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Comment by ajkjk | Hacker News Reader

Hm? It's easy to make a meaningful argument without raw data. You just extrapolate from what you know.

I know that I have had the opportunity to apply to work at the NSA. When I was looking for job opportunities after college I perused lists of government jobs, including positions at the NSA. I know that today, I would not apply to work there. I'm one person, but I know many engineers of a similar mindset and read about many more, so I assume it's a trend. I definitely don't know what rate of potential applicants conform to this mindset, but I know some do (me, the people I know like me, and voices I've heard on the internet).

Therefore, I can meaningfully argue that they would have a harder time hiring. Of course I might be wrong but that's what you get when you operate with incomplete data.

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Just to play the devil's advocate, one might just as easily argue that the self-selecting of you and your like-minded peers actually made the NSA's recruiting tasks easier. If you have some moral / ethical / rational belief systems that are inherently incompatible with their organizational DNA, a perfectly efficient recruiting machine would have sorted you into the "NO" pile anyway. Likewise, people more well-suited (for the sake of making ourselves feel better, we'll call them morally challenged) - might now be more inclined to sort themselves "in." So, they might have merely saved themselves some additional interview analysis and (assuming a less than perfect screening process) perhaps even prevented another Snowden Affair. To be clear, I am not asserting that any of this is true, but I suspect that my unfounded speculation using incomplete data is no less reasonable than yours.

Many of us have always had that mindset about the NSA.

However, it takes a special type of odd personality to work there (doing amazingly cool stuff but not being able to talk about lots of it). The personalities that fit there well don't fit elsewhere very well.

> The personalities that fit there well don't fit elsewhere very well.

Source?

I think NSA employs over 30k people. You're going to make a baseless claim that they all share one common personality trait, making them a poor fit for any other possible place of employ, in the whole world?

Really?

Um, yes. Really.

We know, for a fact, that the vast majority of NSA employees are willing to subject themselves to enhanced scrutiny (limited travel), behavioral controls (they will discuss your porn and online accounts), and submission to a fairly arbitrary set of rules (such as polygraph tests) that have no proven connection toward their job or efficacy.

Okay, so, we HAVE demonstrated that NSA employees do share at least one common personality trait that is reasonably unusual in the general population.

Perhaps I was being a bit overzealous and should provide a bit of exception. People who stay with the NSA for very long don't fit elsewhere very well.

Now, this probably doesn't apply to those who don't have security clearances. But then, you're basically claiming that the NSA is just like a standard employer--and that's not normally what people think of when they think of "working for the NSA".

> personality trait that is reasonably unusual in the general population

I'm not sure this part is true. "submission to a fairly arbitrary set of rules" sounds like every job.

> that's not normally what people think of when they think of "working for the NSA".

Most people working for the NSA aren't working as a "Jason Bourne"-type (which is what we think of as "working for the NSA).

I would claim the NSA's very much like a standard employer... but with a (significantly) more heavily enforced NDA.

There's a smaller pool of candidates, but the ones that remain are more likely to be okay with what the NSA does.

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