AWS hired 66 former US gov officials since 2018; half are from Dept of Defense | Hacker News Reader

AWS hired 66 former US gov officials since 2018; half are from Dept of Defense

politico.com

126 pointsfireball_blaze76 comments

I'd venture to say that aren't any significant federal government contractors that don't employ former federal workers. Like it or no this is the norm and it isn't all the revolving door. Selling to the federal government is significantly different than selling to other customers.

A big part of this is the need for workers with security clearance to service your government contracts. Its far far easier to hire people who have clearance rather than hire somebody and then pay for them to go through the process, and the DoD has the majority of people with security clerance.

Indeed. Take into account the security clearance matter, and the fact that these two organizations work closely together 24/7, and this just makes sense. With whom would AWS have a closer relationship than with the DoD or DHS?

I formerly worked in AWS on a team that had occasional minor need to deploy and make changes to the GovCloud. I was the only US Citizen on my team and was required for every single deployment.

Did this give you incredible leverage for performance reviews, raises, etc?

none at all; this task was just literally a "hit the button".

I can only imagine turning off the lights and sending people home in those moments where you have a late night family emergency.

pretty much all of the times I was needed were scheduled, so there was rarely surprises.

Yup. Not only do you have to be a US Citizen, but you also have to be on US soil. So if you're on vacation internationally? Can't make that change.

AWS takes that stuff very seriously.

Can you tell me what country I have to be in to cancel my services and stop being billed?

Iran

Suuuuure. Whoops and there goes a vpn tunnel with a residential endpoint.

That’s not particularly surprising. I spent a lot of time on an army base in mid aughts as an undergrad for a similar reason, decommissioning an astrophysics project.

And I bet that Amazon pays a lot better for SC (DV) cleared workers than the DOD does.

Likely, but Amazon isn't known for its high salaries, is it? Also govt jobs typically have good benefits so a 1:1 salary comparison may not make sense.

What's high? They are competitive with other FAANG. Source: I worked at both Amazon and Facebook. Amazon also offers a bonus for having a clearance.

What’s the bonus?

IIRC $15,000 / year

It also helps if you have people who are just familiar with the things the government is trying to do, too, so they don't just get blank stares when they start discussing IAVAs and STIGs.

It does a lot. I have someone in the family,who went from working for the government regulator to going into the private sector and literally exchanging emails with ex colleagues a few days later. Knows the system, what's doable and what's not and so on.

That's fair enough and indeed quite plausible. I guess the same kind of argument would apply to the likes of Huawei them, too?

"Except for Eldakdoky, all the AWS hires named in this article either declined to comment or didn’t respond to inquiries."

I'll check Hazem Eldakdoky's profile in 6 months but I'll be shocked if they're still at AWS after making a statement to the press.

Not that any of this is incorrect, but there are two important bits of context to add here:

-Not all DoD hires are for the purpose of lobbying. A lot of the time it’s just because they already have the TS/SCI clearance which is necessary for working on servers in the government-only datacenters, and hiring people who have it already is a lot easier than getting a new hire and waiting the multiple years to get clearance (seriously: it’s a pain in the ass, especially when you consider that you have to pass drug tests including THC, which is an increasingly rare thing to find among developer-types) - Amazon’s competition in this space is mainly Microsoft, who does the exact same thing. Indeed, part of the reason Amazon lost the JEDI contract is probably because Microsoft had been playing the ‘hire former Pentagon suits’ game for much longer.

JEDI going to MS is confusing until you realize that O365 was thrown into the MS offering. The US government runs on Microsoft.

Years it should be 2-3 months - well that's what a little bird told me about the UK equivalent.

> Not that any of this is incorrect, but there are two important bits of context to add here:

> -Not all DoD hires are for the purpose of lobbying. A lot of the time it’s just because they already have the TS/SCI clearance which is necessary for working on servers in the government.

Of course not. Only the managers are for lobying. ( which is corruption with a differrent name). It does help to hire people which can influence the government.

They are hiring people with security clearances to work on the Govt. cloud. Unsurprisingly, many people who have a DoD security clearance work for the DoD, it's not a huge community.

