The US Government as a whole has a massive talent retention problem. Only the mediocre will stay at NSA / CIA now and we'll probably see more of these leaks / hacks.
As far as money is concerned, NSA is way overfunded - it just spends money on the wrong things and wastes lots of resources due to inefficiency.
The CIA were never noted for being the sharpest of government agencies ...
However, the NSA generally had a very good reputation. The big problem with the NSA is who wants to work in a place where you can't actually talk about what you do?
The primary underlying problem is that sharing and security are fundamentally at odds. If the NSA can't even get it right, what chance does everybody else have?
Or maybe it was created for both. Or neither. Shrug.
Just googled it.. Here's a quote from Larry:
[...] the NSA project Perl was (indirectly) written to support.
Another one from his 2005 State of the Onion:
> You might say that Perl grew out of the Cold War. I've often told the story about how Perl was invented at a secret lab that was working on a secret NSA project, so I won't repeat that here, since it's no secret
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacker_(security)
Here's the source on that:
http://cahighways.org/wordpress/?p=5460
Another notable aspect of that was it used an early secure kernel, GEMSOS, that is still marketed by Aesec but probably in legacy mode in bad way. It did resist penetration during NSA certification and time on market far as what data I have says.
The Feds want to contract out for anything they can. So you work for Lockheed or whatever and get most of the attributes of government employment.
In my indirect experience with Lockheed, their pay wasn’t that much better than being federal (they’re still a huge federal contractor and aren’t exactly boutique). It seems like a lot when you’re used to $80-90k as a senior engineer though for years to bump into $110k on a whim (this is without being particularly special or niche, the over-funded “cyber” contracts get anyone that can read and write shellcode $140k+ which is a ton of people at NSA).
The much bigger problem hitting defense as a whole is that smaller contractors that specialized in being nimble and elite are basically being driven out of business due to federal contracting trend shifts post-sequester. Myself and many others have permanently left the IC out of exasperation with contractors now getting oftentimes less than their federal counterparts and a severe drought of technologically interesting contracts that make business sense.
Right, and the profits flow to a couple people who essentially own the contract. It’s essentially modern day aristocracy, except the contracts are more valuable to farm out to peasants than land is.
State and local government employees are paid well? Where? Which ones?
It all depends on what is valuable to you.
Not to my knowledge. Which ones for what jobs, do you happen to know?
https://www.nctq.org/districtPolicy/contractDatabase/distric...