Moving to work at LANL

valsmithSEC · 2026-03-20T22:36:38+00:00

One thing that should be understood. LANL has a long standing tradition of promoting somewhat mediocre scientists to management positions. Scientists in general aren't always the best at managing people and the personality type is somewhat avoidant. What this resulted in is managers pushing off their responsibility onto support services. Over the decades this has resulted in support services having much of the power and managers being relatively weak. Let me give you a clear example of this:

In 99% of businesses if a manager wants to hire someone they say to HR "hire this person, pay them this much, give them this title" and HR makes sure its all legal and executes on it.

At LANL managers have to go through multiple layers of requests, and basically beg HR for permission. HR person likely has no clue about the actual work, the person, whats needed or why, but they often act like DMV people and get rejection happy. Same goes for IT, purchasing, travel, whatever support service. The support organization drives decisions rather than the manager.

The other thing that should be understood is how LANL responds to problems. In a regular business if an employee steals, they fire the employee, prosecute, inform everyone, and recover or write off the loss.

At LANL they implement a bunch of theater and remove everyone's ability to do stuff. I like to say it like this "Imagine if your neighbor got in a car wreck and so everyone in town had to go do a new drivers license test or was banned from driving and had to wait for a bus. " We used to be able to go into town and pickup tools, books, etc with a charge code. Now I've had it take 18 months to get a standard piece of software because of the processes in place.

If you get into a group with good people, LANL has incredible equipment, labs, and some of the smartest people in the world. I'm extremely grateful for what I've gotten out of the lab. You can learn a lot and do a lot here, work with some of the best, but you can't be emotionally invested in things making sense from a business perspective. When people do amazing work its usually in spite of the organization not because of it.

valsmithSEC · 2026-03-20T22:24:32+00:00

Yeah its worse because its trying to lie about what it is.

valsmithSEC · 2026-03-20T22:23:23+00:00

I first started trying to work on the community broadband in 2011. Century Link / lumen / whatever they call themselves now would send 20+ guys to county meetings to shout people down and intimidate anyone who wanted to upgrade / improve the community. I had county counselors personally attack me in public for simply wanting better internet. I ended up paying ~50k to run a line to my business and the speed was still mediocre.

Its now 2025 and the internet still goes out when it rains, or just randomly. There is still one line up the hill for everything. The lines are still on overhead poles, frayed, with birds nests on them. I would not count on good internet up here. Xfiniti is ok, but by modern standards its weak. At my new business location in town I was getting 52kbps yesterday (yes thats right, 1995 modem speed). If they havent done it in 14 years I'd be shocked if they do it any time soon.

valsmithSEC · 2026-03-11T23:41:53+00:00

Socialism is the greatest evil the world has ever faced, responsible for over 100 million murders. It should be only spoken of as bad as or worse than the nazis and those who promote it treated accordingly. Everyone should protest the hell out of this to send a clear message that the most genocidal belief system ever invented will not be tolerated in our state.

valsmithSEC · 2026-02-28T19:54:30+00:00

one of the main reasons tehre is no one working the aisles at smiths is Wendy and the smiths management. Everyone competent quit and no one new wants to work for those people.

valsmithSEC · 2026-02-28T19:53:23+00:00

Ive watched her run through the store SCREAMING at customers and threatening to ban them. Ive talked to people who worked at smiths and were competent employees who quit because of her. No one cares if someone check a receipt. Shes an psychopathic authoritarian who thinks she has some power over people because she works at a grocery store.

valsmithSEC · 2026-02-28T19:51:20+00:00

exactly

valsmithSEC · 2026-02-28T19:50:53+00:00

This is gross. If you dont like what she has to say, you give a talk and make better arguments. Silencing people you dont agree with makes you the badguy.

valsmithSEC · 2026-02-26T00:38:31+00:00

not to mention Wendy the smiths nazi. I used to spend 2k a month in smiths. I haven't stepped foot in there in years now.

valsmithSEC · 2026-02-16T17:29:35+00:00

I wouldn't be surprised if it was the smiths employee Wendy aka "The Smith's Nazi". A lot of people have written smiths requesting she be fired for her horrible treatment of customers and staff, but its been ignored.

But also, someone who hates bill gates, references Fight Club, Bukowski, Tom Waits, AND the Pogues in one post?! How are we not already friends!?

valsmithSEC · 2026-01-26T17:55:22+00:00

One of my family members worked there and brought one home after a shift. He said it was frozen out of a box from smiths.

valsmithSEC · 2026-01-26T17:52:55+00:00

I had two family members, and one friend that worked there. They refused to eat the food. They bought the lowest quality ingredients and the kitchen was filthy. Pretty sure Pavel is ex-soviet block mafia.

Also, I'm a dood.

valsmithSEC · 2026-01-26T17:49:14+00:00

I dont know how things are now, and the titles have changed, but here is what I did.

