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Comment by Gustomaximus | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if this is due to the ever increasing scale of the US intelligence services.

From my working life perspective smaller teams of talented people are often more impactful than significantly larger teams. E.g. Large teams create bureaucracy. And 'weak links' become harder to spot and typically allowed to remain.

I know nothing about this area so take my comment as curiosity only, but I wonder what USA gets/achieves for this $50-100bn intelligence budget? And what would they get at a $2bn funded group utilising a much smaller group of the best employees within the existing orgs.

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I don't think that's it. I personally think the best window into this world is William Binney and his thinthread project. He developed thinthread to protect Americans privacy, and it only was going to cost a handful of millions.

His functioning program was scrapped for a billion dollar program that didn't protect Americans privacy and that didn't work because all it did was make the haystack so big finding the needle became neigh impossible.

That is a clear example of the good ol boy kickback system being allowed to take over and actually reduced national security. There is a reason that since 9/11, multiple counties in VA have the most growth of millionaires in the country.

As for the CIA, most sources I listen to (Ray McGovern, John Kirakou, Bob Bear, etc) indicate they have been getting rid of analysts who speak "truth to power" due to the over politicalization of intelligence, so combine that with good ol boy kickback cruft, it's no wonder incompetence is allowed to abound.

This is only a part of the reason the military Intel community has tended to have an adversarial attitude to the company.

Often it's not so much that the billion dollar program was created to make defense contractors rich. It's that the attitude of the US military and intelligence agencies is that if it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing. The defense and intelligence contracting industries simply aid, abet, and exploit that propensity to enrich themselves.

So where a simple and cost effective solution would work, the US Military/Spy Agencies would want a platinum-plated solution that would give them total dominance in the situation at hand, which would spiral the costs and complexity to the point that the solution doesn't work at all. Contractors are never going to be a brake in that situation because it makes them filthy rich. And any employees who object get swept aside because the powers that be want to pursue the most aggressive and ambitious solution possible.

Binney is a complete crank.. I'd be very cautious of any first person narratives that he tells, especially when he paints himself as the hero.

You can't say shit like this without backing it up. I think you are full of it and just attempting character assassination.

I mean.. Have you heard anything he's said lately?

Here's his appearance on Infowars.. where he explains to Alex Jones how the "deep state" is setting up Donald Trump by scapegoating the Russians: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5XE96G5kN0

From my brief view into a federal agency:

Employee breakdown is as follows:

1/6 extremely capable and dedicated high performers

1/6 extremely capable and dedicated but go home at 5pm

1/3 average (not going to screw things up massively, but also never going to make a large contribution)

1/3 shocking (as in where do you even find people this useless and disagreeable - if you’re lucky their managers put them in an office and don’t let them touch anything, if not, they wreak havoc)

So 1/3 high performers, 1/3 average, and 1/3 low performers? Not a particularly amazing revelation.

And why the differentiation between folks who leave after 8 hours of work and those that don't?

It's just silicon valley startup mentality.

You literally work inside a room with no windows, poor ventilation, and sound dampening. Anyone who doesn't go home after 8 hours has something wrong with them.

The low performers are beyond low performers, the 6th decile at the federal govnerment would be the bottom decile at most larger well run private organizations. Again i am talking white collar federal government.

At the margin, in corporate america salaried professionals have a focus on deadlines and deliverables (because a. If the company goes under They’re out of a job and b. If they consistently miss deadlines they’re out of a job), so if that means the occasional late night, or an an expectation around a 10 hr work day - ok. On the federal government side the attitude CAN be “if it’s late, it’s late - what are they going to do, fire me?” Without some sense of urgency (however that is inspired) productivity is bad and tends to get worse.

Because federal employees cannot practically be fired it is very common to try to move them sideways to get rid of them. Eventually they just get promoted.

These numbers look pretty good compared to my experience with large corporate organizations.

So like a normal office, then? :)

Normal offices have layoffs now and then, which in many cases target the latter third.

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