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An NSA or DOD guy doing digital forensics and cybercrime type stuff came to one of my college classes to teach a lesson or two. He mentioned that he would love

An NSA or DOD guy doing digital forensics and cybercrime type stuff came to one of my college classes to teach a lesson or two. He mentioned that he would love if we came to work with him, but also people he talks to at colleges almost never do because even median pay at a generic private sector corp is better than the government wages for that work. So yes, people working in the majority of cybercrime shops are people who either couldn't hack it at a generic boring C# corpo job, or are specifically more interested in being a white hat than getting paid lots of crinkled, sweat-dampened VC money.

lyu07282 2y ago
It's not even just the money, I had a brief experience working within german bureaucracy and i couldn't imagine a more soul sucking, conservative and uninspiring environment. You definitely have to be a certain type of person for that environment, the unpleasant type imho.
hunter-gatherer 2y ago
Eh. It is more complicated than that. I started out in DIA and a lot of government employees in the "hacker space" are indeed underpaid compared to their civilian counterparts. The way the sausage is really made though is through contracting, and these folks are paid. Bottom line is that if you want to do cyberspace stuff for uncle sam and want to be paid the you shouldn't be going to any careers/*.gov website. Look instead for generic "Network Operations Engineer" type postings that are in Herndon, Bethesda, Baltimore, Annapolis Junction, Fort Meade, and so on. There are some perks to being a government employee, but you end up in the government framework for pay and what not, which sucks. if I recall correctly the folks at CIA (AFD I believe???) had some sort of system set up where they hired government employees as a POCO billet or something so they could bring talent in at a reasonable pay scale, and then they'd do some political maneuvering to rotate people around so everyone was getting paid. DIA was a charlie foxtrot in that arena and probably still is, so I'd avoid them. The FBI has a pretty good team in quantico, though I'm guessing again that most of the are really just Booz employees.

lyu07282 2y ago

It's not even just the money, I had a brief experience working within german bureaucracy and i couldn't imagine a more soul sucking, conservative and uninspiring environment. You definitely have to be a certain type of person for that environment, the unpleasant type imho.

hunter-gatherer 2y ago

Eh. It is more complicated than that. I started out in DIA and a lot of government employees in the "hacker space" are indeed underpaid compared to their civilian counterparts. The way the sausage is really made though is through contracting, and these folks are paid. Bottom line is that if you want to do cyberspace stuff for uncle sam and want to be paid the you shouldn't be going to any careers/*.gov website. Look instead for generic "Network Operations Engineer" type postings that are in Herndon, Bethesda, Baltimore, Annapolis Junction, Fort Meade, and so on. There are some perks to being a government employee, but you end up in the government framework for pay and what not, which sucks. if I recall correctly the folks at CIA (AFD I believe???) had some sort of system set up where they hired government employees as a POCO billet or something so they could bring talent in at a reasonable pay scale, and then they'd do some political maneuvering to rotate people around so everyone was getting paid. DIA was a charlie foxtrot in that arena and probably still is, so I'd avoid them. The FBI has a pretty good team in quantico, though I'm guessing again that most of the are really just Booz employees.