.

I was amused by this as I have worked in a lot of DoD environments where a tie is "overdressed" and makes others uncomfortable. Likewise for a lot of environments where the uniform is a hoodie.

A little off topic observation here, but people who can't handle adhering to a business professional dress code are exhibiting a low resilience personality. Not a good thing.

Not to mention the reality that a button down shirt, slacks and a tie, when properly fitted, are not constrictive at all.

$166k/year isn't bad, by any means. But it isn't competitive for a PhD scientist or engineer with equivalent experience.

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 contractors is better than the government itself, but it is still shit compared to the rest of the tech industry. This is particularly true when you look at variable compensation (which is virtually nonexistent in government contractor land).

NSA leadership has clearly acknowledged the impediment:

The big change these days is there’s a supply-demand imbalance between the outside and the inside

Total compensation for [SV and other cities that tech start-ups call home] jobs can reach $200,000 or more, meaning even relatively junior cyber professionals in the industry can make more than top officials at the NSA.

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 with how much closer to her intelligence her new colleagues are.

Not only richer, but less moral and more likely to pat herself on the back. Even better.

If you're newer than 3 years at facebook or google, there's no way in hell you're going to have any work life balance. And even if you make it past the 3 year mark, it still depends on which team your on.

I am not aware of any exceptions to the law, unless you mean the Special Executive Service. You can - eventually - make it into the Special Executive Service (SES), which pays somewhat higher (around $200k per year, depending on specifics). But that typically takes 20+ years of service and is reserved to less than 1% of the total workforce of a lab or agency. It is extremely rare for someone to be hired directly into the SES, unless that person is a presidential appointee.

Which means that under ordinary circumstances, my lab cannot offer a Nobel Laureate more than $200,000 per year.

I often wonder if I'm the only person on this list that wouldn't work for them simply because I feel its WRONG.

I don't know if this is a problem in the US, but something else worth mentioning is that for many jobs, public sectors pay much more (higher pay, better pensions, more sick leave, better job security, ...). So it isn't just about firing people for incompetence. [1]

If the govt should be increasing pay to match market rates, then it should also be decreasing pay to match market rates.

[1] https://www.fraserinstitute.org/studies/comparing-government...

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

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.

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 politics. Don't make the mistake of comparing the worst case of government to some idealized notion of private enterprise.

Second, take a look at what happens to people who do leave the government. Very often, their salaries go up in the private sector. This is especially true for specialists like the folks who work at the NSA. Seems like they can hack it.

Folks who have not worked for the government, or very close to it, have a hard time comprehending the fundamental differences between government and private enterprise. For one thing, when you work for the government, many rules of your job carry the force of law. Being too flexible might not just get you fired, it might get you prosecuted.

And there are so many rules. I'll give you one example scenario: a person leaves their job, and a subordinate steps up, takes on their workload, and does great.

In a private company, you'd just promote the subordinate. You already know they can do the work, you retain institutional knowledge, and it's easier to hire junior positions. Efficient and effective.

But in most federal agencies that would be illegal, as it might permit some form of corruption. The subordinate would have to keep doing the extra workload, while the supervisor requisitions a new position to replace the old one, and then runs a (highly regulated) open public application process. The subordinate can apply too, of course.

This is not because the supervisor is some terrible inflexible or dumb person. The rules are just stricter and more burdensome in the government than in private enterprise.

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.

So: if you want people to act smarter in the government, you have to give them permission to act smarter. Firing has little to do with it. You have to give people the opportunity to try things and make mistakes in good faith.

In my limited experience this depends on the area. For example I know scientists who work for the government because environment and policy is their passion and for better or worse the EPA is/was the place to be. First choice not second.

But I've also met developers that work for state government and... I don't think they could handle a private industry job for the most part.

How do you know? I know a couple of talented, hard working statisticians that work for the census. They tell me a lot of good work gets done there. Well, at least until this year when they have suffered complete demoralization after a Trump political appointee crashed their china shop.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044741/

Is there any basis for this claim and the others? It's repeated by many, but that doesn't make it so. It doesn't describe the people I know that work in government.

You've just described every large institution I've ever worked for.

