> Think about how fucked up a tech company would be if it got to the scale of Microsoft or Google but without being able to hire non-citizens, have people enter/leave freely, hire anyone with at all a shady background, interact much with the outside world, etc.
Not to mention not hiring anyone who smokes marijuana. That would eliminate like 60% of the best CS grads I know.
It's the "CS grads you know" thing that is the problem. There's plenty of Venn overlap between hardcore CS and ROTC, too. They're just not the people we hang out with.
FWIW, NSA doesn't hire people who "smoke" marijuana, but probably doesn't have a huge problem now (extrapolating from the past) with people who "smoked" marijuana. It's probably below "has a foreign spouse" on their rejection criteria, provided it was "a college thing".
FBI and other LEOs had a much more serious antidrug screening than DOD or IC.
Not to mention not hiring anyone who smokes marijuana. That would eliminate like 60% of the best CS grads I know.