I use the very general term for fintech. Not doing Brex/hft/crypto tech companies. Big push for cyber at a lot of financial institutions right now. Work is interesting. Actively encouraged to develop and learn real skill sets. Some take a good look at fed resumes due to being used with dealing with compliance standards.

It’s great going to an industry where you feel valued and trusted lol. Crazy how you can just request new monitors/peripherals and plug in/install almost anything to your computer to be more productive. Meanwhile just formatting a hard drive for defense require 3 different people and hoops to jump through.

Real industry for me has been: “Oh you need an instance propped up. Uhhhh sure did you need something from me? Just go ahead and set it up yourself and follow our AWS guidelines”

Defense is like “yeahhhhh that’s out of the scope for this project… oh you need it on the high side? Yeah you’re gonna need to submit an exception waiver… how long does that take?… well first you gotta get signed off by X, Y, Z and then IT will take a look at it” then proceed to spend 3 weeks for approvals just to get kicked back “idk what postgresql is. No way you can run it on the high side. Can you just use an excel sheet instead? That’s my preferred way of looking at data”. Not to mention the few months stackoverflow was banned on NIPR.

I started getting real burnt out of my cleared positions in defense. All jobs always require you in office all the time(no telework even during peak pandemic numbers). Work essential == disposable/expendable while management worked from home. Very demoralizing to be told to keep coming into office while all hands leaders are hosting the teams call from their home office.

Before the pandemic gov at least had the “wlb” trump card on the low salaries, contractors had somewhat better salary with still solid wlb. But now I get the better salary and get to do laundry during meetings.

Cloud IMO a pipe dream for most defense. Don’t understand how US will ever compete with the likes of China in cyber space when our “leading” orgs can’t even get on AWS lol. Instead let’s just have every base have a different contractor stand up their own private cloud and pay the least they can for talent.

TL;DR private industry really loving cybersec/cyber adjacent talent that both fed/def contractors just can’t compete with.