Culture and Context:
Does the military nurture technologists?
By Susan Miller
Published on March 15, 2006 - 03:52 AM
Slashdot points to an interview with Elonka Dunin on the WhiteDust Security news Website. Dunin is a game developer and a (mostly) self-taught cryptologist. Here’s a snip from her biography on Wikipedia:
Dunin is a member of the International Game Developers Association and the Planetary Society. Along with speaking to government agencies such as the FBI, CIA, and NSA, Dunin is a frequent speaker on cryptography and online games at conferences such as Dragon*Con, PhreakNIC, Def Con, and the International Game Developers Conference, and has twice been invited to be a co-host on the Binary Revolution webcast.
If you’re at all interested in that cryptologic sculpture outside CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., take a look at her personal Kryptos page, which has pictures, bibliography, notes, etc.
Meanwhile, the interview on WhiteDust is awfully good. Here’s something from that piece that seems obvious, but that you don’t hear every day:
WD> Like many of the people we have interviewed you worked in the military before computing. Why do you think that is?
I can't speak for other people, but for me, being in the military definitely changed my work habits and made me much more disciplined in terms of complex projects. It also gave me a lot more confidence in my own abilities. Those factors may be an edge which helps entrepreneurs to marshal the focus and drive that's necessary to become personally successful, whereas some other people may have ideas that are just as good, but not be able to pull together the discipline, confidence, and persistence to make their ideas happen.
So besides the discipline and the experience with huge projects, is there something else about the military that nurtures or appeals to the technologist?
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