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This comment section is useless. Here is a useful comment: working for that agency results in a strong technical experience, a security stamp of approval, and

This comment section is useless. Here is a useful comment: working for that agency results in a strong technical experience, a security stamp of approval, and a social network that often leads to very high paying contractor jobs or the development of startup businesses that end up being worth tens of millions. Did you ever wonder why there is so much wealth in the Maryland-DC-Northern Virginia area? Well, now you know.

zoklet-enjoyer 4y ago
Sure, but some people have morals.
- Entinel 4y ago
  Is there really such a big leap going from working for Facebook to working for the NSA except the spying you are doing is much more direct and not surrounded in business speak?
  - bitxbitxbitcoin 4y ago
    And “patriotism.”
    - roarcher 4y ago
      I consider myself fairly patriotic and I'd never work for the NSA, because I can think of few things that are more antithetical to this country's (hypothetical) ideals than mass surveillance. The Patriot Act has to be the most ironically named piece of legislation in history.
  - zoklet-enjoyer 4y ago
    People can (mostly) opt out of Facebook. There's no opting out of government surveillance. There's no opting out of zero days and built in backdoors and secretly modified hardware.
    - thfuran 4y ago
      Opting out of being tracked by Facebook isn't nearly as easy as opting out of using Facebook.
    - nirvdrum 4y ago
      Facebook builds shadow profiles for people that don't have accounts. I have a dormant account and checked out my profile and they've linked together multiple email addresses I've never given them. Ad blocking and tracking protection aren't sufficient because retailers give data to Facebook. There are ways to delete data now, which is a welcomed improvement, but that's after it's already been collected. With that said, I understand the larger point you're making about government surveillance. I just don't see most people being able to opt out of Facebook. Moreover, the government can compel Facebook to hand over whatever data is provided by users voluntarily, making the private/public split less than airtight.
    - kodah 4y ago
      I think OPs point is there is probably very little ethical difference between Google, Facebook, and the NSA. The people at all three probably aren't also climbing moral mountain either. Most people in tech probably have to struggle or ignore both morals and ethics, maybe not directly about their job but definitely about the companies they work for. You can't really opt out of what Google and Facebook do, because a big part of it is industry influencing and their own opt-out features are rarely comprehensive enough to be useful.
    - pcthrowaway 4y ago
      Yeah, facebook is definitely tracking everyone, whether or not they use facebook. Remember a few years ago (maybe even 10 years now) when facebook started testing their facial recognition capabilities? You'd post a photo, and it would highlight all the faces, tell you who they were, and ask if you wanted to tag them. It likely has a photo of 99.99% of living people at this point, and has profiles on them, cross-linked with any relevant discussion people have had about them (even if they're not on facebook). Any site that allows you to "log in with facebook" is running their analytics which tracks you across sites, and builds your "profile", and if you have a gravatar on one of those sites, there's a good chance Facebook can now associate you with any photo that has been uploaded of you, even if you just happened to be in the background. People were writing about this stuff in the '80s; it seems like some don't realize we're already there.
  - tmaly 4y ago
    Your family and friends will need to be interviewed. So overall the interview process is a bit more in-depth.
    - wyclif 4y ago
      How do they determine who counts as a friend?
  - Marsymars 4y ago
    I mean, I’d say there’s a big positive leap in working for the NSA rather than Facebook. (And I’m not American, so I’m an explicit target of the NSA in ways that Americans aren’t.)
alephnerd 4y ago
This needs to be upvoted! He's right! DMV has a similar energy and vibe to how the Bay Area felt in the early 2000s, and that's definetly because of the cybersecurity ecosystem that has been cultivated there since Obama 1
Julesman 4y ago
Because being wealthy is definitely the most important thing.
- throwaway6734 4y ago
  Many engineers on this site spend their lives developing machines to hook young adults on toxic social networks for that wealth
  - TheNorthman 4y ago
    More than one thing can be bad
  - shitlord 4y ago
    This comment doesn't deserve the downvotes. The surgeon general recently suggested that children should stay off of social media because it's bad for their psychological development: https://www.edweek.org/leadership/surgeon-general-kids-under-14-should-not-use-social-media/2023/02 https://www.edweek.org/leadership/surgeon-general-kids-under... There's growing evidence that social media is also bad for teenagers. Rates of teenage depression and suicidality have increased in recent years, and there is a direct correlation to social media use. Cigarette companies are viewed as evil because they peddled addictive, cancer-causing products to kids. Our industry is peddling a different type of poison, and I suspect we'll have a similar legacy.
- mc32 4y ago
  In life, people aspire to many things, but often do quite different things.
  - yeahbu777 4y ago
