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How Does the CIA Keep Its IT Staff Honest?
Tootech points out this story for anyone who's been curious about getting that top-secret clearance and the promise of a cushy pension from the CIA, as a reward for decades of blood-curdling, heart-pounding, knuckle-whitening IT service: "Be prepared to go through a lot of scrutiny if you want to work in the Central Intelligence Agency's IT department, says chief information officer Al Tarasiuk. And it doesn't stop after you get your top secret clearance. 'Once you're in, there are frequent reinvestigations, but it's just part of process here,' says Tarasiuk, who also gets polygraphed regularly, though he won't be more specific. For those senior IT managers who are the 'privileged users,' meaning system administrators, 'there is certainly more scrutiny on you,' Tarasiuk says. 'It's interesting: there's so much scrutiny that a normal person might not want to put up with that. But it's part of the mission.'"
I'm aware of a few people employed with 3 letter agencies doing sysadmin work at remote facilities that bring in ~$150k. The worse part of it, in my opinion, is that the background checking must be so stringent, it apparently makes it hard to hire competent admins. I've had to walk more than one of them through some basic linux cli stuff like mount, restarting daemons, etc.
I've attended FBI, CIA, NSA ... uh ... events.
Straight and narrow-fests. Usually boring people. Often from small towns.
They make it clear that your job will usually suck and have nothing to do with what you see on TV or read in books 99% of the time.
You generally do not get to say what you do. Sure, the boring stuff isn't classified, but I've learned it is easier just to never talk about anything. Ever.
The FBI guys who I've met were all boy scouts.
The CIA sends out pretty people. Even the men tended to be pretty. In the back office are regular people.
The NSA ... I can't say.
Low government pay when compared to non-startup corporate jobs. EMC employees would laugh at CIA pay. You can look up the government pay scales. http://www.fedjobs.com/pay/pay.html A G-12 makes less than $80K! The only way to be well paid in the government is to stay there for 30 yrs. I'd call that an IQ test failure. Guess I'm not government employee material. I was earning over G-15 rates at age 35 in the private sector.