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Many Hackers Too Fat For The FBI
CaveDwler writes: "Want to work for the FBI in computer security? Better put down your cheesey poofs and pick up your M16. According to this article over on Wired, you have to pass physical requirements in order to work with FBI in computer security."
...it's the bind-bogglingly stupid hiring practices in general. And the FBI know it; heck, even this article spends only a little time discussing the physical bit. Most of the article points out other ways in which the FBI shoots themselves in the foot:
At some point it will occur to the FBI that people can specialize in a topic before joining.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Why is this considered newsworthy? All branches of the military require a given level of physique, same with virtually all law enforcement departments, not to mention fireman, rangers, and private security.
What else did you expect? Next there will be a story on how stupid people can't join the FBI.....
Check out their policies http://www.fbi.gov/employment/policies.htm
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Don't be content to be a fat fuck, and don't let yourself off with "Gee, I'm just too busy to exercise" or "Exercise is for stupid jocks" excuse. There are better ways to flirt with death than to sit on your ass 18 hours a day chugging Dew and eating Ho Hos.
Here's my 20 minute-a-day, 4 times a week solution: Get out and run. Two and a quarter miles or so in about 20 minutes will put you in reasonably good shape. It doesn't hurt to squeeze in some work with free weights, either, but you can work up to that. In any event, start off slow and work up to your goal over a couple of months, and *don't* let yourself plateau too early.
Oh, and good shoes are really important. I highly recommend New Balance.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
After flirting with exercise for about two years, I finally started working out on a seriously regular basis about four months ago (every weekday, 1 hour, rain or shine or apocolypse).
I find that I have increased energy and, as an extention, less need for caffine and a generally clearer head (esp. during those hours after lunch when everyone else is half-asleep). IMO, I absorb information much more easily and am better able to "wrap my head" around things.
As a bonus, I find that the time I spend working out (I run and lift free weights) is rivaled only by my morning shower in terms of inspiration potential -- you're concentrating only on the mundane task at hand, and your brain is free to dedicate extra cycles towards solving problems.
That's just one geek's observations; your milage may vary.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
>>I'd think the "college degree" required bit
>>would be a bigger limiting factor.
Not really. Universities churn them out by the thousands, every year. And many of them are quite buff, physically, emotionally, mentally.
When we read stories like this article, and hear about some overwieght, aging geek who got the wild
hair to go into law enforcement when it suddenly appeared lucrative, and was rejected, we are supposed to sympathize. Perhaps we should, somewhat, but we must also consider that despite the requirements, and no matter what hype you hear to the contrary, most Federal agencies are having no problems whatsoever finding qualified applicants. There are a lot of people out there entering the workforce. It appears to me that there was a little babyboom in the more-is-more 1980s, and those kids are coming of age. I wish there was a way to get credible census information in this kind of detail, but I'll bet $1 that there are more 18-25 year olds today than there have ever been in history.
In the case of the Federal law enforcement agencies, they usually have enough applicants just from former MP's, who have degrees, are physically fit, and have records that show distinguished military service.
The "average geek" will refuse to believe that a business major or enlisted soldier could be as effective in computer security, network administration, or programming than he, but it is merely a perception based on prejudice, and not necessarily based in reality.
I'm not even sure the "typical geek" would survive at all in a regimented, authoritarian work enviromnent. Quasi-military police work?
The story sensationalizes the "overweight" factor, but I believe strongly that the man being over 35 and just now wanting to go into law enforcement is a bigger red flag. You really should start that career at 20. Perhaps at 18, beginning either with a few years of military service or majoring in criminal justice or political science. When it's time to retire from police work, you'll probably have a law degree to fall back on!
But don't wait until you're almost 40, already burnt out, and THEN decide you want this type of career -- and if you do, don't try to blame not getting the job on your weight. There are a large number of factors working against this individual; the weight thing is just one; more of a symptom of the whole.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Contraray to what we all like our PHB to believe, most technical skills are not hard to learn. Modern development and administration tools make most of the work fairly easy to do, once you acquire the needed knowledge of the systems. Even a total moron (who has an advanced degree in astrophysics, wa-hey!) can run an app in debug mode until he gets it working. What sets us geeks apart (or has so far, anyway) is the desire to learn this shit.
If the FBI recruits a good person, who won't have an acid flashback or a massive stroke two weeks after getting hired, and won't sell everything he knows to foreign governments in exchange for a box of Cheez-Its, they can train him in on what he doesn't know later.
Besides, in the current market, you can afford to weed out the overweight, the hippies, the criminals, the people who don't clean under their fingernails, and anybody who uses the wrong conditioner for their ph balance, and still have lots of solid candidates to interview.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
no problem.
but then, i grew up as a fbi agent's kid.
too many moves and too many schools before graduating high school.
it's more of the boyfriends that were the trouble.
design is art - art is design
Two steps:
1. Recognize that your excuses are all self-defeating bullshit.
2. Work up to your goal.
Seriously, the only things keeping 99% of us from being healthy are the convenient little excuses we make for ourselves (some people have medical problem, but few are so serious as to preclude an active lifestyle).
Look around and tell me how many really fat 40 year olds you see. Now, how many 50 year olds? 60? Am I getting through here?
Being active gives you a lot of things: it makes you more physically attractive to most people, you'll have more energy, you'll fit into a single airline seat, you'll be stronger and generally more able to keep up with life, but the biggie is still this: If you're fat, you're going to die before you have to.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Don't be content to be a fat fuck, and don't let yourself off with "Gee, I'm just too busy to exercise" or "Exercise is for stupid jocks" excuse. There are better ways to flirt with death than to sit on your ass 18 hours a day chugging Dew and eating Ho Hos.
