[thisismyaccoun7]

A lot are grabbed out of college or post military. These agencies and governement research centers want degrees, but they are willing to grow desired skills in-house. The most common new employee is someone hired for their potential, with experience much more highly valued in the private sector.

There are ex-Googlers and such as well, but they're not super common. One guy said he got bored at Google because he was rebasing code all the time so switched over. Not everyone will take the more money for a job where your role can feel meaningless. In comparison, these DOD jobs definitely feel meaningful, almost no matter your role. Feelings inside are very similar to what you hear from military servicemembers about feeling like you're making an important difference. If you don't, it's easy to change positions; it is very desirable to have a load of different skills, and learning/training is not only available but pushed hard. Internal and external classes, paying for degrees and having partnerships with local colleges, externships with large private corporations, internships in other departments are all common. If you like to learn, it is appealing. As a result, there are certainly a lot of very smart people.

Being government, you still have a chunk of the pool who are basically done but hanging on til retirement. I'd say it's past the 15-20 year mark that people really start to phone it in in technical positions. I won't get into this too much, but someone who is not known as top of their field but is close to or has maxed out the pay scale, they're probably not useful anymore. There are a lot of these (everywhere in government).

[dllthomas]

> The most common new employee is someone hired for their potential, with experience much more highly valued in the private sector.

This makes a lot of sense if the state of the art inside the agency is sufficiently ahead of that outside - experience would be in the wrong stuff.

It might also make sense if they want to pretend that is the case.