[HN Gopher] AWS hired 66 former US gov officials since 2018; hal...
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AWS hired 66 former US gov officials since 2018; half are from Dept
of Defense
Author : fireball_blaze
Score : 103 points
Date : 2021-06-04 17:34 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.politico.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.politico.com)
| us0r wrote:
| "In FY 2019 there was a 4.2% increase in the number of security
| clearances, for a total number of 4.2 million individuals with
| eligibility to access classified information."[0]
|
| This "they need people with clearences" talk is laughable. This
| is purely lobbying which every government contractor does. They
| also scooped up 4 former state CIOs. They are playing the game
| and quite well. This does need to be cleaned up. A company
| recently won a $500 million DOD contract and months later the
| women on the government side is now the company CEO.
|
| [0] https://news.clearancejobs.com/2021/02/09/how-many-people-
| ha...
| imwillofficial wrote:
| That 4.2 million people included all the military and civilian
| contractors, unable to be hired because they are fulfilling
| their roles. Additionally that 4.2 million includes all
| clearance levels. The higher the clearance, the more the
| available talent pool SHARPLY declines. I have first hand info,
| AWS is DESPERATE for cleared individuals for various contracts.
| Unfortunately the recruiting has not synchronized their offers
| with this need, so you get a lot of low balling offers that
| most cleared people laugh at.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| That seems like an absurdly small number...
| [deleted]
| geodel wrote:
| This would make sense. Unlike Google where a woke employee might
| start gas-lighting coworker if they worked for DoD or berating
| Google if it tries to work with DoD. Amazon seems to have better
| handle on situation.
| throwaway9980 wrote:
| I recall Bezos making some public statements a couple years ago
| pushing back on internal objections to working with DoD.
| Something to the effect of "I understand the concern, but if
| you think the US doesn't need a strong military, you're
| mistaken, and if you think the US is generally a bad actor,
| you're mistaken."
| geodel wrote:
| Good. He seems like man of convictions.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| Not that any of this is incorrect, but there are two important
| bits of context to add here:
|
| -Not all DoD hires are for the purpose of lobbying. A lot of the
| time it's just because they already have the TS/SCI clearance
| which is necessary for working on servers in the government-only
| datacenters, and hiring people who have it already is a lot
| easier than getting a new hire and waiting the multiple years to
| get clearance (seriously: it's a pain in the ass, especially when
| you consider that you have to pass drug tests including THC,
| which is an increasingly rare thing to find among developer-
| types) - Amazon's competition in this space is mainly Microsoft,
| who does the exact same thing. Indeed, part of the reason Amazon
| lost the JEDI contract is probably because Microsoft had been
| playing the 'hire former Pentagon suits' game for much longer.
| walshemj wrote:
| Years it should be 2-3 months - well that's what a little bird
| told me about the UK equivalent.
| hulitu wrote:
| > Not that any of this is incorrect, but there are two
| important bits of context to add here:
|
| > -Not all DoD hires are for the purpose of lobbying. A lot of
| the time it's just because they already have the TS/SCI
| clearance which is necessary for working on servers in the
| government.
|
| Of course not. Only the managers are for lobying. ( which is
| corruption with a differrent name). It does help to hire people
| which can influence the government.
| johncessna wrote:
| JEDI going to MS is confusing until you realize that O365 was
| thrown into the MS offering. The US government runs on
| Microsoft.
| dannyphantom wrote:
| America runs on Dunkin' _and Microsoft_.
| meepmorp wrote:
| Change the headline to the original: The secret behind Amazon's
| domination in cloud computing
|
| The current one doesn't really convey what the article is about
| fireball_blaze wrote:
| I disagree entirely. The title I employed is exactly what the
| article is about.
| granzymes wrote:
| I'd say the current title more accurately describes the
| article.
|
| The best title would probably be "AWS hired 66 former US gov
| officials since 2018, strengthening its ability to win federal
| contracts"
| fireball_blaze wrote:
| The HN title character limit is very restrictive. The title I
| used is the max length.
| thrill wrote:
| AWS has 25,000 employees. How is the former legal employee of 66
| of them of the slightest interest?
| arkitaip wrote:
| The answer is in the article.