    I don’t carry around in my head that Bill Gates or any other person is worth fiat money. It’s a social meme I just don’t buy into, like opinions on movies and memes. Every rich person is just one of billions, their fiat wealth is based upon mathematical inference, information shaping, nation state propaganda. Depending on my mood, if we were together I may ignore Bil Gates, punch is teeth out, or ask about the weather; I would not treat him as special. I’ve worked with people who have answered fundamental questions about reality. Some nerds who read a consumer machines manual and structured syntax appropriately are far dumber than that. There was no manual for folks building LHC.
Bnichs 4y ago
I always figured that the DC area was wealthy due to mostly political corruption and creating government contracts that enlist a 30 person team over 5 years to design a toilet seat for a plane that will be used twice. I didn't know it was this mecha of tech expertise and problem solving.
- alephnerd 4y ago
  It's much more "middle class" than wealthy imo. For example, most lobbyists for top firms earn less than an L3 at Google and less than a GS-15 or SES1 employee, and with much less job security (for example, if you were an ex-Trump staffer, your political currency is useless on the Hill at the moment). There definetly is old money in the city, but it's honestly about as prominent as Pac Heights old money in the Bay Area and absolutely gets dwarfed by out of towners.
  - wahern 4y ago
    Unlike San Francisco, Washington, DC was a backwater until the 1960s. For most of the country's history Federal policy was to avoid centralization of government administration to prevent Washington becoming as economically prominent as Paris, London, or countless other capital cities. But things began to change during the Cold War, and then accelerated during the military buildup under Reagan. The Washington metro area began to explode economically as defense contractors that had once been spread around the country started moving to DC. The acceleration was compounded again under Bush with the war on terror attracting a broader range of security and IT companies wanting to cash in on Federal largesse. A big part of the reason for this is that Republicans preferred outsourcing Federal work to contractors, to avoid Federal unions. Federal policy didn't care where the contractors headquarters were located, whereas older agencies like the Social Security Administration, Federal Reserve, etc, had always been forced to locate most of their work elsewhere, both the labor and most of management--mostly only the political appointees were in DC. What the government should do is return to the old policies of pushing administrative agencies back out into regional centers. Though it would probably look different in the sense that what's more important now is pushing agency directors and other political appointees along with their teams out of DC, whereas in the bygone era the emphasis was on the mass of Federal workers. You want the leadership teams out of DC because that's what's attracting the companies, not Congress. But DC has probably grown too economically powerful to reverse the course of things.
aquinas_ 4y ago
[flagged]
erehweb 4y ago
To engage with your comment - some of this experience will not be transferable outside government - is this a big problem? Also, is DC really that wealthy, compared to Silicon Valley?
- alephnerd 4y ago
  Govt experience can translate well into Federal Sales and Solutions Engineering and Product Management. I've found ex-Govt engineers to be amazing salespeople, because they understand both the technical AND the organizational aspects in implementing technical projects. Also, DC is much less wealthy than the Bay Area. The upper bound on salaries in the DMV is around $150-200k with 15-20 years of experience because of how prominent government employment is. It's a very solidly middle class feeling metropolitan area.
  - beckingz 4y ago
    The greater DC and Bay Area have the top 8 counties by median household income, and 13 of the top 20 counties. [0] Sure, it's just a bunch of doctors (NIH), lobbyists, defense contractors and government lawyers that skew that towards only being upper middle class and probably not as many ultra high net worth people, but it's extremely affluent. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-income_counties_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-income_countie...
    - alephnerd 4y ago
      That's a fair point. DMV definetly skews top 10%, but I feel the affordability skew doesn't feel as crazy compared to the Bay Area. At least there's plenty of building occurring in DC and NoVA that helps keep prices manageable at the moment.
      - beckingz 4y ago
        The rent is too damn high. Not quite NYC/SF levels, but it's close in most of the DMV.
betaby 4y ago
So cronyism?
ourmandave 4y ago
And the NSA is practically recession proof, like all the other spook depts.
whoopdeepoo 4y ago
Exactly. I made a fortune as an intelligence contractor during the Iraq war.
- heyoni 4y ago
  Doing what? Government IT contracts? Were they easy to get?
  - whoopdeepoo 4y ago
    First we were looking for potential uranium deposits with satellite imagery. When that was no longer necessary we switched to identifying targets for aerial strikes. The imagery was pretty outdated but they needed a set amount of targets each week so we weren't very accurate. I got the job through family, my uncle was able to get in the industry in the 80s.
    - rurp 4y ago
      > they needed a set amount of targets each week so we weren't very accurate. I don't think that enabling capricious air strikes is the kind of work that is going to allay most people's ethical concerns.
      - the_only_law 4y ago
        The nepotism involved probably isn’t available to everyone anyway.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - heyoni 4y ago
