There’s a massive pay disparity between public and private, and those currently in power want to keep it that way and eat away even more at gov functions. That combined without a clear rallying call for public service (like the Cold War or collective pride) are a recipe for disaster.

There is a big pay disparity, but the main thing is that engineers and other technical types have gone from having a big say in how problems get solved to being the problem itself. No amount of pay is going to retain people in those circumstances, except possibly those you don't want to retain.

As far as money is concerned, NSA is way overfunded - it just spends money on the wrong things and wastes lots of resources due to inefficiency.

I'm not even sure it's just pay. The govt is extremely inefficient and bureaucratic. If your thing is writing code, why go to a place like that? You'd spend half your day writing memos and wrangling red tape.

Until this is fixed we'll continue to be reliant on Israel intelligence

> The US Government as a whole has a massive talent retention problem. Only the mediocre will stay at NSA / CIA now and we'll probably see more of these leaks / hacks.

The CIA were never noted for being the sharpest of government agencies ...

However, the NSA generally had a very good reputation. The big problem with the NSA is who wants to work in a place where you can't actually talk about what you do?

The primary underlying problem is that sharing and security are fundamentally at odds. If the NSA can't even get it right, what chance does everybody else have?

What the hell are they doing spying on american citizens? The people you’ll attract are the people attracted to abusing said power. Good luck weeding out the creeps; let’s hope only a few die as the result of beuracratic negligence.

I think they will still have a steady supply of talented people who consider themselves patriots and whose politics align with the NSA and CIAs stated missions. Just because their politics don't agree with yours doesn't necessarily make the 'mediocre' remember.

Wait, they use perl?

Wasn't Perl created for the NSA? At least that's a story I heard. The official JPL reason is a cover.

Or maybe it was created for both. Or neither. Shrug.

Just googled it.. Here's a quote from Larry:

    [...] the NSA project Perl was (indirectly) written to support.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3394

Another one from his 2005 State of the Onion:

> You might say that Perl grew out of the Cold War. I've often told the story about how Perl was invented at a secret lab that was working on a secret NSA project, so I won't repeat that here, since it's no secret

https://www.perl.com/pub/2005/09/22/onion.html

It was for the high-assurance BLACKER VPN:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacker_(security)

Here's the source on that:

http://cahighways.org/wordpress/?p=5460

Another notable aspect of that was it used an early secure kernel, GEMSOS, that is still marketed by Aesec but probably in legacy mode in bad way. It did resist penetration during NSA certification and time on market far as what data I have says.

http://aesec.com/

Great links, thanks.

Well mostly Python for scripting. But it might be 2.4 running on RHEL 5 or something silly like that.

Federal pay sucks by design. If you want to work for .gov, you want state/local government.

The Feds want to contract out for anything they can. So you work for Lockheed or whatever and get most of the attributes of government employment.

It sucks by design compared to current markets and our job functional areas. Back in the 70s it was absolutely awesome pay in a region that wasn’t terribly expensive, but when the top n% of intelligence community engineers could easily go to a Big Tech company paying twice or three times as much it’s factors like ideology, mismatch of skills, or family that keep people in these jobs. In many other areas of government jobs, private sector pay is abysmal and the government jobs attract the best and brightest.

In my indirect experience with Lockheed, their pay wasn’t that much better than being federal (they’re still a huge federal contractor and aren’t exactly boutique). It seems like a lot when you’re used to $80-90k as a senior engineer though for years to bump into $110k on a whim (this is without being particularly special or niche, the over-funded “cyber” contracts get anyone that can read and write shellcode $140k+ which is a ton of people at NSA).

The much bigger problem hitting defense as a whole is that smaller contractors that specialized in being nimble and elite are basically being driven out of business due to federal contracting trend shifts post-sequester. Myself and many others have permanently left the IC out of exasperation with contractors now getting oftentimes less than their federal counterparts and a severe drought of technologically interesting contracts that make business sense.

> So you work for Lockheed or whatever and get most of the attributes of government employment.

Right, and the profits flow to a couple people who essentially own the contract. It’s essentially modern day aristocracy, except the contracts are more valuable to farm out to peasants than land is.

> Federal pay sucks by design. If you want to work for .gov, you want state/local government

State and local government employees are paid well? Where? Which ones?

Many state governments pay much better than the Federal government and offer better benefits, and don’t require that you live in the DC crazy corridor. Local governments depend on the locality — big counties and cities pay ok.

It all depends on what is valuable to you.

> Many state governments pay much better than the Federal government and offer better benefits

Not to my knowledge. Which ones for what jobs, do you happen to know?

Public school systems tend to pay well for people who majored in early elementary education, music, kinesiology, etc. But this isn't the same demographic that would work at NSA.

My mom has a master's in education, and after 30 years across two public school systems, she's finally broken $40k salary. Where do you live that public school systems pay well?

In Cincinnati, not a particularly HCOL place, with 30 years and a master's she would have made $77k.

https://www.nctq.org/districtPolicy/contractDatabase/distric...

Is that really "paid well"? 30 years and a masters degree earns you $77K? Could you imagine that offer in SV?

Cost of living is much higher in San Francisco/Sunnyvale vs Cincinnati. I'm saying $77K in an area where you could get a 3 bedroom/2 bath house for under $200K is pretty good, especially if you don't have the skills to compete in the tech realm, which is about the only way you're going to end up paid well in SV.

Presumably England, where 'public' schools are what would be termed 'private' or fee paying schools in the USA ;)