Wild that the NSA has a podcast. Part of me always wanted to work for them, and I still dream of cyber warfare, but the allure of big tech money and the Virginia location always pushed me away. Maybe some day.
Have you? Is this just public information I didn’t see? Or are starting a conversation with an impossible premise?
I also wouldn’t make assumptions.
If you go looking around on linkedin or crunchbase, you'll find numerous 10-50 employee defense contractors. Having known a few individuals employed this way, I would rank them as smart, capable, highly technical and easily capable of working at FAANG. They're getting comparable compensation/benefits with far less stress, and probably work on more interesting problems than the average Googler.
If you had people cycling through one of the most critical branches of US intelligence at startup pace primarily motivated by money that probably creates some issues. Because they probably care where these people wander off to when they leave the agency