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FBI Need Potheads To Fight Cybercrime
An anonymous reader writes "The rate of cybercrime is growing and growing, and law enforcement is struggling to keep up. The FBI is in the process of beefing up its headcount, but they're running into a problem: many of the hackers applying for these jobs have a history of marijuana use, and the agency has a zero tolerance policy. FBI Director James Comey said, 'I have to hire a great work force to compete with those cyber criminals and some of those kids want to smoke weed on the way to the interview.' However, change may be on the horizon: Comey said the FBI is changing 'both our mindset and the way we do business.' He also encouraged job applications from former pot users despite the policy."
Wait a second, I thought potheads were worthless burnouts who will never amount to anything?
Looks like one bullshit stereotype driven war is affecting our ability to fight another bullshit stereotype driven war.
The irony is fucking killing me.
Regardless of your stance on the morality of it, maybe we just start treating one drug (MJ) like another (Alcohol or Tobacco) from a legal perspective? Contrary to Mr. Christie, Denver is a fantastic place to live, and I genuinely believe the recreational industry has improved it even more.
Physics is nothing like religion. If it was, we'd have an easier time trying to raise money!
Look I'm all for allowing them to smoke on their own time, but I don't show up to interviews or work buzzing off of a couple bloody marys. Relax the drug screenings yes, but showing up high? That's just immature IMHO.
Must be true. You are statistically significant.
If you have to smoke weed just to make it to the interview I seriously doubt you'll be able to do the job. Some recreational usage might be fine but it you need it to just get out of your apartment to go to a job interview then you have issues and problems that should disqualify for most any job out there.
A good point. if you can't stop long enough to pass a drug test for which you know the date, you likely have a problem. One issue is that the FBI loves to do polygraphs. Even though they're not reliable enough to be used in criminal proceedings, they use them for employment screening all the time.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
Unrelated to the topic, but being qualified for the job and being qualified for the interview is 2 totally different things in the IT and software development field, since there's so many bad interviewers out there.
I wish I could screen for the interview before agreeing to do it. Would save me a lot of trouble.
Let me guess. You probably dress in a shirt with a tie and wear some clean pants. On casual Friday, you *might* switch to a polo. Guess what ? You might not be what the FBI is looking for..
Do you mean as they do by all the way you can be charged with a felony, and even more controlled afterward ?
The only FBI agent I have ever known reasonably well was a scoutmaster and used his boy scout troop as couriers to deal weed. True story.
So what are the tech wages like in Salt Lake City?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I've been programming professionally for just over thirty years, and in that time I got a BS in Comp Eng in 1993 and a MS in Comp Sci in 2001. I have never even seen pot. I can't remember ever hearing anyone in this field mention using it. It just isn't common in our field. Of course when I was hiring for a new janitorial position here, I couldn't find a single male that could pass the drug test so it appears to be only the uneducated that use it.
that's because all the people who DO smoke it KNOW you are a prick and thus don't mention it near you
THC accumulates in fat cells. It can be detected up to three months out if you're a regular user. One of my friends, who was fucking smart but also a serious stoner and a bit of a womaniser, stayed of the whacky tobacky for six weeks before trying to get into the Royal Australian Air Force, but still failed the drug test. A few years later he successfully got into the army after not smoking weed for about six months.
History is NO liar (provided it is not a govt. approved textbook)
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
A combination of forces has pretty much made the liquid lunch history(at least in technical fields). Neoprohibitionists (MADD, which is no longer about driving, but about drinking, per se), employer paranoia about "impaired employees", etc.
Not really. I have a beer at lunch once in a while. I do so in plain view of my boss. The way some of you guys describe jobs, I really wonder why you don't leave. You're in a technical field, jobs really aren't that hard to find. Take a pay cut, go work for a startup, get more freedom. Still a ton of work and insane hours, but you're not going to get your boss writing you up for an official warning from HR because you had a beer during lunch.
Now, though, you get text messages during your (working) lunch asking for a response "soonest", and somehow I think that if you texted back "sorry, getting a couple pints with the guys, get back to you tomorrow", the next text would be "we'll ship your stuff to you at the last address you had on file with HR".
Holy shit, tomorrow?? Yeah, I wouldn't blame them for firing you in that case, I would too. The guy you're responding to said a couple of drinks, not get plastered and blow the afternoon off. Somehow I think if you instead texted back, "sorry, I'm currently at lunch. I'll get to it as soon as I'm back in the office," it wouldn't be that big of a deal. It's still a workday, dude.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
Like gay marriage the prohibition of marijuana will start falling state by state. Colorado and Washington have already done so. When people see that it isn't going to be a huge disaster other states will follow suit and eventually it will become untenable to maintain the prohibition. It's just a matter of time.
Assuming you've got a track record as a top-notch white hat hacker and security guy and you had some unique experience/skill mix that the FBI really felt they needed, would they just kind of put up with it, maybe/especially if you lived in a state like Colorado or had a medical card in California?
How do companies like Apple/Oracle/Google/MS/Amazon handle it in California now? My first hand experience and everything I've read in the media makes pot seem pretty well accepted in California and there's certainly a counter-culture kind of attitude among a lot of technology people. If you get recruited to Google because you're something special, do they give you a piss test and then tell you they won't hire you?
Sounds like a trap to nab a whole bunch of pot smokers imho.
Seriously... Ever see a stoner get violent? Many drunks get violent, yet alcohol is legal. Weed is not the same as hard drugs, and more people than you think indulge (or have indulged) in the stuff.
Besides, if you use a vaporiser, it's not that harmful, and I don't think weed kills more brain cells than beer.
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
Must be true. You are statistically significant.
At a young age I learned to read beyond the words of humans. Frequently the ignorant will have valid points when they talk on subjects even if they are unable to speak on the pertinent issue with the nuance it requires.
I wrote my first wireframe 3D game while stoned. I hadn't been taught trig yet so I invented vector math independently after discovering what you'd call the "unit circle" by drawing a radiant diagram of line slope ratios represented in decimal form; Ultimately I ended up creating the equivalent to sin(), cos() and dot() functions because I didn't know what those were useful for (seriously 'online' documentation sucks sans Internet). It was one of the most productive nights of my young life. I doubt I'd have come to the conclusions about connectedness between the mathematic properties in geometry with just a knowledge of linear equations, a glorified graphing calculator, and no mind expanding chemicals. The next school year I realized there was no such thing as Genius. I couldn't understand the reverence my teacher had for these dead dudes: If a stoned kid could discover in a single night much of what took Pythagoras decades to do when confronted with the same problem spaces, then maybe we're just teaching kids wrong... I digress.
We do have a bit of research which found that downers are less common among Hackers. We typically don't like things that make us stupid or slow. Today's Marijuana is very potent compared to the 70's or even 90's, so many Hackers tend to shy away from what I would call an overdose (meaning above recommended, the term does not imply lethal). IMHO, a brownie shouldn't put you out of commission; Eat herbal confections responsibly. However, for those that Marry Jane doesn't dance with in 'detrimental' ways it's not uncommon to do some light buzzed hacking sometimes with surprisingly clever results (especially for harder problems). Indeed, after I woke the next afternoon I was refreshed and amazed at my output. I was only confounded by a single block of dense hand optimized code with only the comment, // Refactored symbiotic slope system to remove branching. Whether such "here be dragons" comments in code should be taken as quite literal statements or if they arise from the ceremonial chemistry itself is still a great mystery each code-fu master must overcome for themselves. Mine turned out to be matrix math sans matrix idiom.
Think about it: Hackers like exploiting systems for interesting or clever results; Drugs are the tools we hack organic computers with... Well, that and tDCS, but the latter may blow your fuses before our stem-cell and n.net replacements are ready. As with even alcohol, caffeine or self modifying instructions: Moderation is the key when dealing in any form of computer altering substance.
Now reconsider the GP's post: Here is someone who has since the early 90's never heard of anyone enjoying recreational mind expanding chemicals in programming. However, when we polled Usenet via trial balloon that's not what we found at all among hackers. Consider that the corporate-clone workplace strongly filters against non-authoritarian approved drug use with the help of the state. The environment itself even hackers find somewhat hostile. Consider that many people sacrifice their pleasures if these are made to cause their livelihood risk. Consider that Hackers do have ways of defeating many unjust social systems such as these. Consider that we may be letting some great minds slip through the cracks for no other reason than a form of Orwellian thought control. Even consider that GP is posting AC and propagating anti-drug propaganda, just as we've seen since the 60's and 70's. With a bit of context even a seemingly dumb comment can stir up the probability matrix quite well. The trick is not to assume anything absolutely or concretely,