Defense Department Eyes Hacker Con For New Recruits

alphadogg writes "The US Air Force has found an unlikely source of new recruits: the yearly Defcon hacking conference, which has been running since Thursday in Las Vegas. Col. Michael Convertino came to Defcon for the first time last year, and after finding about 60 good candidates for both enlisted and civilian positions, decided to come back again. Federal agencies have only recently begun embracing the hacker crowd. When US Department of Defense director of futures exploration Jim Christy hosted his first Defcon 'Meet the Fed' panel in 1999, he was one of two people onstage. At this week's Defcon, there may be several thousand federal employees in attendance, he said."

Comments

Isn't this an obvious way to recruit

[ta bu shi da yu]

Seriously, these events attract at lot of smart, independent thinking people who love technology. What better place to recruit people? If it works at Universities, then it probably works better at DefCon.

I guess they were worried about the "independent thinking" before...

Re:Isn't this an obvious way to recruit

[russotto]

Seriously, these events attract at lot of smart, independent thinking people who love technology. What better place to recruit people?

Emphasis mine. Civilian positions are one thing, but it seems to me if you put a smart and independent thinking person through the military's recruit-crusher, you're either going to get a non-independent-thinking person, a smart and independent thinking person who has been faking non-independent thinking and hates the military for it, or a corpse.

Hackers & discipline... probably not the best combination ever.

Re:Isn't this an obvious way to recruit

[Darth_brooks]

Hackers & discipline... probably not the best combination ever.

Score -1: So wrong it hurts to read.

The best hackers i know of are the ones who *are* disciplined. Go to sourceforge and look at the overwhelming number of half assed, dead projects the clutter up the works. The best open source projects are the ones that have taken years of hard work to reach maturity. That's real discipline.

The linux kernel wasn't written in a nights hacking in Linus' moms basement. It takes years of dedication and hard work to get to the level of "holy freaking crap, that guy is amazing" hacking. Simply knocking around around in perl does not a hacker make. For ever 10 hackers out there that won't put up with the bullshit that military service brings, there are probably one or two who will go that extra mile. Kudos to the air force for figuring that out.

Re:Discipline vs patriotism

[Narnie]

From my enlistment w/ the military, I found that in the wartime situation, enlisted freethinkers were the most beneficial to the military and often helped the unit the most and were most rewarded. Conversely, during the peace time, the enlisted followers/conformist were most often rewarded because they were least bored and had the least amount of issues with adhering to the regulations, SOP, and ROE. Of course, this leads to an interesting dichotomy of the enlisted ranks--those senior NCOs who demanded strict adherence to orders (because they expect conformists), and those NCOs that would let a few minor things slide if you could get shit done.

Sure, freethinkers who can conform to regulations are the ideal, but many times the junior ranks are beaten with the "conform stick" enough that the freethinkers leave the military before they advance to a rank that encourages creativity.