        > I don't think that enabling capricious air strikes is the kind of work that is going to allay most people's ethical concerns. Seriously for a second I was like, maybe the NSA isn't such a bad idea anymore. They're out there making Ghidra and other open source tools so that's nice. And then I read this and immediately thought of that monologue from Good Will Hunting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJHvSp9AKYg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJHvSp9AKYg That's gonna be a no from me dawg.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> working for that agency results in a strong technical experience, a security stamp of approval, and a social network that often leads to very high paying contractor jobs or the development of startup businesses that end up being worth tens of millions. Even without going into contracting or starting a business, having worked a high level job at an agency like the NSA comes with a resume boost. It may not mean much to a mid-level hiring manager on the west coast who only knows about the NSA from what they read on Twitter, but it carries some weight in communities that understand what goes into these careers.
- photonbeam 4y ago
  I wonder if there is risk that a typical hiring manager would consider three letter agency experience to be a red flag if they disagree with the agency’s behavior
  - rightbyte 4y ago
    I would certainly not want to work with a former CIA employee. The others I would probably be fine with.
    - to11mtm 4y ago
      The concern with a former CIA employee is that the concern they are not truly a 'former' CIA employee is much higher. Although, ex-mil psyops are not much lower on the list...
  - metadat 4y ago
    It makes sense that some folks may not have favorable opinions of government employment. At the same time, it's worth considering alternate perspectives, too. Any single grunt worker has little hope to sway the trajectory of top-down mandates at federal security agencies. Even if the individual disagrees with the decree. Should similar forms of micro-judgement stemming from macro concerns also be applied to candidates from other industries such as adult entertainment or legal cannabis operations? Edit: blep_, all salient points, thanks for sharing.
dsfyu404ed 4y ago
>Did you ever wonder why there is so much wealth in the Maryland-DC-Northern Virginia area? Nobody who's ever read their pay stub wonders.
aeturnum 4y ago
There is absolutely money in work that requires a clearance. There always has been. I would also point out that, historically, a lot of "startup" culture comes directly from people fleeing from the more conservative east cost workplace culture. Consider if you can get the life you want working for a security service. Obviously making between 100 and 200k is a healthy salary, but we shouldn't pretend that it's at the top of the industry. You're agreeing to a very particular work culture in return for middle-industry compensation.
- sandworm101 4y ago
  >>You're agreeing to a very particular work culture There is also still a concept of national service in such places. Even as a civilian, some people would rather design systems to protect their county than design systems to support real estate in the metaverse. Do you want to do data analysis to catch terrorists or track international drug shipments, or design another algorithm to better serve ads to elderly people needing regular diabetic testing supplies?
  - azinman2 4y ago
    Exactly. It seems most feel they’re above this, while taking everything given to them for granted. This is especially true of people who become libertarians after they get rich, forgetting everything that made that possible, and then wanting to keep it all for themselves.
    - sandworm101 4y ago
      Like the steady stream of 50+yo tech millionaires who buy boats. After decades of working to minimize their individual tax burdens and arguing for small government they suddenly expect a giant helicopter full of trained government employees to appear and lift them out of whatever dangerous situation they got themselves into.
      - reducesuffering 4y ago
        Any $1m+ yacht that finds itself needing naval government services should absolutely be expecting a bill for services rendered. I don't know if the law exists. I'm not here to ascertain what the fine print would look like, only of the spirit of such law.
bobkazamakis 4y ago
[flagged]
- dang 4y ago
  Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. Let's assume you don't owe spy agency contractors better—you still owe this community better if you're participating in it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: also, you've been doing this quite a bit and we've asked you more than once before. We end up having to ban accounts that post like that. I don't want to ban you, so could you please review the rules and fix this?
anthomtb 4y ago
I have worked with a few folks who did stints with various 3 letter government agencies. My takeaway is that you get to do some very technically interesting and challenging work. But politics, both organizational and electoral, means your cool thing is likely to sit on a shelf. They are good places to be if you like building for the sake of building. Not so good if you like both building and shipping.
bandyaboot 4y ago
> Did you ever wonder why there is so much wealth in the Maryland-DC-Northern Virginia area? Well, now you know. There’s an entire industry built around influencing how the Federal government allocates the vast sums of money that it allocates. Everyone in the industry is wealthy and nearly all of them live in that area. But yeah, it’s because the NSA.
ren_engineer 4y ago
>Did you ever wonder why there is so much wealth in the Maryland-DC-Northern Virginia area? Well, now you know. because they are parasites leeching off the tax payers via corruption? >a social network that often leads to high paying jobs at least you are honest about it
red-iron-pine 4y ago
Of the top 20 richest counties in the US, a huge chunk are the DC area. Decades of blank DoD checks for ya

