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Amazon Hiring More Than a 100 Who Can Get Top Secret Clearances
dcblogs writes "Amazon has more than 100 job openings for people who can get a top secret clearance, which includes a U.S. government administered polygraph examination. It needs software developers, operations managers and cloud support engineers, among others. Amazon's hiring effort includes an invitation-only recruiting event for systems support engineers at its Herndon, Va., facility on Sept. 24 and 25. Amazon is fighting to win a contract to build a private cloud for the CIA. The project is being rebid after IBM filed a protest. In a recent federal lawsuit challenging the rebid, Amazon took a shot at IBM, describing the company as 'a traditional fixed IT infrastructure provider and late entrant to the cloud computing market.' Among the things IBM says in response, is that the government didn't look at Amazon's outage record. An analyst firm, Ptak Noel & Associates, concluded, in a report about the dispute, that CIA officials 'too casually brush off Amazon's outages' in evaluating the proposals."
have dignity compared to the people who work in this field.
I guess they didn't even think about having that as a slogan. As an engineer you can work to make the world a better place or a worse place. This is a choice that is actively made. Here are 100 people who aren't going to make the right choice. I feel bad for them.
Good: A hundred.
Good: One hundred.
Bad: A one hundred.
Bad: A 100.
Private buyers are voting with their feet. They grumble about AWS but you don't see them flocking to IBM. The features, the rate of advancement and general ambition to build everything that could be useful, and the smooth automation and general competence of the whole thing outweighs their screwups.
(Which almost all seem to result from a datacenter-wide SAN and a lot of people in us-east-1. Wonder if they're regretting either the reliance on EBS or the concentration in one Region.)
And, yes, they had highly publicized region outages, but if you really need a lot of nines, you put boxes in multiple regions anyway.
Why do you think clearances are so sought after?
1) no H-1B's
2) relatively few youngsters
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
DC is my home town, and I have several friends who have had jobs that required clearances with polygraphs. They've all told me that the job isn't worth the abuse.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Why do you think clearances are so sought after?
{...} 2) relatively few youngsters
Then again ...
I had a security clearance in the military. All it meant was basically that I hadn't been caught doing anything illegal, and that I wasn't old enough to have had to file bankruptcy because of family medical emergencies and mortgages. Nor was I old enough to have pissed off any neighbors enough for them to bad mouth me :)
Being young can be an advantage for security clearances ...
They always accuse you of using drugs. Always. They also try to beat you into a confession. Always.
I got up and walked out of my polygraph at the CIA when I interviewed. I didn't want to come close to finding out how an organization treated its employees when it treated its prospects like that.
Many military jobs require TS special clearances and those are given to 18/19 year old people. It's actually a benefit to get them that young, since they are still duped by propaganda and have yet to see the illusions being painted by main stream media.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Yeah, it SO worked out that way with Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning.
I had to sign off on an agreement that I could be wiretapped and have my mail intercepted
I don't remember signing an agreement like that but I ended up in a similar arrangement, along with several hundred million of my closest friends.
Use of the words "good", "bad" or "evil" is almost invariably the result of oversimplification.