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If the rest of the intelligence community treats their IT people same as Schindler in his tweets, it's no wonder they can't get quality staff.

by bragh 13y ago

rdl 13y ago
The essential problem is that once the IT people were held to an objectively lower standard AND paid better (because the government was having a hard time recruiting), it turned into a death spiral. Resentful career people shit on them more and thus they had to be paid better and overseen less and thus resented more and thus shit on more... The correct solution would have been using more military people at NSA and accepting a much longer in-house training pipeline. The benefit is I'd trust an 8-12 year military IT veteran who served in general military IT then got put at NSA a lot more than someone hired as a contractor; much harder for the enemy to infiltrate someone, and someone who has been in for 8-12 years probably has a pattern of behavior, family, ties, etc. to make it less likely he'd accidentally or intentionally fuck you. Schindler seems to be particularly upset (which is probably understandable) and maybe not representative of how people treat contractors normally :)
- mpyne 13y ago
  I concur with your correct solution. The military has been the normal source of reliable labor, even for support tasks. The problem is that it's expensive and much more difficult to administer, but hopefully NSA and DoD in general will realize why mere difficulty of administration should not hold them back now. Honestly the NSA is lucky that the first (known?) insider leak of this type came from a do-gooder instead of something more sinister. I will say that civil servants tend to despise the contractors. I can't say I blame them either, it's literally a case of "dey turk our jeerrbs!". But fixing the rise of contractors would require both a decoupling of the military-industrial complex and possibly an overhaul of the civil service benefits/retirement scheme (as the whole point to hiring a contractor is that their staff are cheaper overall).
  - rdl 13y ago
    I don't think "contractor staff are cheaper overall" applies to IT or other specialty services staff. A Boozer getting $200k/yr is probably billed at...$350k? Assuming you need the position for 10y, that's 3.5mm. You could keep a civil servant for $80k/yr and give him a $60k/yr pension for (say, $120k/yr for his working life) for an entire career of 30 years for that. Spend the first 5-10 on training (much of which is OJT, so he's still doing useful work), and you're still 10-15 years ahead, even today.
    - mpyne 13y ago
      That's a great point, but unfortunately there's a real political cost to having civil servant headcount. People already complain all the time about how many people work for the Federal government alone, but if they knew how many civil servants there would be if we limited contractors to actual common business functions I think they'd be stunned.
      - rdl 13y ago
        That's partially the point :) If we had to account for headcount, we'd scale back our missions to things which were essential to national security.

If the rest of the intelligence community treats their IT people same as Schindler in his tweets, it's no wonder they can't get quality staff.

by bragh 13y ago

If the rest of the intelligence community treats their IT people same as Schindler in his tweets, it's no wonder they can't get quality staff.

rdl 13y ago

The essential problem is that once the IT people were held to an objectively lower standard AND paid better (because the government was having a hard time recruiting), it turned into a death spiral. Resentful career people shit on them more and thus they had to be paid better and overseen less and thus resented more and thus shit on more... The correct solution would have been using more military people at NSA and accepting a much longer in-house training pipeline. The benefit is I'd trust an 8-12 year military IT veteran who served in general military IT then got put at NSA a lot more than someone hired as a contractor; much harder for the enemy to infiltrate someone, and someone who has been in for 8-12 years probably has a pattern of behavior, family, ties, etc. to make it less likely he'd accidentally or intentionally fuck you. Schindler seems to be particularly upset (which is probably understandable) and maybe not representative of how people treat contractors normally :)

mpyne 13y ago
I concur with your correct solution. The military has been the normal source of reliable labor, even for support tasks. The problem is that it's expensive and much more difficult to administer, but hopefully NSA and DoD in general will realize why mere difficulty of administration should not hold them back now. Honestly the NSA is lucky that the first (known?) insider leak of this type came from a do-gooder instead of something more sinister. I will say that civil servants tend to despise the contractors. I can't say I blame them either, it's literally a case of "dey turk our jeerrbs!". But fixing the rise of contractors would require both a decoupling of the military-industrial complex and possibly an overhaul of the civil service benefits/retirement scheme (as the whole point to hiring a contractor is that their staff are cheaper overall).
- rdl 13y ago
  I don't think "contractor staff are cheaper overall" applies to IT or other specialty services staff. A Boozer getting $200k/yr is probably billed at...$350k? Assuming you need the position for 10y, that's 3.5mm. You could keep a civil servant for $80k/yr and give him a $60k/yr pension for (say, $120k/yr for his working life) for an entire career of 30 years for that. Spend the first 5-10 on training (much of which is OJT, so he's still doing useful work), and you're still 10-15 years ahead, even today.
  - mpyne 13y ago
    That's a great point, but unfortunately there's a real political cost to having civil servant headcount. People already complain all the time about how many people work for the Federal government alone, but if they knew how many civil servants there would be if we limited contractors to actual common business functions I think they'd be stunned.
    - rdl 13y ago
      That's partially the point :) If we had to account for headcount, we'd scale back our missions to things which were essential to national security.