As someone who has had to do it: even in a supposed talent shortage, really fucking hard. Even in the rare instances I could get an interview I probably sounded like an idiot giving generic and slightly evasive answers.
To be honest I'd be leery of hiring a former intelligence agent regardless of technical ability. I'm sure if they wanted to plant someone it wouldn't be someone with NSA on his/her resume, but the thought would be hard to shake.
Interesting perspective. For the record, I was doing radar signal processing for a contractor for the Navy. While there I bumped into plenty of people who were in the Order of Secret Squirrels, and got the definite impression that once you join you never really leave.
Well, I'm not completely out, just at a contractor that does predominantly unclassified work.
It was a combination of finding someone to take a chance on me and the classification of my last program easing. When I started, "I do stuff" was about the extent of what I was allowed to say. When I left the name and nature of the program had been declassified so I could at least talk about some concepts in detail, though still not specific problems.
I ended up in NLP, which is similar enough to signal processing that the company was willing to roll the dice. I did have to take a pay cut, though.
Why couldn't you say "It's classified" and have general answers and then follow that up with "But I'd like to prove my skills to you directly"?
I could understand suspicion if you were coming from some unknown enterprise company and wouldn't elaborate on your previous work, but this is still the NSA (that we all hate but are still super smart).
> Why couldn't you say "It's classified" and have general answers and then follow that up with "But I'd like to prove my skills to you directly"?
Well, first you'd have to get an interview with a resumé full of generic statements and a network that exists exclusively in the world you are trying to leave. Then you'd have to find a company willing to give you that chance. Took me two years to do that successfully.
> I could understand suspicion if you were coming from some unknown enterprise company and wouldn't elaborate on your previous work, but this is still the NSA (that we all hate but are still super smart).
Not all of us are coming from the NSA. I couldn't believe how many recruiters and engineers had never even heard of Raytheon.
Probably less of an issue than you think. It's pretty common in DC. There are recruiters who specialize in placing people who work in "Clearance" jobs.
If you want a job at another cleared contractor. Getting out of this very siloed world is really hard, though. For a number of reasons, actually; nit being able to provide detail is just one of them.
Imagine you are a hiring manager at Lockheed Martin, and you have two candidates' resumes in front of you:
One has a bunch of certifications, a TS/SCI with polygraph, a list of skills/technologies that overlap strongly with the ones you are interested in, work experience with your biggest customers (responsible for 85% of revenue), but only has very vague information about what he has done specifically. Everything looks like a good fit, but it is hard to tell for sure because of the vagueness.
The other has an excellent, detailed, resume listing several jobs in the purely private sector. Even though he has worked in large enterprises, they weren't DoD and so the technology overlap isn't quite as good. But by and large you think he'd be an excellent fit based on the projects he has undertaken so far.
It will cost you six figures and take at least many months to get the second candidate security cleared, which will be necessary before he can start working on the project you have in mind. He might fail to get cleared in which case you will have to start all over.
This thought exercise suggests that someone with an NSA background will have significant trouble straying far from government-connected "private industry" work.
GovCloud is pretty much AWS (I got the impression basically a separate DC, switches, racks, etc. - an airgap of some sort I guess) and is accredited for U//FOUO workloads, which is where a lot of work has shifted to make it easier for contractors that are having trouble clearing people to TS/SCI quickly as well as to be able to do some work on platforms outside of a SCIF.
Contrary to the prevailing popular opinion that defense is run by complete idiots, a lot of programs are run by extremely intelligent people... that have a litany of pressures that are completely contradictory that results in completely insane outcomes.
"Imagine you are a hiring manager at Lockheed Martin".
I'd say walking away from that job might be the best option. You're not part of the mil/industry complex any longer, you sleep better after the next drone bombing of civilians, based on intel received from RQ-170 or similar.
It really depends on the project, but in my case, I could talk about technology, but not the specific problem we were trying to solve. I have the unclassified cover names listed on my resume as well.
