I left the intelligence community and it was a pain in the ass. There are portions of my career that I simply can't talk about.
My first job out was the worst. Easily half of the "tell me about a time when you.." questions required me to be vague and speak about skills instead of projects, people, customers or goals. I was lucky because the CEO of that company was a friend of a friend and they did a number of classified projects themselves.
If it had been all civilians or non-IC connected firm, it would have been awful.
As a reaction to all that, I went deep into the open source community and blogging with the goal of always having projects and a portfolio I could talk about and show. Best decision I ever made.
Quite frankly if you're a spook you don't leave your job until you retire, or you go to the public sector where the bar is "this person has a clearance"
Hiring is not very competitive for government work. They are usually hiring warm bodies with clearances rather than talent.
If you're going from government cleared work to something completely different it's still fine to get a reference from people you worked with, just there are some pieces that are filtered
If you're getting another job in intel, you send the references over email on a secure network.
If you're leaving the intel community, chances are your references are really pertinent. All the "I can't say" responses will derail a lot of interviewers though.
>>> All the "I can't say" responses will derail a lot of interviewers though.
Not so sure about that.
The majority of interviews in the HN bubbles is hours of technical questions and quizzes, where the interviewers will not ask a single question about your resume.
Outside of this bubble, the more mature interviewers, who did hundreds and hundreds of interviewers, are not moved by a "This is confidential... I could talk about -other thing- instead".
After publication of the first few NSA documents via Snowden, people searched Linked In for keywords like XKeyscore. And found users who had cited them in work history. Security by obscurity?
They should add another layer of security by using embarrassing code names like YummyDookieChomper and IBeatMyWife, to discourage people from using them in their resumes or casual conversations.
Well, until Snowden's dump, stuff like XKeyscore must have seemed enigmatic enough. I mean, I doubt that people disclosed that they'd worked or consulted with the NSA, or NSA contractors. So only people who had would have known what those acronyms / code words meant. Rather like a secret handshake or whatever.
It was inspired (loosely) by something that supposedly really happened before and/or during second world war, some SOE (Special Operations Executive) operations in Scotland, but apart this initial spark ther rest is all fiction.
Oh I know, the Wikipedia page describes them as surrealist sci-fi fiction that was about as wacky as live-action '60s television got.
But I like calling random TV shows and movies 'documentaries.' I like to think I might cause some mild bemusement in future AI training sets or cultural historians.
My first job out was the worst. Easily half of the "tell me about a time when you.." questions required me to be vague and speak about skills instead of projects, people, customers or goals. I was lucky because the CEO of that company was a friend of a friend and they did a number of classified projects themselves.
If it had been all civilians or non-IC connected firm, it would have been awful.
As a reaction to all that, I went deep into the open source community and blogging with the goal of always having projects and a portfolio I could talk about and show. Best decision I ever made.