zoklet-enjoyer 4y ago

Sure, but some people have morals.

Entinel 4y ago
Is there really such a big leap going from working for Facebook to working for the NSA except the spying you are doing is much more direct and not surrounded in business speak?
- bitxbitxbitcoin 4y ago
  And “patriotism.”
  - roarcher 4y ago
    I consider myself fairly patriotic and I'd never work for the NSA, because I can think of few things that are more antithetical to this country's (hypothetical) ideals than mass surveillance. The Patriot Act has to be the most ironically named piece of legislation in history.
- zoklet-enjoyer 4y ago
  People can (mostly) opt out of Facebook. There's no opting out of government surveillance. There's no opting out of zero days and built in backdoors and secretly modified hardware.
  - thfuran 4y ago
    Opting out of being tracked by Facebook isn't nearly as easy as opting out of using Facebook.
  - nirvdrum 4y ago
    Facebook builds shadow profiles for people that don't have accounts. I have a dormant account and checked out my profile and they've linked together multiple email addresses I've never given them. Ad blocking and tracking protection aren't sufficient because retailers give data to Facebook. There are ways to delete data now, which is a welcomed improvement, but that's after it's already been collected. With that said, I understand the larger point you're making about government surveillance. I just don't see most people being able to opt out of Facebook. Moreover, the government can compel Facebook to hand over whatever data is provided by users voluntarily, making the private/public split less than airtight.
  - kodah 4y ago
    I think OPs point is there is probably very little ethical difference between Google, Facebook, and the NSA. The people at all three probably aren't also climbing moral mountain either. Most people in tech probably have to struggle or ignore both morals and ethics, maybe not directly about their job but definitely about the companies they work for. You can't really opt out of what Google and Facebook do, because a big part of it is industry influencing and their own opt-out features are rarely comprehensive enough to be useful.
  - pcthrowaway 4y ago
    Yeah, facebook is definitely tracking everyone, whether or not they use facebook. Remember a few years ago (maybe even 10 years now) when facebook started testing their facial recognition capabilities? You'd post a photo, and it would highlight all the faces, tell you who they were, and ask if you wanted to tag them. It likely has a photo of 99.99% of living people at this point, and has profiles on them, cross-linked with any relevant discussion people have had about them (even if they're not on facebook). Any site that allows you to "log in with facebook" is running their analytics which tracks you across sites, and builds your "profile", and if you have a gravatar on one of those sites, there's a good chance Facebook can now associate you with any photo that has been uploaded of you, even if you just happened to be in the background. People were writing about this stuff in the '80s; it seems like some don't realize we're already there.
- tmaly 4y ago
  Your family and friends will need to be interviewed. So overall the interview process is a bit more in-depth.
  - wyclif 4y ago
    How do they determine who counts as a friend?
- Marsymars 4y ago
  I mean, I’d say there’s a big positive leap in working for the NSA rather than Facebook. (And I’m not American, so I’m an explicit target of the NSA in ways that Americans aren’t.)

alephnerd 4y ago

This needs to be upvoted! He's right! DMV has a similar energy and vibe to how the Bay Area felt in the early 2000s, and that's definetly because of the cybersecurity ecosystem that has been cultivated there since Obama 1

Julesman 4y ago

Because being wealthy is definitely the most important thing.

throwaway6734 4y ago
Many engineers on this site spend their lives developing machines to hook young adults on toxic social networks for that wealth
- TheNorthman 4y ago
  More than one thing can be bad
- shitlord 4y ago
  This comment doesn't deserve the downvotes. The surgeon general recently suggested that children should stay off of social media because it's bad for their psychological development: https://www.edweek.org/leadership/surgeon-general-kids-under-14-should-not-use-social-media/2023/02 https://www.edweek.org/leadership/surgeon-general-kids-under... There's growing evidence that social media is also bad for teenagers. Rates of teenage depression and suicidality have increased in recent years, and there is a direct correlation to social media use. Cigarette companies are viewed as evil because they peddled addictive, cancer-causing products to kids. Our industry is peddling a different type of poison, and I suspect we'll have a similar legacy.
mc32 4y ago
In life, people aspire to many things, but often do quite different things.
- yeahbu777 4y ago
  I don’t carry around in my head that Bill Gates or any other person is worth fiat money. It’s a social meme I just don’t buy into, like opinions on movies and memes. Every rich person is just one of billions, their fiat wealth is based upon mathematical inference, information shaping, nation state propaganda. Depending on my mood, if we were together I may ignore Bil Gates, punch is teeth out, or ask about the weather; I would not treat him as special. I’ve worked with people who have answered fundamental questions about reality. Some nerds who read a consumer machines manual and structured syntax appropriately are far dumber than that. There was no manual for folks building LHC.

Bnichs 4y ago

I always figured that the DC area was wealthy due to mostly political corruption and creating government contracts that enlist a 30 person team over 5 years to design a toilet seat for a plane that will be used twice. I didn't know it was this mecha of tech expertise and problem solving.