;)
It sounds like you suffer from the false belief that obesity is simply a matter of laziness. Trust me, there are plenty of lazy people who are not obese.
The rise of obesity in American society has many factors, and I think that laziness is a very small one. A much more important factor would be the insane number of carbohydrates that we consume now as opposed to one hundred years ago. Do you know how many millions of gallons of soft drinks (50 grams of carbs per can) people go through in a year? To put it in the proper perspective, consider that humans used to drink exactly zero gallons of soft drinks in a year. And add to that the fact that soft drink manufacturers continue to raise the portion size of their products. Notice that snack makers (carb factories) and restaurants (carb factories) are doing the same thing. It's merely pandering to the "get more for your money" desire which is almost inextricable from the American psyche.
Also, 99% of diets will fail (read: make the dieter gain more weight, not less) if the dieter is already over 100 pounds overweight. Telling these people, "Get off your ass you fat fuck!" does not help. In fact, I think it exacerbates the problem that you deplore.
New balance sucks. Ecco rules the universe! Then again, I'm biased: I value my knees too much to be a runner.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Maybe they want people who already know what the limits of what they can and cannot do are, and how law enforcement generally operates.
.com, either.
That way, the new guy doesn't bollux up an investigation by committing some mistake which a defense attorney can present as a violation of his client's rights and grounds for dismissal. They'd also likely have a better grounding in who and what you're dealing with, on the other side -- and it won't just be against stereotypical "black hats" getting their rocks off by DOSing some high-profile
At least, that's one possible explanation. Another is just that they cut-and-pasted requirements from their other divisions without being overly concerned about it. I'm not a Fed, so I wouldn't know.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
The drug requirement also serves another purpose. By getting someone that has done little-to-nothing wrong during their life they minimize the chance that you can be blackmailed at some point during your career.
And it took you long enough! I almost lost my erection before you climbed all the way down.
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But the war on drug *users* has been a great success! Our prison population is about four or five times what it was twenty years ago, thanks to mandatory minimums that send drug users off for 20 years for possession.
The standard by which the war on drugs is a raging success is: Correction Corporation of America. They are our nation's sixth-largest imprisoner, behind the Feds, California, FLA, and so on.
Even better, CCA has no motive to rehabilitate their prisoners, since that might reduce the recidivism rate. If they rehabilitated drug users, they might work themselves out of a job.
Follow the money, the war on drugs is just another way to fleece the tax base (like when prisoners are mistreated at a private prison, the state who sent them to prison has to pay the damages, because the corporate entity is shielded.)
Check out nomoreprisons.org for more info. Not that I agree with all of what they have to say.
And kudos to America, the Land of Opportunity. The land where the same people who brought you the ease and convenience of the Colonel's Original Recipe saw that the War on Drugs created a market for privatised, for-profit prisons.
First, we have the right not to incriminate ourselves. War, or not, asking someone to snitch on themselves is self-incrimination. The fact the FBI is doing it makes it all the worse.
Second, we have the statute of limitations. After a period of time, it isn't a crime anymore.
Third, we supposedly have the presumption of innocence in this country.
The rights you mention apply to a crime you are being arrested for, but have nothing to do with security clearance screening.
If, during the screening, you say "I smoked a fat bag of crack in 1982," they can not convict you for drug posession, because of all three reasons you cite (self-incrimination, statute of limitation, presumption of innocence), but they can choose not to hire you.
That is as it should be. You do not have an inalianable right to an FBI career.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Running isn't the only form of exercise. I'm 5'9" and used to weigh close to 200 pounds. Now I weigh around 160. Four years ago I decided enough was enough and made some changes, some big and some small:
The point is, it didn't take a massive, up-front dose of self-discipline to point myself in the right direction. I started off slow and built up over time, and now I'm in the best shape I've been in nearly 20 years. I'm maybe a bit more stubborn than some, but fundamentally anyone could do what I've done.
"You tried to use my comments as a bully pulpit to rail against everything from immigration to social programs, and that was inappropriate."
I agree with all your other points. I, basically, didn't write enough in response, so that my point would have been clearer. I tend to write-and-run, because this sort of thing takes a lot of time.
Not against immigration: merely realistic that the H1B relaxation of about two years back flooded the tech job market and closed up options for employment. This is a fact.
The admin: I did rail against them, but I don't think it was inappropriate or "political" -- the tax cut and the new borrowing to finance 6.5 trillion bucks emptied out the SocSec funds with prejudice. Stick a fork in it: it's over. So now we collectively have to plan on working past 70.
As for the purpose of arguing, I was not arguing the subject in the original article was correct, or you incorrect either. I was pointing out that, with a boomlet of yunguns, a flood of H1B's permitted, and age discrimination more rampant than in the '60's (another era of no-over 30's need apply), a person over thirty seems like a kid pressed up agaist a candy store window, with no hope of ever going inside.
Someone over 30 shouldn't try to be an Olympic runner, but going into law enforcement or engineering shouldn't be a problem. A 35-yo can learn calc a lot faster than a 18 yo: not as distracted by the opposite sex, at the height of their mental faculties, fr more motivated (because, grimly, and realisitically, it's their last chance!). But, realistically, as you say, there is almost no chance for employment for a 35-40 year old new BS in CS.. some, but slim and vanishing.
As you say, I am being realistic, but this is not a good situation for either you or anyone else. You're aging too, and you may need to change careers two or three times in your life.
In Chicago last year, there was a such a critial shortage of new police recruits that they upped the age limit to... 40. They finally got their recruits, and I hope it works out well. I suspect that the older men and women will do better than their younger counterparts, since they are more motivated to succeed.
In conclusion, I think my comments appropriate.