The NSA recruits at some of the best graduate schools. In some quarters, the joke is that if you have a PhD in math, comp sci or software engineering and you're not teaching or doing post-doc work, you must be working in the black world, which includes NSA.
Agreed. A young woman sitting next to me at a Hadoop oriented class during the summer (right as the Snowden info was coming to light) had just left the NSA.
She was brilliant. Little coding experience outside of Perl, but was able to keep up on the exercises in Java with only minor hiccups due to her lack of familiarity. She had been recruited out of graduate school.
On the other hand, she became extremely hostile when the Snowden incident was mentioned by people next to us (they didn't know her former employer) and was stating repeatedly that "None of you know what you're talking about, and if I was allowed to I would correct you, but I can't." and "Do you really think people can just sit down at a computer and spy on people without their supervisor's approval?" (as it turns out, we were right, and she was profoundly wrong)
It was a revealing moment, because it demonstrated the group think that can permeate even the most brilliant mind. Of course, she also thought there was nothing wrong with mathematics education in the U.S., which in my opinion makes her clearly deluded.
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The NSA recruits at some of the best graduate schools. In some quarters, the joke is that if you have a PhD in math, comp sci or software engineering and you're not teaching or doing post-doc work, you must be working in the black world, which includes NSA.
Agreed. A young woman sitting next to me at a Hadoop oriented class during the summer (right as the Snowden info was coming to light) had just left the NSA.
She was brilliant. Little coding experience outside of Perl, but was able to keep up on the exercises in Java with only minor hiccups due to her lack of familiarity. She had been recruited out of graduate school.
On the other hand, she became extremely hostile when the Snowden incident was mentioned by people next to us (they didn't know her former employer) and was stating repeatedly that "None of you know what you're talking about, and if I was allowed to I would correct you, but I can't." and "Do you really think people can just sit down at a computer and spy on people without their supervisor's approval?" (as it turns out, we were right, and she was profoundly wrong)
It was a revealing moment, because it demonstrated the group think that can permeate even the most brilliant mind. Of course, she also thought there was nothing wrong with mathematics education in the U.S., which in my opinion makes her clearly deluded.