alephnerd 4y ago
It's much more "middle class" than wealthy imo. For example, most lobbyists for top firms earn less than an L3 at Google and less than a GS-15 or SES1 employee, and with much less job security (for example, if you were an ex-Trump staffer, your political currency is useless on the Hill at the moment). There definetly is old money in the city, but it's honestly about as prominent as Pac Heights old money in the Bay Area and absolutely gets dwarfed by out of towners.
- wahern 4y ago
  Unlike San Francisco, Washington, DC was a backwater until the 1960s. For most of the country's history Federal policy was to avoid centralization of government administration to prevent Washington becoming as economically prominent as Paris, London, or countless other capital cities. But things began to change during the Cold War, and then accelerated during the military buildup under Reagan. The Washington metro area began to explode economically as defense contractors that had once been spread around the country started moving to DC. The acceleration was compounded again under Bush with the war on terror attracting a broader range of security and IT companies wanting to cash in on Federal largesse. A big part of the reason for this is that Republicans preferred outsourcing Federal work to contractors, to avoid Federal unions. Federal policy didn't care where the contractors headquarters were located, whereas older agencies like the Social Security Administration, Federal Reserve, etc, had always been forced to locate most of their work elsewhere, both the labor and most of management--mostly only the political appointees were in DC. What the government should do is return to the old policies of pushing administrative agencies back out into regional centers. Though it would probably look different in the sense that what's more important now is pushing agency directors and other political appointees along with their teams out of DC, whereas in the bygone era the emphasis was on the mass of Federal workers. You want the leadership teams out of DC because that's what's attracting the companies, not Congress. But DC has probably grown too economically powerful to reverse the course of things.

aquinas_ 4y ago

[flagged]

erehweb 4y ago

To engage with your comment - some of this experience will not be transferable outside government - is this a big problem? Also, is DC really that wealthy, compared to Silicon Valley?

alephnerd 4y ago
Govt experience can translate well into Federal Sales and Solutions Engineering and Product Management. I've found ex-Govt engineers to be amazing salespeople, because they understand both the technical AND the organizational aspects in implementing technical projects. Also, DC is much less wealthy than the Bay Area. The upper bound on salaries in the DMV is around $150-200k with 15-20 years of experience because of how prominent government employment is. It's a very solidly middle class feeling metropolitan area.
- beckingz 4y ago
  The greater DC and Bay Area have the top 8 counties by median household income, and 13 of the top 20 counties. [0] Sure, it's just a bunch of doctors (NIH), lobbyists, defense contractors and government lawyers that skew that towards only being upper middle class and probably not as many ultra high net worth people, but it's extremely affluent. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-income_counties_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-income_countie...
  - alephnerd 4y ago
    That's a fair point. DMV definetly skews top 10%, but I feel the affordability skew doesn't feel as crazy compared to the Bay Area. At least there's plenty of building occurring in DC and NoVA that helps keep prices manageable at the moment.
    - beckingz 4y ago
      The rent is too damn high. Not quite NYC/SF levels, but it's close in most of the DMV.

betaby 4y ago

So cronyism?

ourmandave 4y ago

And the NSA is practically recession proof, like all the other spook depts.

whoopdeepoo 4y ago

Exactly. I made a fortune as an intelligence contractor during the Iraq war.

heyoni 4y ago
Doing what? Government IT contracts? Were they easy to get?
- whoopdeepoo 4y ago
  First we were looking for potential uranium deposits with satellite imagery. When that was no longer necessary we switched to identifying targets for aerial strikes. The imagery was pretty outdated but they needed a set amount of targets each week so we weren't very accurate. I got the job through family, my uncle was able to get in the industry in the 80s.
  - rurp 4y ago
    > they needed a set amount of targets each week so we weren't very accurate. I don't think that enabling capricious air strikes is the kind of work that is going to allay most people's ethical concerns.
    - the_only_law 4y ago
      The nepotism involved probably isn’t available to everyone anyway.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - heyoni 4y ago
      > I don't think that enabling capricious air strikes is the kind of work that is going to allay most people's ethical concerns. Seriously for a second I was like, maybe the NSA isn't such a bad idea anymore. They're out there making Ghidra and other open source tools so that's nice. And then I read this and immediately thought of that monologue from Good Will Hunting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJHvSp9AKYg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJHvSp9AKYg That's gonna be a no from me dawg.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

> working for that agency results in a strong technical experience, a security stamp of approval, and a social network that often leads to very high paying contractor jobs or the development of startup businesses that end up being worth tens of millions. Even without going into contracting or starting a business, having worked a high level job at an agency like the NSA comes with a resume boost. It may not mean much to a mid-level hiring manager on the west coast who only knows about the NSA from what they read on Twitter, but it carries some weight in communities that understand what goes into these careers.

