Hacker News Reader

Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

translation: must submit yourself to the indignity of doing an SF-86 background check to get a clearance, for a relative pittance of a salary, and having all your sensitive personal background data stolen from the OPM:

https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=opm...

View on HN

The background check process is involved (taking ~3-24 months), and since clearance is condition of employment, employees are sometimes let go if they fail to obtain a clearance. For anyone interested, clearedjobs[1] has a good faq about how clearances are obtained and adjudicated. Before applying, it's worth asking yourself if you want to go through the process and possibly risk having to leave the job if you fail to obtain a clearance.

As far as compensation goes, government pay will always be a little lower. Our new grad pay is notoriously low (GS 5-9), but we'll pay for your background check and a Masters/PHD if you're interested. For engineers with ~5-10 years experience GS-13 pay ($95k-$120k) is pretty competitive when you consider the cost of living in Sacramento (A nice 4bed/2bath house, in a great neighborhood is ~$400k). Additionally, we have management and technical promotions tracks within the organization of which both go up to GS-15 (non-management GS-15 jobs are pretty rare within the federal government).

[1] https://clearedjobs.net/security-clearance-faqs

Translation: accept lower pay because you're doing interesting work in the national interest with good job security and benefits; go through a background check because that's part of getting a job like this

For all you know they'll task you with writing assembler for a 1980s vintage cpu controlling m113 Bradley internal combustion engines.

Programming jobs don't get much better than that. I guess you could program the Voyager probe for NASA, which is even older. Programming missiles would be fun too; I've heard that memory leaks are accepted because it will be set free upon impact. Medical implants and spy equipment are probably fun too, with 8-bit CPUs being likely.

This kind of stuff sure beats web and phone app programming to sell ads, cause addiction, and scoop up people's lifestyles.

Psychological manipulation vs instruments for killing

No win either way.

If you want peace, you have to be prepared for war. We're currently the better part of a century into The Long Peace, something that has never happened before in human history, and it came about in part because of weapons development.

The same tools that provide the means for evil also provide the means for subjugating evil.

That said obviously we get into a lot of unnecessary war where a lot of people die who didn't need to. Still, you'd be a fool to sit on your hands while Russia and China race ahead in weapons development, with lower regard for human rights than the rest of us. You don't want them knocking on the door.

https://youtu.be/UC9pc4U40sI

"without you all this killing cant go on": It's impossible to disarm, because it's impossible to prove the other guy (russia, china) is being honest about disarming.

The long peace has lasted 50 more years since that song was written.

Do you have a particular point to make regarding the song?

Long peace? The US is in the longest war in our history.

Edit: second longest, but still > 16 years. We'll break the record soon enough.

The Long Peace means there have been no wars between major powers since 1945, we fear nuclear weapons. All wars now engaged in by great powers are asymmetric.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Peace

also see http://www.fallen.io/ and https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-59-the-destroyer-...

We do a lot of work on ARM Cortex processors and TI MSP430s. On a recent project the main processor was an Atmel ATSAMA5D3x running embedded linux. Most of the embedded work is C but some engineers use C++. There's a lot of peripheral support software we write as well, which is usually in C# or python. It's easily been 15+ years since we've done any projects in assembly.

That sounds interesting as hell. Also, when else do you get to test your code by driving an armored vehicle.

There's more to life than money (like getting to work on cool stuff), plus you know the government isn't going to shut down in 9 months like every startup, or get acquired, or "restructure" your job to puff up the numbers this quarter.

The OPM hack is something that already happened, in the past, to files that were current at that time. It is not known to be ongoing.

And it left me with such great confidence in the OPM's security!

The OPM hack was a succession of hacks over a few years with long detection & dwell times. Hard to turn that kind of ship..

Anyways, pretty fascinating.. as long as you and your colleagues aren't in the database. We work on tools to bring visibility & reliability to these kinds of incidents, it's pretty wild in practice!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com