"The kinds of commercial organizations that take in raw recruits generally turn out extremely mediocre J2EE and .NET developers" Maybe the NSA is different but

"The kinds of commercial organizations that take in raw recruits generally turn out extremely mediocre J2EE and .NET developers" Maybe the NSA is different but from my experience, the big contractors that do programming for government programs are exactly the same. Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, etc- they have lots of mediocre .NET and J2EE devs. Those types of developers you can attract with money. But the truly bright and intelligent people just aren't interested.