The NSA famously recruits math geniuses and quants to solve abstract problems, esp. around cryptography. If you're a security person hired to harden infrastructure or web services, its not so abstract. People like Snowden for example.
NSA's early career recruiting pipeline is pretty strong at the collegiate level. They recruit from a LOT of good universities that top tech employers don't recruit from (eg. UTSA, Texas Tech).
The issue is the US Government is hundreds of agencies, and each state in turn has hundreds of agencies as well.
Each of these agencies has their own IT that manages that agencies's infra and security AND they are very limited funds wise and salary wise.
For example, back when I was a PM, a customer of mine was the de facto CISO of a several hundred person agency yet only earned around $120k a year and had a less than $1M budget for all IT spend.
The agency could not build it's own hiring pipeline (having to resort to USAJOBS and the department it was a part of) nor was there any truly unified security platform.
While the naive answer would be "have everyone use a single platform", just about every presidential administration in the past 20 years has tried that and failed.
> While the naive answer would be "have everyone use a single platform", just about every presidential administration in the past 20 years has tried that and failed.
Isn't that literally the job of a National Security Agency, instead of spying?