A friend that does inspection work at factories, told me over beers once, that many executives are former military. West Point graduates and the sort. I took it as some sort government control of industry collusion. But who knows.

How is this surprising? Military is a breeding ground for leadership, that's like literally the whole point of going to West Point is to be a professional leader. After the armed services, corporate leadership has got to be a total breeze.

Its not surprising, just something I never thought about. It's more like when you notice the wall's of the cage you're in moment. With that said, West Point is a great school.

> After the armed services, corporate leadership has got to be a total breeze.

“Total breeze” is probably an overstatement given the culture differences between the military and civilian worlds, but otherwise I agree.

Yeah, its probably harder to get people to follow direction when they can't be court-marshalled if they don't.

My ex-military officer friends tell me the corporate world is considerably harder than the military. Maybe it also depends on where you work / what you do.

I concur with your friends. The reason is due to the fact that in the military, people understand where they fall within the chain of command and that they must follow orders or there will be severe consequences. This strict structure is needed in life and death situations - I wouldn't know personally, but I'd imagine the medical industry (hospitals and such) have a similar respect for chain of command. It's more difficult to lead when employees have little respect for authority or directives coupled with companies that do not enforce chain of command rules.

You can hire a master artist to paint you a portrait, but if you only give them Jello and a steel 'canvas' to work with, your painting isn't going to be so great.

I have a few decades in private sector, 8yrs as a reserve officer, and I recently was publically berated by a junior engineer after simply asking him to explain his work (which was, incidentally, incorrect). He was forced to publically apologize in the face of losing his job, but this was an extreme example. An event like this would virtually never happen in the military, but I see it happen fairly routinely to other senior staff, albeit less extreme cases, with junior employees that do not have a military background.

There is a professional and orderly way to handle dissagrements with authority. The military helps teach you how to handle those situations in a more productive and stable manner.

Just on a side tangent. A lot of great art, comes out in part from the restriction of materials being used. A portrait from Jello and steel would be awesome.

Isn't the DoD a civilian institution?

The US DoD includes civilian agencies and all of the US armed forces.

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

Or that wars and retail dominance are both won by logistics and the leadership skills are transferrable. Lots of former military at every level of Amazon.

Why is this surprising? When people leave the military, they still need jobs. My brother is a veteran, now he's a SWE at Facebook. All large companies have veteran recruiting efforts: https://www.facebook.com/careers/facebook-life/veterans

Its not surprising. Just might come into play in ways people have not thought about. Like there's been a lot chatter of a military coup online in the last year. Due to Covid, Riots, Election, and mostly China's growing power. If such a scenario were to pass. It will matter which side industry will take. For example, will truckers strike. Its something I did not think about. But having former military at top, makes me think industry will follow military. This is not totally hypothetical. Like even as recently as last week this topic has been on CNN.

That chatter is mostly from people outside the military, the military itself is not inclined to coup in the US. It goes against what it stands for, it's also almost guaranteed to fail in any meaningful sense. The military itself would become disbanded in the process and it would mean not just the end of the nation at the top (change from democratic republic to military authoritarianism) but a fracturing of the nation itself.

The chatter inside the military is mostly, "How stupid are those asshats that want a coup?"

I mostly agree. But I think most people see it as brief intervention period, and then the military would be restoring political democracy. I personally don't think it would be positive at all for the reasons you mentioned. But also life would lost for sure. Though I do think if the riots continued last year, at some point military would have stepped in.

However, I remember when the US early in the pandemic ran out of masks, since the masks were manufactured in China and was telling its people masks were not necessary, to preserve supplies for healthcare workers. Recently the chip shortages are causing car manufacturing to grind to a halt.

Is the US military anything without industry? Seems to me like almost under all scenarios, US military success, is heavily based on US industry's ability to supply its weapons and logistical needs. With politicians behind outsourcing so much to China, can the US even sustain any direct conflict. Seems to me, that diminishing industrial capability has to be a giant sore point for the military. Especially when there are money trails of some politicians accepting money from China.

Who are these "most people"?

The military would not have "stepped in" under its own accord. It may have been called in (probably in the form of the state national guards).

If so many former military officers are positioning themselves so well in industry to effect this coup, maybe they could also step in and restore a larger portion of US manufacturing and sidestep the issue of your last paragraph. It would certainly be easier than destroying a country.

