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Comment by throwawaygh | Hacker News Reader

> It will be a long, long time before the marketplace evolves sufficient technological measures to guard against state-sanctioned/possibly-state-sponsored malicious actors operating with impunity in a lawless environment.

Unfortunately, the marketplace -- at least certain segments of it -- are far beyond .mil/.gov in terms of capacity and sophistication. E.g., AWS's formal tools for code-level security is what DARPA's been yelling about doing for decades, but gov't contractors and the branches/agencies are unable/unwilling to catch.

I'm not sure how to fix gov or mil, but a good starting point within mil is to stop making career officers with theology and polisci degrees but zero CS training the first-line managers of cyber commands.

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The first time I ran into somebody who was in charge of a technical department but had only degree in Applied Theology my jaw hit the floor.

Applied theology.

By the third time I had to seek out existential comfort.

How do you apply theology?

Pray your infrastructure is secure?

Pray your infra is secure haha brilliant!

Practice what you preach?

This upsets me a bit because I graduated from art school but got into DevOps because I was a Linux nerd since I was in my early teens. There is room for us. It doesn't make us terrible fits for the job. On the contrary, I think people with unconventional backgrounds can offer unconventional insights into software architecture.

What you got a degree in shouldn't be the make or break of your career.

> DevOps because I was a Linux nerd since I was in my early teens

You are an exception.

In the military and certain parts of the corporate world ("enterprise" companies mostly), there is a wide-spread and systemic problem with horrendously unqualified people managing software/IT groups. E.g., Susan Mauldin for a recent example.

We can allow space for self-taught people without opening the flood gates. No one should be in charge of IT security without first developing deep technical expertise at some point in their career.

> Susan Mauldin

For anyone as confused as I was, this is probably referring to the Equifax security officer. My local search engine mostly brought up a murder case.

I've never objected to being managed by anybody with an arts degree and never will. English, communications, philosophy, have at it. Some of my best technical managers majored in English.

Theology says something specific about how you process reality.

> Theology says something specific about how you process reality.

I will point out that one of the founders of a core CS discipline have written books [1] on what can be called theology.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth#Works_regarding_h...

Ok, but that wasn't his focus. Your point?

We all have musings that cross domains; why does this persons book hold significance to you for this thread?

Sorry, this wasn't clear enough to you in my original comment. My point was that judging someone's ability to do CS negatively by their interest in theology, as presented by the person I was replying to, is refuted by a well-known example. Makes sense now?

Not necessarily - theology is just philosophy. Biblical literalism is an almost uniquely American phenomenon, there are plenty of Christians around the world and in the US who don't believe the earth was literally created 6000 years ago.

Theology is just philosophy.

Applied Theology is an American evangelist field of study that focuses on shaping your life and the world around you to operate according to the will and word of the Christian Evangelist god.

Looks to me like a degree for people intending to become a priest/minister/etc.

Oxford (UK): https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/graduate/courses/mth-applied...

California Baptist: https://calbaptist.edu/programs/bachelor-of-applied-theology...

From your second link:

"Everything from preaching to media technology, from helping with funerals to discipling [sic] unbelievers."

This is one of those very frustrating conversations to have online, not that different from people saying "but it's the People's Democratic Republic of whatever."

The Baptist thing called "applied theology" is a part of the Dominionist movement. Fundamentally it's a theocratic endeavor.

I agree that theology has been used in a thousand ways across two thousand years and I'm sad that if you have a degree in "Applied Theology" from a small religious college in the Midwest it's definitely not just "I was thinking of becoming a minister."

But dominionism is a real thing. People major in it, they drop out, they get other jobs, and then you have this record of their beliefs right there on their resumes. It'd be easier if they had no degree at all.

you could well be right that this is a dominion thing, though I don't see anything suggesting such - but then I can imagine it's not openly promoted, if so.

> Everything from preaching to media technology, from helping with funerals to discipling [sic] unbelievers

I don't see an issue with this, if discipling unbelievers means something similar to promoting the church, or missionary-esque behaviour (of the non-colonial form, obviously). If it means how to deal with atheists in a theocracy then I'm not a fan.

FWIW, I read it as a joke in part about how common it is in their experience to run into people without CS degrees who are in this field.

(And in part just an opportunity to play with language. I grew up in the Bible Belt. Gentle humor about religion/spirituality is something I am no stranger to.)

I totally agree with this and for a entry-level job, with no experience, I would be totally cool with ignoring the degree is the person was right. For a manager or higher level engineer, I believe some amount of prior experience is necessary, the degree is not a requirement but it may influence how much experience I am willing to accept as requisite for the position.

In Vernor Vinge’s scifi novel “A Fire Upon the Deep” applied theology is the study and appeasement of superhuman sentient AIs. :) Its a field where the study subjects either completely ignore the practicioners, or squashes them like bugs. Also by the sound of it it involves a lot of software archelogy. Who knows, if they studied, and survived, that kind of applied theology they might be good for technical leads.

Could have been Computational Demonology but you didn't have clearance.

I was trying to use rust to write a hyperdimensional version of Conway's game of life and sone suits showed up with papers for me to sign and said if I hadn't used rust we'd have all been dead.

career officers with theology and polisci degrees but zero CS training the first-line managers of cyber commands.

Is this true?

This can't be true. Surely they must have some CS experience?

I took my last bus off a USMC base so long ago I've raised a kid who's in med school since. Can someone with more recent experience chime in on whether or not this is hyperbole?

I was a cyber operator in the USAF for years, and finished up my active duty in late 2019. This is completely accurate. Not only are the first-line officers generally uneducated in CS/IT/security, the people training them are equally uneducated. This is apparently by design.

Once upon a time, I heard a story about Air Force officers working on some technical problem that required a relatively advanced education. Until a new CO moved in and said that that kind of thing wasn't going to wash; AF officers don't work, they manage.

What AWS tools? This [1]? If so, it looks interesting, I need to take a closer look at it.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/security/provable-security/

It seems more that the most competent government agencies and private organizations are in the same general ballpark, but anyway that doesn't matter, because the ones getting hacked are the least competent of either group.

> AWS's formal tools for code-level security

what tools?

yeah what tools?

https://aws.amazon.com/security/provable-security/ as one example

On whether it's being unable or unwilling: one could argue that various gov agencies actively invest in keeping software insecure, e.g. by buying up zero-days.

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