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| They are hiring people with security clearances to work on the
| Govt. cloud. Unsurprisingly, many people who have a DoD security
| clearance work for the DoD, it's not a huge community.
| ckdarby wrote:
| "Except for Eldakdoky, all the AWS hires named in this article
| either declined to comment or didn't respond to inquiries."
|
| I'll check Hazem Eldakdoky's profile in 6 months but I'll be
| shocked if they're still at AWS after making a statement to the
| press.
| austincheney wrote:
| One thing to consider is that a federal security clearance is
| expensive. It makes a huge amount of sense to hire people who
| already have a clearance paid for by a federal employer. That
| saves $50-$80 thousand per headcount. A high quantity headcount
| of clearance holders also bolsters a contractor's position in
| contract negotiation.
|
| Every defense contractor does this. It's stupid not to. My
| current employer isn't even a defense contractor (as far as I
| know) and still hires thousands and thousands of veterans.
| mojomark wrote:
| > That saves $50-$80 thousand per headcount.
|
| I'm sorry, I'm not trying to be rude, but this is a wildly
| innacurate claim. Citations are requested on HN posts to avoid
| misinformation (though apparently nobody adheres to or enforces
| this rule anymore).
|
| It only costs employers a few hundred to a few thousand dollars
| to obtain and maintain a US security clearance for employees
| [1]. It's not really a hurdle when hiring new talent without a
| clearance. In general, we hire military veterans not because of
| their clearance, but because of their tendency (not always, but
| in general) to possess high integrity, strong leadership
| skills, loyalty, niche skillsets, and strong work ethic.
|
| 1. https://www.taonline.com/security-clearances/hiring-
| cleared-...
| nonameiguess wrote:
| The actual billing rates for an investigation aren't that bad
| (and can be found here:
| https://www.dcsa.mil/mc/pv/gov_hr_security/billing_rate/).
| I'm not sure where the 50-80,000 comes from, but somewhere
| around 70k average total cost is what I remember being cited
| when I was first getting a cleared job years back.
|
| It wasn't the direct charge for the investigation that caused
| that, though. It was the wait. You can obviously mitigate
| that by finding something productive for people to do while
| they await clearance, but a lot of employers struggle quite a
| bit to do that if all or almost all of the meaningful
| engineering work they do is classified. When I was still at
| Raytheon, it was becoming fairly common to see people waiting
| for over two years sitting around in what they called "ACES"
| or the awaiting clearance employee station. They tried to
| find some way to put these people to use, but for older
| programs with very limited unclassified code bases, there
| wasn't much to do. We had guys adding unit tests and setting
| up SonarQube for over a year, to code they had no context for
| and no understanding of how it was used.
|
| It was quite frustrating, to the point that the President of
| our business unit testified to Congress about the costs of
| the investigation backlog, which lasted years in the wake of
| the OPM hack.
| austincheney wrote:
| According to your link the cost for a TS is $3000-$15000.
| That is just the expense directly to OPM (office of personnel
| management).
|
| The hired employee cannot perform the work they are hired to
| perform until that clearance is granted which can take as
| little as 3 months. A TS investigation will generally run
| from 6-18 months. Mine took closer to 18 months and I am a
| boring nobody with no foreign connections. Jared Kushner,
| Trump's senior advisor also took about 18 months for a
| clearance.
|
| TS alone does not grant access. It is a classification
| umbrella allowing access to compartments, the most common
| being SCI. These also take time, money, and administration.
| mc32 wrote:
| Two words: project JEDI.
| canadianfella wrote:
| So?
| vajrabum wrote:
| I'd venture to say that aren't any significant federal government
| contractors that don't employ former federal workers. Like it or
| no this is the norm and it isn't all the revolving door. Selling
| to the federal government is significantly different than selling
| to other customers.
| blacktriangle wrote:
| A big part of this is the need for workers with security
| clearance to service your government contracts. Its far far
| easier to hire people who have clearance rather than hire
| somebody and then pay for them to go through the process, and
| the DoD has the majority of people with security clerance.
| walshemj wrote:
| And I bet that Amazon pays a lot better for SC (DV) cleared
| workers than the DOD does.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Likely, but Amazon isn't known for its high salaries, is
| it? Also govt jobs typically have good benefits so a 1:1
| salary comparison may not make sense.
| influx wrote:
| What's high? They are competitive with other FAANG.
| Source: I worked at both Amazon and Facebook. Amazon also
| offers a bonus for having a clearance.
| eschulz wrote:
| Indeed. Take into account the security clearance matter, and
| the fact that these two organizations work closely together
| 24/7, and this just makes sense. With whom would AWS have a
| closer relationship than with the DoD or DHS?
| Natsu wrote:
| It also helps if you have people who are just familiar with
| the things the government is trying to do, too, so they don't
| just get blank stares when they start discussing IAVAs and
| STIGs.