IME, large companies that were well insulated from competition were way more dysfunctional than the government, too.

I think that any large bureaucracy, including ones in big corps, attract people like this.

Maybe some groups within the NSA need the best and brightest, but the government in general doesn't. A lot of government work concerns accounting and administrative tasks that are neither intellectually challenging nor do they have a clearcut equivalent in business. Most government agencies cannot be run like businesses, because there either is no market to speak with or the markets for their 'products' are not free and open.

All you need is people who get their work done.

> but we must also make it easier to fire people (or manage them downwards) for incompetence

That only works if you start at the very top. If you get what I mean.

So you are saying that government employees are greater at serving the people who actually matter. Not the people who should matter, but the people who do.

Imagine a startup that focused on its customers' customers (maybe once or twice more removed) instead of the people paying it. Would anyone be surprised if it gets out competed by a different startup focusing directly on their customers, even if at the cost of their customers' customers?

This isn't unique to government. I've seen private organizations where employees will make choices that benefit their own department at the cost of the overall organization. I sometimes wonder if a natural selection-esque drive behind this is the reasons that inefficiency grows as organizations grow.

> We should pay market rates, but we should pay them for market quality.

I think this would fix a lot of problems, but implementing it is going to be a nightmare because it isn't just the rank and file employees who you need to do this for. You almost have to start at the top, and from what little I've worked with governments, you are looking as a massive cycling of employees and a large loss of institutional knowledge. Also, given that much of how any government agency works is dictated by some of the same people who would be replaced under this, you are looking at having to pay people much more than even going market rate because of the extra costs of working the position.

For example, hiring good government IT is not just going to mean having to pay market wages, but also having to account for paying people to work in dead languages and eldritch abominations built by poorly managed contractors who often still have rights to the software that prevent the government employees from doing major changes (lots of contract security).

I worked in military medicine, and the IT department at one of the hospitals was entirely staffed with (in some cases well-meaning), but wildly unqualified staff.

Mostly this was people who were previously department secretaries and who turned out to be just generally incompetent, unmotivated or abrasive. As they couldn't be fired, they were promoted to IT. It was a dumping ground.

Their "Database Administrator" literally didn't know what SQL was and that's how it was for everything. One of them told me to my face (I was a contractor there to train them on an app): "I'm only going to be here for 5 more years, so I don't really want to learn all this."

Disgraceful.

I worked for a well known (in this area) science non-profit agency, and while we did attract good talent, after I moved to the private sector (and literally earning twice the salary) that I found much more brilliant people working at the high paid private sector jobs.

So while I agree that public sector jobs can attract good people, I think that most of the best people are in the private sector where they can earn more money.

NSA has a booth and so does In Q Tel and a few others, but these are very sparsely attended. Where you'll see a line of 200+ for Facebook and maybe 1 person for NSA by accident sort of thing.

A number of the 3 letter agencies have very nice job propositions (you really can do work you can't do anywhere else) but their processes and bureaucracy (not to mention pay etc) really leave quite a bit to be desired.

For example a number of the NSA Presidential Fellows are ridiculously amazing, but for some reason (maybe my lack of exposure) I've not found them to stay in their role, or to necessarily be super positive about it.

Similarly when we were getting offers even with a lot of the red tape out of the way (e.g. already having a high level clearance), it would take months for paperwork - in the meantime you could get a few offers and deadlines for many of the well known companies.

Again similarly there were likely a handful that went to these agencies over the last 6yr and they were never our best + brightest; if you were drawn to that sort of work it made more sense to do a PhD with a NDSEG/NSF fellowship and do an internship at one of the military labs/NSA then to spend years there.

I have the opposite perception about this in the US: government jobs seem to be 'butt at desk 9-5' where private sector provides the opportunity for flexibility.

Having worked in public sector (for a small gov't agency in NYC), I know for the fact that most voters or taxpayers don't hear much about most of botched projects or millions of dollars wasted extravagant IT purchases that incompetent gov't career bureacrats make. Or why the last president of my organization was "forced" to resign years ago after a major IT f'up. Normally, there would be no firing, but the scale of the f'up was so gross that the president had to resign, but, despite his public standing as the head of the second largest library system in the country (funded by taxpayers and private donors), nobody got to hear what really happened.

