[Mac_crypto] employment market for applied cryptographers?

[Michael Rutman]

I can only speak for our company.  I recently tried to hire one of the
security experts on this list and it was shot down flat despite him being a
perfect fit for our company.  The fact is, after laying off 2/3 of the
company increasing head count is very hard.  Without a bullet item to show
investors or customers, it just isn't going to happen.

I can't even say that management is being bone headed about it, because
they would really love to pick up some of these security people right now.
Some of the people on this list have given us free advise over the years,
so it's not even like I can't point out how helpful they've been.  It
really is there is only so much money and right now features are all that
matter.

We seriously had a conversation with one of our partners who told us that
AES was just too much processing power on the 133 MHz Pentium MMX (that is
not a typo) so their solution was to use smaller than 128 bit keys.
Imagine trying to explain to someone who believes that that there is a need
for a security expert.  We are assuming they mean they are using DES, but
who can tell.

>From our point of view, we'd love to hire someone, but there is no way to
justify it to the board, nor our partners, nor our clients.  On the other
hand, tell them we are hiring another programmer that will port our
software to a platform nobody really uses but sounds like someone may one
day, bingo.


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