The Federal government is definitely out of favor, whether for doing too little or too much depends on your MAP (it never does enough for us and does too much for them).
In no part of the government is this more obvious than NSA; the poster child of dislike, distrust and disdain.
But those feelings should hold only for the leadership, not the techies who staff the place.
NSA hires a lot of techies and techies are techies the world over. One of the things they all have in common is that they love puzzles, especially math and logic puzzles—not just to work them, but to create them.
“Intelligence. It’s the ability to think abstractly. Challenge the unknown. Solve the impossible. NSA employees work on some of the world’s most demanding and exhilarating high-tech engineering challenges. Applying complex algorithms and expressing difficult cryptographic problems in terms of mathematics is part of the work NSA employees do every day.”
So if you love puzzles click the link above and try your skills. Here’s a sample from a software developer.
Four friends, Holly, Belle, Carol, and Nick, gather for May birthdays. Holly announces that she has a game before dinner. She hid gifts for each of her friends inside three separate boxes secured with padlocks. She challenges her friends to figure out the combination without consulting each other.
She provides the following information. All the padlocks have the same combination. The padlocks use 3 digits from 0 to 9. She also tells them that the sum of the three digits is equal to nine, and every digit is equal to or greater than the previous digit. Holly tells each of her friends one of the digits in the combination. She states, “I’ve given the first digit to Belle, the second digit to Carol, and the third digit to Nick.” The caveat is that the friends cannot share their numbers with each other or they will forfeit the gifts.
Then Holly gives her friends 30 minutes to open the padlocks while she watches and finishes dinner.
The three friends begin to think of the solution. One by one, they each try their hand at their padlock, but none of them opens the padlock. Seeing that no one has succeeded, suddenly Carol realizes she knows the answer, and successfully opens her box, revealing a new fitness tracker. Following this, Nick opens his padlock, revealing a new tablet; and Belle opens her box to find new pair of headphones.
Having watched this entire event unfold, can you determine the correct combination?
The good thing is that things are changing. Even mighty Google that once hired only 3.7+ GPAs has changed how they recruit using puzzles to identify talent that might fall through the cracks—assuming it even got that far.
Probably the greatest value of higher education—all education, actually—is learning how to learn.
It’s knowing where to find information and how to assimilate, tweak and synthesize it
so it becomes useful in both the short and long terms; more value comes from learning how to focus and think critically.
Skill in the actual major has value for two to four years—less in technical fields that change with radical speed.
From that point on the value of actual degree content goes down 20% or more each year, whereas real experience goes up.
That means in five years specific degrees become meaningless, while specific experience holds all the value.
Moreover, those with the ability to successfully move from industry to industry, field to field, department to department, position to position sans ego and hype truly have a price above rubies—although they rarely think so.
Next up is a real treat and useful, too. I’ll bet that not even all my tech savvy readers know about some of these Google goodies; have fun, but don’t waste the entire weekend fooling with them.
Last up is a bit of laughter—or at least a few snickers. I hate 99% of the ads companies stick us with (I am so sick of being pitched illnesses and drugs) unlike the rest of the world who’s ads actually qualify as entertainment. But there is the other 1%, so that now and then we actually get a good commercial. The Layoff and the other four videosare definitely funny if you need a quick laugh. This isn’t an endorsement of the company—I have no knowledge of their products just their sense of humor.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
Do you like puzzles? Author Michael Brooks shows you 