> I took it as some sort government control of industry collusion.

Why?

The more mundane explanation is that the military teaches you how to tolerate command chain bullshit on a daily basis.

Large companies are more about navigating political waters than they are about getting stuff done.

That isn't the reason. It's that the leadership training and experience of someone who has been placed in command of a large military unit is roughly equivalent to the demands placed on a corporate executive. In many ways, we're perfect targets, not just because of the leadership training and experience, but the extreme devotion to mission and personal sacrifice. Where else are you going to find people who regularly worked 20 hour days 7 days a week for up to 15 months in a foreign country? No matter how much you ask of an employee, you can't possibly ask more than the military did. Every time I read about Amazon employees pissing in bottles, I can't help but think of how many times I did just that when I was commanding tank crews. Working yourself to death and never taking a break is just an ordinary day in the service.

Where we struggle is in what others have identified in this thread. As a military leader, you're used to having complete control of your subordinates. You can confine them and in some cases execute them for not following orders. It takes some getting used to being in a situation where your reports have personal liberties guaranteed by the Constitution and you have to follow labor laws and what not. I've seen a lot of former military officers struggle with this. My wife's ex boss (and part of the reason he is now an ex boss) reported a hospitalization incident all the way up his chain of command, seemingly unaware of the existence of HIPAA. Soldiers don't have privacy rights, but ordinary citizens do.

There's also a dichotomy. Companies following rules, doing things the way they always did, inevitably leads to stagnation. You need creative people that break these rules and innovate. Sometimes even burn off parts of a companies portfolio that are still successful, to get to the next thing. Just from my brief study of personality types.

One thing to consider is that a federal security clearance is expensive. It makes a huge amount of sense to hire people who already have a clearance paid for by a federal employer. That saves $50-$80 thousand per headcount. A high quantity headcount of clearance holders also bolsters a contractor’s position in contract negotiation.

Every defense contractor does this. It’s stupid not to. My current employer isn’t even a defense contractor (as far as I know) and still hires thousands and thousands of veterans.

> That saves $50-$80 thousand per headcount.

I'm sorry, I'm not trying to be rude, but this is a wildly innacurate claim. Citations are requested on HN posts to avoid misinformation (though apparently nobody adheres to or enforces this rule anymore).

It only costs employers a few hundred to a few thousand dollars to obtain and maintain a US security clearance for employees [1]. It's not really a hurdle when hiring new talent without a clearance. In general, we hire military veterans not because of their clearance, but because of their tendency (not always, but in general) to possess high integrity, strong leadership skills, loyalty, niche skillsets, and strong work ethic.

1. https://www.taonline.com/security-clearances/hiring-cleared-...

According to your link the cost for a TS is $3000-$15000. That is just the expense directly to OPM (office of personnel management).

The hired employee cannot perform the work they are hired to perform until that clearance is granted which can take as little as 3 months. A TS investigation will generally run from 6-18 months. Mine took closer to 18 months and I am a boring nobody with no foreign connections. Jared Kushner, Trump’s senior advisor also took about 18 months for a clearance.

TS alone does not grant access. It is a classification umbrella allowing access to compartments, the most common being SCI. These also take time, money, and administration.

You can also receive an interim secret pretty fast to start certain work immediately . Once you have TS/SCI it’s as “easy” as some paperwork and a briefing to get read into another space. That initial TS investigation is LONG though as you said

Interim secret clearances are routine, but not so much for TS. Unsurprisingly, it comes down to urgency of need and not anything else like seniority or authority. That explains why certain nobodies in the military can easily attain an interim but not senior officials working on presidential staff.

I was a nobody in the military and had to get one at my first command until the investigation completed! Also - I heard from buddies still in/contracting that they increased the time period between needing to get reinvestigated? I did contracting for a while afterwards and have considered returning. I miss being mission focused rather than profit but the reinvestigation process/finding a sponsor is intimidating.

The actual billing rates for an investigation aren't that bad (and can be found here: https://www.dcsa.mil/mc/pv/gov_hr_security/billing_rate/). I'm not sure where the 50-80,000 comes from, but somewhere around 70k average total cost is what I remember being cited when I was first getting a cleared job years back.