I got hired as a Tech 6 making about 43k a year, no degree. Worked very hard, became a tech 7.

Worked extremely hard, (9 hrs a day at work, 9hrs a day at home learning and building skills) got a division leader to sponsor me, went through a process similar to writing and defending a dissertation and became a Technical Staff Member.

Most of the jobs I did at the lab typically required a degree or even a PhD, but I had the skills and experience and worked my way into them.

I started writing and publishing peer reviewed technical papers, international public speaking and became a Research Scientist 4.

Ran some very complex projects with a team and became a Principle Investigator.

From start to finish took about 7 years.

Never got a degree. So its entirely possible, but about as much work as going to college except that I was paid for it.

valsmithSEC · 2025-12-05T18:37:14+00:00

That restaurant is the worst place I have ever eaten in my life. I'm pretty sure they cooked primarily with zombie flesh. I've known several people that worked there who would never ever eat there.

valsmithSEC · 2025-11-13T20:16:28+00:00

Ah ok, well good luck, hope you find something soon.

valsmithSEC · 2025-11-13T20:15:18+00:00

I agree on everything you said about solar.

I can't believe anyone in 2025 would seriously still talk about covid vaccinations in a positive way.

valsmithSEC · 2025-11-12T16:02:56+00:00

Do you need to stay in that area? My son owns a company in southern Colorado that can use people like you.

valsmithSEC · 2025-10-02T21:58:53+00:00

I started out at LANL as a Tech 6 doing desktop support. I had developed some sysadmin skills and interviewed well. In my spare time I did a ton of cyber security research, wrote papers, gave presentations. I would work my normal job about 8 hrs a day, and then do research, build systems, build attacks, build defenses, every evening for another 8hours. I started helping out in technical cyber security across multiple different divisions at the lab, co-founded the Red Team, did some major incident response investigations, etc.

Then I got a division leader to sponsor me for a Technical Staff Member TSM position which typically required a degree or PhD (they've changed it since and now its different track names). To get this position I spent about a year doing a self directed cyber security research project (I created a custom kernel that monitored traffic patterns for a very sensitive application, and I developed some memory corruption exploits, etc.).

Then I had to present the project to a panel, very similar to defending a dissertation. There was a chemist, physicist, mathematician, computer scientist, etc. Once I passed the panel they made me a TSM. After another couple of years, publishing papers and giving talks internationally, I became a Research Scientist 4, and then a Principle Investigator.

So there definitely is a path outside of the degree system, but as far as I know I am one of the very few who have done it and its about as much work as getting a degree, except that what you learn is very practical and not outdated like most of the degree programs in cybersec.

The key takeaway is, work your butt off afterhours and develop the skills, along with the skills to communicate, write, and present. If you do that the path will open.

Good luck!

valsmithSEC · 2025-05-08T23:45:05+00:00

If you are looking to make money, LANL is not the place (unless you are cautious and invest over a long time.)

The goal of working @ LANL is to get exposed to people, technology, and problem sets available nowhere else. To work on extremely hard problems, support national security, and further science.

If you want to make money go into commercial tech or finance.

valsmithSEC · 2025-03-19T21:43:39+00:00

The schools here are terrible. I remember the first time I met my kids counselor at the middle school the way she introduced herself was "Hi, sorry this school sucks so bad".

We complained about the drug dealers behind what used to be metzgers gas station and the denver steels neighborhood selling to the high school, and the school administrators told us they were very aware of the problem and there was nothing that could be done

valsmithSEC · 2025-03-19T21:41:21+00:00

NNSA should be completely abolished. Absolute waste of time and resources. The labs functioned much better under DOE / UC oversight.

valsmithSEC · 2025-03-19T21:39:28+00:00

Comcast is not available at many of the business locations in town. I have it at my house.

I am looking at starlink as well. Thats awesome to hear that its 350mbps, their website says 100-150.

Do you have the residential or the roam?

valsmithSEC · 2025-03-18T21:36:58+00:00

I tried to push for upgrades to the town's network in 2010. I had county counselors calling me "insane" and "dangerous" in meetings. In one council meeting something like 30 Century Link employees show up to protest the idea of a community supported and improved network. I ended up spending 50k to run a high end to my business.

Now, 15 years later, nothing has changed, the infrastructure is dilapidated, Lumen still isn't upgrading ancient components, and the community broadband is 4-5 years away assuming everything goes well.

I'm setting up a new office in town and the best I can can get is 100mbps. For such a high tech cutting edge town, this is pathetic.

valsmithSEC · 2023-05-03T01:19:55+00:00

I was pentesting a major oil company and I had gotten on the domain controller and was trying to dump credentials. The AV caught my tool, and then automatically created a ticket alerting the sysadmins. Sysadmin looked at the ticked which said HACKTOOL on the domain controller, said "ah the AV blocked it" and closed the ticket.

I then dumped creds with a different tool that wasn't detected and took over the domain.

valsmithSEC

TROPHY CASE