> Perception is everything. I say this as someone who dreamt of working at the NSA for most of my high school years, but would now never even consider it. One

> Perception is everything. I say this as someone who dreamt of working at the NSA for most of my high school years, but would now never even consider it. One of the first three technical books I read was Bruce Schneier's "Applied Cryptography". I loved crypto and wanted to work in it. Fast forward to my 4-year degree when looked around and assessed my potential career paths. NSA salaries weren't competitive to what I could make as a generic software engineer and the NSA was starting to get a bad reputation, and that was well before Snowden. Fast forward to today and it's hard to see myself working as an FTE for the NSA under almost any circumstances, both practical and ideological.