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Comment by purututu | Hacker News Reader

Where does NSA get the money from to hire thousands (=multiple 1000s) of big tech workers? How comes big tech is laying them off but NSA can afford to hiring them, in the thousands?

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Tax dollars. These jobs are safe from layoffs. It looks really bad when the government starts laying off people.

Also borrowed dollars. The federal budget deficit is $1.38T in 2022, enough to fund 16 NSAs.

Its insane that NSA is 1/16 of federal budget. Thats way too much money to spend on merely one part of the defense budget.

Deficit, not budget.

Snapshots are valueless. The deficit shot up to 3T in 2020, though I'm not really sure why (;. Then, in 2022 it was cut in half. It looks like we're on track to hit pre-Iraq War levels of deficit in another few years.

https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/natio...

We haven't run a surplus since 2001, and I'd be very surprised if we continue to see the deficit decline. You can think of 2020/2021 as outliers because of all the pandemic spending assistance, and then taking them out, we're back on the same trendline since 2015, i.e. up. Likely will be even steeper if we get a recession later this year or next.

Are they safe from government shutdown brinkmanship

Usually, government shutdown excludes security-critical programs.

In the past, the government workers got unpaid time off. Then Congress quietly voted to reinstate all of lost pay so it turned into extra paid time off that didn't count toward the vacation allowance.

It's not guaranteed, but I would guess that Congress would do the same thing again.

Blurb in the article: "The NSA declined to say how much taxpayer money is allotted for the hiring effort. Total spending on the intelligence community for fiscal 2022 was $89.8 billion."

Government budgets tend to be stable so I suspect they have always been hiring this many positions, but have had severe difficulties retaining talent with the lower salaries.

They pay a fraction of big tech

The gravy train isn’t running as well as it used too, and even during the glory days it’s not like every FAANG employee was on a half a mil+ total comp… and not ever tech worker worked for FAANG.

You can get a very decent salary with amazing benefits and job security working for the government, living in a far lower cost area than SF or Seattle and retire early on a very generous retirement plan.

> living in a far lower cost area than SF or Seattle

If you're talking about DMV, it's not that different.

This random calculator has SF[1] as 15% more expensive and Seattle[2] as slightly less expensive

[1] https://www.forbes.com/advisor/mortgages/real-estate/cost-of...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/advisor/mortgages/real-estate/cost-of...

I’m not sure the DC is really much (if at all) cheaper than Seattle.

And GS salaries are bad. GS-15 tops out at like 160k at the most senior levels.

Maybe NSA puts them on a special track, but even that isn’t very good.

I’ve lived extensively in both Seattle and DC. DC works out to be cheaper at this point.

The GS salary, as you noted, is the bigger issue.

Ok but like 80-90% of FB engineers are E5s making ~300k+. That’s a lot more than an upper limit of 160-185k (sibling comments). And cost of living in Seattle is not substantially higher than DC.

> That’s a lot more than an upper limit of 160-185k (sibling comments).

The GS upper limit is on base pay. Just as with FAANG, you'd have to look at bonus structures too.

It's definitely not the same as FAANG upper limits, but it's also going to be a more stable and steady-paced job that still pays more than the median developer salary.

There are a lot of burned out ex-FAANG employees out there who will gladly take a pay cut to work at a different pace. Not all of the FAANG jobs are like the "I only work 3 hours per day and make $300K per year" anecdotes that get posted here all the time.

I'd be keen to hear from anyone familiar with GS compensation about typical bonuses you might expect in any given year. I suspect it's a lot less than $100k.

NSA is part of the DoD - the DoD's annual budget at this point is north of $700 billion. While NSA's exact slice of the overall DoD budget is classified - they're by far the largest intelligence agency in U.S government. Many times larger than even the CIA. It's safe to say they have the funds to hire 1000s of tech workers.

All kinds of source I'm sure—for example, the CIA has financed all sorts of black operations with drug trafficking since at least WWII. Now, that money would not be used to hire the rank and file, but it does relieve pressure on the budget.

Ransomware attacks come to mind. It wouldn't be hard to subcontract that out and keep even the hackers themselves from knowing who they're working for.

Much smaller scale, but I'm sure most of the VPN companies run at a profit.

It gets the money from you, and unlike MicroGoogBook, you are absolutely obliged to be their customer.

1. congress 2. big tech has to actually make a profit

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