Yeah my big takeaway from the recent press is that they didn't even think I was good enough to be a patsy to fire. Definitely an ego hit

Have you applied to Amazon? Talking with recruiters who've left it sounded like Amazon incentives were different than other places. So internal recruiters spend more time contacting people already in their system. Sometimes not even doing a basic fit check.

Yeah, I made it to the last round but wasn't given an offer.

I agree, I know tons of people that work for and would love to work from them, and I do not live in WA.

Some of that impact is making the CIA more effective at the things the CIA does, as Amazon runs a special datacenter for them on-prem at Langley.

It is quite sad how many in our industry are either sufficiently clueless or sufficiently indifferent that they would eagerly go work at the CIA's sysadmins, especially under the guise of "important" or "impact" (quite literally in the case I mentioned).

I would be proud to go work directly for the CIA, but I’m too selfish to do so, because the pay would be worse than what I’m doing now.

Not all Americans loath their country and the institutions that help maintain it - imperfect though they may be.

A lot of people use "CIA" to mean "everything bad about the government". I've seen people claiming the CIA started the Iraq War, which they were actually opposed to and the admin had to ignore them to get it going.

No, I just mean the people orchestrating extrajudicial assassinations of US citizens (and others) and operating torture prisons.

They could just mean "the CIA's record, specifically". There's plenty there.

Claiming that things are their historical record leads to fighting the last war and not the next one.

Oh, for christ's sake, it's been like 75 years if you include the OSS.

They're the department with an image of white-collar intelligence collection and a huge sideline in dirty fighting to maintain American hegemony. That's who they are, have been and who they will be.

I'm going to assume ignorance here, versus malice.