If you think that's a perk you don't belong doing that work. It's not the james bond life you think it is and the people who think of it that way are insufferable.
Try living in a windowless box for 8 hours a day and having no resume.
Try living in a windowless box for 8 hours a day and having no resume.
I remember vividly one training session where they explained to us that if an attractive woman approached us, it wasn't because we were particularly interesting. And if that happened we should notify the security group immediately.
Then he cut to slides with several enemy combatants, followed by a massive explosion, followed by a large smoldering crater, and said "Pay back is a real bitch."
It's a burden.
I'm not saying it's a ticket to being filthy rich, but it opens doors to some lucrative careers that you wouldn't otherwise be able to get.
I remember being emotionally exhausted after a particularly rough week at work, and not being able to talk about it to my wife beyond the barest "yeah, it's been a tough one". It isn't cool or sexy, at best its a layer of inconvenience and red tape over your day-to-day work life. Looking back, it was by far my least favorite job I've ever held
(Caveat: these are "rules" for regular people that have been given the privilege of holding a US national security clearance. There are many examples of people that have held security clearances that get away with conduct that would otherwise result in revocation and criminal charges for regular persons)
If you don’t want to do that work you would not view it as a perk.
I can only speak from the contractor side of things, and it is true that many job openings list "must have active [clearance X]" as a requirement, which certainly keeps the candidate pool to within people already in that community. It takes 12-24 months to get some clearances, with no guarantee that after that time invested, you will actually be approved. So it is a massive gate.
But the flip side, as others pointed out, is you have large chunks of time where you cannot talk about what you did in anything approaching the detail someone who worked on a non-cleared job can. Even if you worked on some stealth mode startup's top-secret project, with NDAs and whatnot, there's nothing like the very real threat of decades in federal prison. The best way to avoid falling afoul of an unauthorized disclosure is strongly compartmentalizing your work life - this is strongly encouraged within the industry. You talk about work at work, in a vault where the only other people there are cleared. You STFU everywhere else. Easy and simple to remember. The only time this is _ever_ a problem is when you're trying to get out of the industry, where you must talk about your work experience to potential employers. That's how your perk becomes a trap.