Edward Snowden

For some reason, the mainstream media, as well as commenters on my blog, can’t seem to get over the fact that Edward Snowden didn’t graduate from high school yet he had a $122K job at the age of 29, or because eight years ago (when he was 21?) he had a job as a security guard, which everyone know is a crappy job.

I don’t know why this is so shocking, especially coming from my blog commenters who are usually trying to argue that formal education is overrated.

“He was always very quiet, and he was always on his computer,” Joyce Kinsey said in a telephone interview. Through open curtains, she said, she could see him “at all hours of the night at the computer.”

So the guy’s a computer nerd who picked up some commercially valuable IT skills. It generally takes as little as five years of work experience with some IT skill to reach a peak salary with respect to that skill.

If Snowden had lived anywhere else, he might have remained employed as a security guard, because companies would prefer to hire Indian immigrants. But the DC area is desperate for people with IT skills who are American citizens who qualify for a security clearance. I personally was involved in hiring people in the DC area for a computer programming job, and I wound up hiring some guy without a college degree because he was the first guy I found who was an American citizen and who actually knew how to program. (But in retrospect, it was still a mistake to hire the guy.)

(Note that the stupid HR department of the tiny government contractor I worked for refused to put in the job description that American citizenship was required, even though it’s legal to do so if citizenship is actually required for the job, and I got zillions of resumes with Indian names, and I just wanted throw them out, but the HR person insisted she had to call each one to ask if they were American citizens, even though I had perfect 100% accuracy in identifying resumes of non-citizens. Anyone with any experience applying for jobs with government contractors would put down on his resume that he’s an American citizen, if he was one, especially if he has a foreign-sounding name.)

It’s not that difficult to get a security clearance, millions of people have them, I had a Public Trust clearance and an interim Secret Clearance which would have become a Secret Clearance had I not quit the job before the very slow military bureaucracy got around to approving me. It’s really not a big deal getting one of these clearances so long as your background doesn’t have drugs, arrests, financial problems, or strange foreign contacts. Educational credentials are not required to get a clearance. It’s just a matter of getting hired into a job where you need one, and then it’s just an administrative hassle.

I am sure that Snowden had already reached the glass ceiling for nerdy high-school dropouts and eventually, if he had not released classified information, maybe around the time he turned 40, he would have outdated skills and find his career on a downward track.

In conclusion, I find nothing especially remarkable about his life history up to the point where he decided to release information about the PRISM program.