Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Honest question: does the NSA have good engineers? Like, FAANG good? It seems like a funny "hype line" for a startup, because I think of government engineers as ok, but not like, rockstars.

But maybe I'm wrong?



Most of the top engineers would probably be contractors. The government pay scale pretty much forces you to become a manager if you want to move past GS-12. Including locality pay, GS-12 salary tops at a little over 100k a year[1].

I just looked at their website, and they don't mention anything about NSA, Amazon, or Google on the landing page, so I think it's just techcrunch adding it in as clickbait, even though the founders aren't going out of their way to advertise it.

https://www.federalpay.org/gs/2020


A single example, but Apache Accumulo came from NSA.


The majority of the best engineers don't even work for a FAANG. FAANGs don't offer remote for the most part. How many of the best decided they wanted more. The world is a big place.

NSA engineers on average would be scary good.


I think we're pretty good. Feel free to review the code and contribute as we release our open source packages over time. We all get better with time and collaboration.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: