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Comment by buildsjets | Hacker News Reader

It may have hurt me financially and limited my career opportunities, but this is one reason why I refuse to work on any technology that requires me to have a security clearance. It's a decision I made way back at the end of the last century and it has served me well throughout ~25 years of aircraft development while the world has been at continuous war, and mostly kept me out of military programs.

Also, I took one look at the SF86 and said F that, no government deserves that information, so I didn't get screwed in the Department of State OPM hack like all the other suckers.

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> may have hurt me financially and limited my career

Weapons doesn’t pay as well as making people click ads. The people working on this stuff are usually doing so because they believe it’s the right thing.

Actually, working for DOD programs has several advantages:

1) The pay is pretty good. It's not FAANG-level pay, but it's generally better than non-FAANG pay, without so much competition.

2) The work-life balance is excellent, as long as it's in a place you want to live. No 80-hour weeks, as overtime is generally prohibited unless approved by the customer (and then you get overtime pay). Time is tracked and paid by the government on an hourly basis, so they don't allow overtime unless necessary. No unpaid "exempt" overtime.

3) Generally stable employment. It's hard to find people with a security clearance, so it's hard to get fired unless you're a really poor performer. You probably don't have to worry about dealing with stack ranking unlike many regular jobs.

It’s rather funny to me - that you cannot get security clearance unless you were born in the USA, against the backdrop of the level of contribution von Braun provided.

> you cannot get security clearance unless you were born in the USA

This is not true.

Is it only certain levels of security clearance then ?

Not that I know of. Even Yankee White and TS-SC can go to naturalised citizens. Hell, our current Secretaries of Energy and Homeland Security are foreign born.

Hope you find comfort in fact that smart guys in China don't have such reservations and smart guys in North Korea don't have any options.

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