[rdtsc]

Saw you were being down-voted, seems unfair, it's good to have a counter-example or an opposing view in a discussion. Maybe it seems to much like a recruiting advertisement...

> After about $70k in salary, people are happy anyways.

Unfortunately living in DC/VA/MD on that you are competing with private companies which pay more and thus housing and well just about everything is a bit hard to manage on that salary.

> I honestly don't understand why anyone would do obvious & routine things at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc

What's stopping them from pulling a bait-and-switch. Telling kids they'll be doing exciting stuff that Google and Facebook haven't dreamed of yet, then being a stuck converting perl scripts to python, twiddling excel spreadsheets or writing TPS reports. I think most people would expect more routine working in a govt agency than say at Google.

[throwaway9982]

> What's stopping them from pulling a bait-and-switch.

If you're a contractor, you can just quit and find another contracting position. When I worked as a contractor at NASA, I routinely quit (3 times) when the job turned undesirable and then found another contracting gig through networking in under a month.

>Unfortunately living in DC/VA/MD on that you are competing with private companies which pay more and thus housing and well just about everything is a bit hard to manage on that salary.

No, these places (NSA and NASA) are in the not-so-close suburbs. When I was working at NASA at $85K I bought a condo and biked to work.

[qaq]

He/She was down-voted because a) Never worked for NSA b) never lived in DC metro.

[throwaway9982]

Why?

[yarrel]

The NSA records on their communcations show this. ;-)

[rdtsc]

Old math dept joke:

Q: How do you apply to work for the NSA

A: Call your mother and ask for an application form

[pinewurst]

How many people work at Google and Facebook hacking scripts for ad sales? There's an equally large potential gulf between their reputations for Giant Alien Head genius and prosaic, if not social damaging, reality.

[mozumder]

NSA lets co-ops rotate through various departments to give them a sense of what career path works for them. And nothing wrong with converting old Perl scripts when you're starting. It's a good way to get ramped up in the basics.

[vgy7ujm]

There's everything wrong with converting old WORKING Perl scripts to something else that probably will not be working when they are old like the Perl scripts would... Talk about introducing maintenance overhead...

[mozumder]

They're usually converted because the hacks don't work anymore with the new software system you bought...