Also Switzerland is notoriously bureaucratic. Even very simple tasks require visits to one of the many, many small government offices that dot the landscape and each interaction always costs hundreds of dollars ... even when the act itself is basically "print out a piece of paper and give it to you".

But I fully agree that direct democracy creates better quality of government in general.

I disagree. The US Government is the single largest investor in R&D in the country, and does much of that R&D work in house. The National Institutes of Health, by itself, does the vast majority of basic and applied biomedical research in the US. That research feeds commercial R&D. The commercial guys can't afford to do the decades worth of basic research needed before a new medical treatment can be tested in human subjects.

NASA, DOE, and DoD research labs basically invented the modern world. NASA and DoD developed spaceflight, satellites, satcomm, GPS, and digital computer networking. NASA was the single biggest purchaser of, and investor in, integrated circuits right up to about 1970. NASA did much, if not most, of the grunt work to make commercial aviation safe enough to be commercially viable. The US Navy did much of the early research work in radio, due to the need to communicate with a worldwide fleet, and is co-listed with MIT as the primary US innovators in radar.

I disagree or at least don't agree to the extent I might have in a more embattled time (i.e. any time in the past). I do agree intelligence serves the military well, I just don't agree with military intelligence scope growth at a time when military use is shrinking. I'm not sure history repeats itself here as much as perpetuates the justifications being used.

I just wish they could be more careful. It's a dangerous power they have.

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"

Guess: what country spends on military several times more than any other country in the world?

There are plenty of services that are needed that high value employees aren't rushing to get in to.

The military is worth paying for as long as they protect our life and liberty but not when they are aiming at us.

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.

And maybe it's not in their charter, but failures to promote security among private industry leading to hacks like equifax, or home depot, or many many others, looks to me like leadership is off chasing political objectives while at home we get pecked to death and damaged by a million small cuts of fixable security problems.

When you have job security and low expectations placed on you, it's wonderful. When everyone does, it's horrible. There is relatively little room for the lazy and useless in the private sector.

Actually the first family does have to pay for many incidentals, like every day food, and it comes in the form of a bill.

Singapore is an extreme example of this (perhaps too extreme) - the Prime Minister earns over $1.5M a year.

I don't see who this applies to in your last election

In the US, we've chosen the private sector to remunerate our officials after they've left public service, and our lovely government is the result.

Keep in mind that, as a public official earning top wages (~$150k/year) in DC, you can just afford to buy the median home in the area. But if you want a nice house (single-family) in a good neighborhood? Forget it! Whereas if you took your skills to the private sector, finding a place to raise your family would not be a major concern.

Keep in mind this is in SF, and I don't know any senior software engineers here making less than $300k/year, more than everyone in the government except the President!

Of course he "talks" with staff and takes questions. Why ? Because despite his wages, he is not all that good at correctly transmitting information, so he is doing this so he might do his job better by having his team interpret his ideas, and try to clarify them to him by asking questions. This is done mostly to avoid the worst of screwups. Only questions that follow this pattern get answered, or even seriously considered (check those financial videos again, trust me you'll see this happen).

He does not have an opinion (I mean he does, but none that you'll ever hear). Remember that. You cannot ask him for it, you will never get an answer. And when you do, because there are amounts of alcohol that will make him divulge opinions, please don't start destroying careers (mostly your own, but you may drag others down) by telling other people what those opinions are.

He won't care about attrition until the ability of the organisation to carry out his boss's orders is in danger, or when his boss cares. Nothing other than that can make him care. But he's paid a LOT of money to make you think he cares.

A lot more people are comfortable with, say, targeted foreign attacks than broad domestic dragnets or attacking American companies or standards.

Thankfully resume sorting is effectively already an entirely random process, so I hope this comment doesn't bother anyone too much.

I've seen an uptick of negativity on HN lately, especially targeted at the big SV companies. Not intelligent criticism mind you, just basic trolling. For example your account appears to be 99% dedicated to shitting on SV companies.