| cosmodisk wrote:
| It does a lot. I have someone in the family,who went from
| working for the government regulator to going into the
| private sector and literally exchanging emails with ex
| colleagues a few days later. Knows the system, what's
| doable and what's not and so on.
| xkjkls wrote:
| I formerly worked in AWS on a team that had occasional minor
| need to deploy and make changes to the GovCloud. I was the
| only US Citizen on my team and was required for every single
| deployment.
| austincheney wrote:
| I can only imagine turning off the lights and sending
| people home in those moments where you have a late night
| family emergency.
| whoknew1122 wrote:
| Yup. Not only do you have to be a US Citizen, but you also
| have to be on US soil. So if you're on vacation
| internationally? Can't make that change.
|
| AWS takes that stuff very seriously.
| arcanus wrote:
| Did this give you incredible leverage for performance
| reviews, raises, etc?
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| A friend that does inspection work at factories, told me over
| beers once, that many executives are former military. West Point
| graduates and the sort. I took it as some sort government control
| of industry collusion. But who knows.
| thehappypm wrote:
| How is this surprising? Military is a breeding ground for
| leadership, that's like literally the whole point of going to
| West Point is to be a professional leader. After the armed
| services, corporate leadership has got to be a total breeze.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| Its not surprising, just something I never thought about.
| It's more like when you notice the wall's of the cage you're
| in moment. With that said, West Point is a great school.
| philwelch wrote:
| > After the armed services, corporate leadership has got to
| be a total breeze.
|
| "Total breeze" is probably an overstatement given the culture
| differences between the military and civilian worlds, but
| otherwise I agree.
| xkjkls wrote:
| Yeah, its probably harder to get people to follow direction
| when they can't be court-marshalled if they don't.
| citiguy wrote:
| My ex-military officer friends tell me the corporate world is
| considerably harder than the military. Maybe it also depends
| on where you work / what you do.
| mojomark wrote:
| I concur with your friends. The reason is due to the fact
| that in the military, people understand where they fall
| within the chain of command and that they must follow
| orders or there will be severe consequences. This strict
| structure is needed in life and death situations - I
| wouldn't know personally, but I'd imagine the medical
| industry (hospitals and such) have a similar respect for
| chain of command. It's more difficult to lead when
| employees have little respect for authority or directives
| coupled with companies that do not enforce chain of command
| rules.
|
| You can hire a master artist to paint you a portrait, but
| if you only give them Jello and a steel 'canvas' to work
| with, your painting isn't going to be so great.
|
| I have a few decades in private sector, 8yrs as a reserve
| officer, and I recently was publically berated by a junior
| engineer after simply asking him to explain his work (which
| was, incidentally, incorrect). He was forced to publically
| apologize in the face of losing his job, but this was an
| extreme example. An event like this would virtually never
| happen in the military, but I see it happen fairly
| routinely to other senior staff, albeit less extreme cases,
| with junior employees that do not have a military
| background.
|
| There is a professional and orderly way to handle
| dissagrements with authority. The military helps teach you
| how to handle those situations in a more productive and
| stable manner.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| Or that wars and retail dominance are both won by logistics and
| the leadership skills are transferrable. Lots of former
| military at every level of Amazon.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| That isn't the reason. It's that the leadership training and
| experience of someone who has been placed in command of a large
| military unit is roughly equivalent to the demands placed on a
| corporate executive. In many ways, we're perfect targets, not
| just because of the leadership training and experience, but the
| extreme devotion to mission and personal sacrifice. Where else
| are you going to find people who regularly worked 20 hour days
| 7 days a week for up to 15 months in a foreign country? No
| matter how much you ask of an employee, you can't possibly ask
| more than the military did. Every time I read about Amazon
| employees pissing in bottles, I can't help but think of how
| many times I did just that when I was commanding tank crews.
| Working yourself to death and never taking a break is just an
| ordinary day in the service.
|
| Where we struggle is in what others have identified in this
| thread. As a military leader, you're used to having complete
| control of your subordinates. You can confine them and in some
| cases execute them for not following orders. It takes some
| getting used to being in a situation where your reports have
| personal liberties guaranteed by the Constitution and you have
| to follow labor laws and what not. I've seen a lot of former
| military officers struggle with this. My wife's ex boss (and
| part of the reason he is now an ex boss) reported a
| hospitalization incident all the way up his chain of command,
| seemingly unaware of the existence of HIPAA. Soldiers don't
| have privacy rights, but ordinary citizens do.