photonbeam 4y ago
I wonder if there is risk that a typical hiring manager would consider three letter agency experience to be a red flag if they disagree with the agency’s behavior
- rightbyte 4y ago
  I would certainly not want to work with a former CIA employee. The others I would probably be fine with.
  - to11mtm 4y ago
    The concern with a former CIA employee is that the concern they are not truly a 'former' CIA employee is much higher. Although, ex-mil psyops are not much lower on the list...
- metadat 4y ago
  It makes sense that some folks may not have favorable opinions of government employment. At the same time, it's worth considering alternate perspectives, too. Any single grunt worker has little hope to sway the trajectory of top-down mandates at federal security agencies. Even if the individual disagrees with the decree. Should similar forms of micro-judgement stemming from macro concerns also be applied to candidates from other industries such as adult entertainment or legal cannabis operations? Edit: blep_, all salient points, thanks for sharing.

dsfyu404ed 4y ago

>Did you ever wonder why there is so much wealth in the Maryland-DC-Northern Virginia area? Nobody who's ever read their pay stub wonders.

aeturnum 4y ago

There is absolutely money in work that requires a clearance. There always has been. I would also point out that, historically, a lot of "startup" culture comes directly from people fleeing from the more conservative east cost workplace culture. Consider if you can get the life you want working for a security service. Obviously making between 100 and 200k is a healthy salary, but we shouldn't pretend that it's at the top of the industry. You're agreeing to a very particular work culture in return for middle-industry compensation.

sandworm101 4y ago
>>You're agreeing to a very particular work culture There is also still a concept of national service in such places. Even as a civilian, some people would rather design systems to protect their county than design systems to support real estate in the metaverse. Do you want to do data analysis to catch terrorists or track international drug shipments, or design another algorithm to better serve ads to elderly people needing regular diabetic testing supplies?
- azinman2 4y ago
  Exactly. It seems most feel they’re above this, while taking everything given to them for granted. This is especially true of people who become libertarians after they get rich, forgetting everything that made that possible, and then wanting to keep it all for themselves.
  - sandworm101 4y ago
    Like the steady stream of 50+yo tech millionaires who buy boats. After decades of working to minimize their individual tax burdens and arguing for small government they suddenly expect a giant helicopter full of trained government employees to appear and lift them out of whatever dangerous situation they got themselves into.
    - reducesuffering 4y ago
      Any $1m+ yacht that finds itself needing naval government services should absolutely be expecting a bill for services rendered. I don't know if the law exists. I'm not here to ascertain what the fine print would look like, only of the spirit of such law.

bobkazamakis 4y ago

[flagged]

dang 4y ago
Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. Let's assume you don't owe spy agency contractors better—you still owe this community better if you're participating in it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: also, you've been doing this quite a bit and we've asked you more than once before. We end up having to ban accounts that post like that. I don't want to ban you, so could you please review the rules and fix this?

anthomtb 4y ago

I have worked with a few folks who did stints with various 3 letter government agencies. My takeaway is that you get to do some very technically interesting and challenging work. But politics, both organizational and electoral, means your cool thing is likely to sit on a shelf. They are good places to be if you like building for the sake of building. Not so good if you like both building and shipping.

bandyaboot 4y ago

> Did you ever wonder why there is so much wealth in the Maryland-DC-Northern Virginia area? Well, now you know. There’s an entire industry built around influencing how the Federal government allocates the vast sums of money that it allocates. Everyone in the industry is wealthy and nearly all of them live in that area. But yeah, it’s because the NSA.

ren_engineer 4y ago

>Did you ever wonder why there is so much wealth in the Maryland-DC-Northern Virginia area? Well, now you know. because they are parasites leeching off the tax payers via corruption? >a social network that often leads to high paying jobs at least you are honest about it

red-iron-pine 4y ago

Of the top 20 richest counties in the US, a huge chunk are the DC area. Decades of blank DoD checks for ya