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Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

> There's also the fact that many-if-not-most hackers are... shall we say... "unsuited" (in terms of their temperament) to the kind of work environment found in government security agencies.

I imagine the NSA is well aware of the correlation between "very clever" and "difficult to work with".

I know people who work for GCHQ, and while they never talk about the work they are happy that the managers keep them insulated from the PHB stuff.

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My anecdotal evidence based on an aunt/uncle who work there is that it's VERY much a bureaucratic nightmare where most people work as hard as possible to work as little as possible. Then the minority of extremely smart researchers the NSA recruits just take advantage of the disorganization to research whatever they want regardless of whether it's actually relevant to the NSA's goals. So that's a plus for smart hackers. But I think in general the NSA has an easier time recruiting brilliant physicists/mathematicians because there's less competition from the private sector. I imagine it's a lot more difficult to recruit ultra-talented hackers, especially since they are totally unqualified to recognize them. At my campus' career fair they were interested in me but totally uninterested in the best programmer I know, who's far more qualified than me even on paper, because his GPA was too low (he was working full time as a graphics programmer at a game company throughout college which hurt his grades). But neither of us were seriously interested anyway because I don't think anyone smart would actually want to work for the government without a huge financial incentive. Even the fact that this article keeps referring to the students as 'soldiers' is the type of condescending Orwellian jingoism that makes me shudder.

"I imagine it's a lot more difficult to recruit ultra-talented hackers, especially since they are totally unqualified to recognize them."

Very real. Best hackers spend their time hacking, not trying to get grades or climbing the hierarchical ladder.

Just think of Steve Wozniak, he was so afraid of not being able to engineer anymore if Apple gave him executive power. He refused to climb the ladder so he could continue tinkering in the lab.

In those big orgs the people that want to get power use to be sociopaths and "power addicts"(people that choose power over everything else in life).

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