| carabiner wrote:
| Why is this surprising? When people leave the military, they
| still need jobs. My brother is a veteran, now he's a SWE at
| Facebook. All large companies have veteran recruiting efforts:
| https://www.facebook.com/careers/facebook-life/veterans
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| Its not surprising. Just might come into play in ways people
| have not thought about. Like there's been a lot chatter of a
| military coup online in the last year. Due to Covid, Riots,
| Election, and mostly China's growing power. If such a
| scenario were to pass. It will matter which side industry
| will take. For example, will truckers strike. Its something I
| did not think about. But having former military at top, makes
| me think industry will follow military. This is not totally
| hypothetical. Like even as recently as last week this topic
| has been on CNN.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| That chatter is mostly from people outside the military,
| the military itself is not inclined to coup in the US. It
| goes against what it stands for, it's also almost
| guaranteed to fail in any meaningful sense. The military
| itself would become disbanded in the process and it would
| mean not just the end of the nation at the top (change from
| democratic republic to military authoritarianism) but a
| fracturing of the nation itself.
|
| The chatter inside the military is mostly, "How stupid are
| those asshats that want a coup?"
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| I mostly agree. But I think most people see it as brief
| intervention period, and then the military would be
| restoring political democracy. I personally don't think
| it would be positive at all for the reasons you
| mentioned. But also life would lost for sure. Though I do
| think if the riots continued last year, at some point
| military would have stepped in.
|
| However, I remember when the US early in the pandemic ran
| out of masks, since the masks were manufactured in China
| and was telling its people masks were not necessary, to
| preserve supplies for healthcare workers. Recently the
| chip shortages are causing car manufacturing to grind to
| a halt.
|
| Is the US military anything without industry? Seems to me
| like almost under all scenarios, US military success, is
| heavily based on US industry's ability to supply its
| weapons and logistical needs. With politicians behind
| outsourcing so much to China, can the US even sustain any
| direct conflict. Seems to me, that diminishing industrial
| capability has to be a giant sore point for the military.
| Especially when there are money trails of some
| politicians accepting money from China.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Who are these "most people"?
|
| The military would not have "stepped in" under its own
| accord. It may have been called in (probably in the form
| of the state national guards).
|
| If so many former military officers are positioning
| themselves so well in industry to effect this coup, maybe
| they could also step in and restore a larger portion of
| US manufacturing and sidestep the issue of your last
| paragraph. It would certainly be easier than destroying a
| country.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| > Who are these "most people"?
|
| Judging from 4chan, twitter, gab, I think currently its
| the "stolen election" Trump supporters. But it might be a
| growing coalition of those that oppose "communism" as
| they see it. Progressive policies, reparations, and so
| on. The disgruntled right. Which is actually a lot of red
| states...most of geographic land area of the US.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Good luck to them, they're still not "most people" and
| can (mostly) be safely ignored.
| bsder wrote:
| > I took it as some sort government control of industry
| collusion.
|
| Why?
|
| The more mundane explanation is that the military teaches you
| how to tolerate command chain bullshit on a daily basis.
|
| Large companies are more about navigating political waters than
| they are about getting stuff done.
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| Not uncommon. I know of companies in the transportation industry
| that contract through the DoD and hire ex-DoD people specifically
| for the DoD contracts. They know how to speak the language and
| get deals done.
|
| Edit: To clarify, most of these contracts, you have to bid for.
| But if you don't know how to speak DoD, you're going to have a
| much harder time.
| [deleted]
| anti-nazi wrote:
| the mergers of state and capital is not socialism, as was the
| case with the third reich
| jollybean wrote:
| 66 former government officials is a very small number.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Seriously. Something like 5 million people work for the USG.
| fireball_blaze wrote:
| Curious -- based on what? Compared to other cloud providers?
| Compared to the normal # of gov officials at Seattle-based tech
| companies like Microsoft? As a % of overall work force?
| [deleted]
| jollybean wrote:
| The US government is the largest employer in the US, and
| Amazon is one of the largest private employer. Literally
| millions in the former, 100's of thousands in the later.
|
| There will be considerable crossover.
| dekhn wrote:
| This is exactly what I'd do if I wanted to expand my cloud
| defense revenue. Amazon clearly stated that's a major goal of
| theirs, they are in hot competition with Microsoft, and
| Oracle/IBM want in too (both those company have long and deep
| relationships with defense). Google, obviously, showed itself out
| the door with its public statements about Maven.
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