It wasn't the direct charge for the investigation that caused that, though. It was the wait. You can obviously mitigate that by finding something productive for people to do while they await clearance, but a lot of employers struggle quite a bit to do that if all or almost all of the meaningful engineering work they do is classified. When I was still at Raytheon, it was becoming fairly common to see people waiting for over two years sitting around in what they called "ACES" or the awaiting clearance employee station. They tried to find some way to put these people to use, but for older programs with very limited unclassified code bases, there wasn't much to do. We had guys adding unit tests and setting up SonarQube for over a year, to code they had no context for and no understanding of how it was used.

It was quite frustrating, to the point that the President of our business unit testified to Congress about the costs of the investigation backlog, which lasted years in the wake of the OPM hack.

This isn't even remotely true. The costs of a security clearance investigation are borne by the sponsoring agency, not the contracting firm. The problem is that it's difficult to justify taking an uncleared person and submitting them for a clearance. You have to have a billet where someone isn't needed to hit the ground running, you have to be willing to take the risk to hire them with the possibility you may have to fire them within 12-18 months if they don't pass the investigation, and the program and/or contracting officer they're assigned to has to be willing to sign off on it (many contracts are written such that pre-cleared individuals are required to staff it).

This is exactly what I'd do if I wanted to expand my cloud defense revenue. Amazon clearly stated that's a major goal of theirs, they are in hot competition with Microsoft, and Oracle/IBM want in too (both those company have long and deep relationships with defense). Google, obviously, showed itself out the door with its public statements about Maven.

Not uncommon. I know of companies in the transportation industry that contract through the DoD and hire ex-DoD people specifically for the DoD contracts. They know how to speak the language and get deals done.

Edit: To clarify, most of these contracts, you have to bid for. But if you don't know how to speak DoD, you're going to have a much harder time.

AWS has 25,000 employees. How is the former legal employee of 66 of them of the slightest interest?

The answer is in the article.

66 former government officials is a very small number.

Curious -- based on what? Compared to other cloud providers? Compared to the normal # of gov officials at Seattle-based tech companies like Microsoft? As a % of overall work force?

The US government is the largest employer in the US, and Amazon is one of the largest private employer. Literally millions in the former, 100's of thousands in the later.

There will be considerable crossover.

Seriously. Something like 5 million people work for the USG.

That seems like an absurdly small number...

Change the headline to the original: The secret behind Amazon's domination in cloud computing

The current one doesn't really convey what the article is about

I'd say the current title more accurately describes the article.

The best title would probably be "AWS hired 66 former US gov officials since 2018, strengthening its ability to win federal contracts"

The HN title character limit is very restrictive. The title I used is the max length.

In that case, excellent job!

I disagree entirely. The title I employed is exactly what the article is about.

Two words: project JEDI.

This would make sense. Unlike Google where a woke employee might start gas-lighting coworker if they worked for DoD or berating Google if it tries to work with DoD. Amazon seems to have better handle on situation.

I recall Bezos making some public statements a couple years ago pushing back on internal objections to working with DoD. Something to the effect of “I understand the concern, but if you think the US doesn’t need a strong military, you’re mistaken, and if you think the US is generally a bad actor, you’re mistaken.”

Good. He seems like man of convictions.

"In FY 2019 there was a 4.2% increase in the number of security clearances, for a total number of 4.2 million individuals with eligibility to access classified information."[0]

This "they need people with clearences" talk is laughable. This is purely lobbying which every government contractor does. They also scooped up 4 former state CIOs. They are playing the game and quite well. This does need to be cleaned up. A company recently won a $500 million DOD contract and months later the women on the government side is now the company CEO.

[0] https://news.clearancejobs.com/2021/02/09/how-many-people-ha...

That 4.2 million people included all the military and civilian contractors, unable to be hired because they are fulfilling their roles. Additionally that 4.2 million includes all clearance levels. The higher the clearance, the more the available talent pool SHARPLY declines. I have first hand info, AWS is DESPERATE for cleared individuals for various contracts. Unfortunately the recruiting has not synchronized their offers with this need, so you get a lot of low balling offers that most cleared people laugh at.

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