Today I Learned

I'm torn between upvoting the TIL part of this because it's something I know a ton about, and downvoting OP for such a wildly stupid take of "LOL go work somewhere else, hurr durr."

A) You only have to fill it out once every 5 or 10 years, depending on what level of clearance you are going for. And when you go back to fill it out again, nearly all of the stuff you filled out is unchanged.

B) It takes a few hours to do in order to be eligible for very high paying jobs.

C) You do realize, don't you, that tons of private sector jobs ALSO require you to fill this out? Working at Lockheed or Boeing or Booze Allen Hamilton or Microsoft or Google or... you get the picture. Any company that does business with the federal gov will have jobs with the possibility of needing this.

D) Private sector jobs can also be impacted by the gov shutdown, since many of them are on contracts with the gov that don't get paid when the contracting officer is furloughed.

EDIT: E) Private sector companies will pay a HUGE bonus to people who already have a TS clearance. Back in 2018-ish, Raytheon was paying a $50,000 sign-on bonus to new employees if they already had TS.

I've filled this form out, multiple times. All contractors who work with a government agency that requires even the lowest Public Trust clearance will go through this form.

It asks for all kinds of information. Your legal name, your aliases you've used (nicknames, or shortened names), immediate family member names (including parents and siblings) and addresses, past addresses you've lived at in X years and who can verify that address, whether you're divorced and how to contact that divorcee, all the countries you have traveled to in the past 5 or 6 years and when, and previous employers, timeframes and why you left them.

It is a lot, typically can take all day. And if they lose that paperwork, you have to fill it out again. After filling it out, they do a preliminary background check to make sure no apparent red flags and you can start whatever project you were told to fill out this form for, which can take months.

Then they assign case workers to do a deeper investigation, depending on the clearance level. That ex-partner you lived with? They may get a phone call or a packet in the mail asking about you. That employer that fired you? Same thing. You might have to do an interview to address inconsistencies (because there always will be in this ridiculous form you have to fill out).

But once you get that clearance... You are coveted by any private company that needs clearanced contractors. Sure, you'll have to go through the process all over again with another government agency, but a company knowing you were clearable makes it easier for them to hire you.

All of this to say that yeah, the form is as horrible as it sounds.

Eh. It’s tedious, but I filled it out on company time, so no biggie.

If filling out the sf86 is the hardest part of your job then you probably deserve to be working at Starbucks.

IDK if this is the same form someone in a private industry engineering job would fill out, but I assume it's at least similar. Having clearance is highly desirable to some; it opens access to projects that others can't work, meaning more leverage to get better pay.

And an inability to fill out a couple hundred pages of paperwork means a person probably isn't suited for the slow, documentation filled slog that is engineering on those sorts of projects anyways.

Personally, I don't want to work on those sorts of projects so I don't pursue clearance and accept it will narrow my job opportunities some.

Yeah, it's a pain in the dick to fill out but most of the pages are actually repeats. There are so many because you are going to have a fuckload of contacts that the investigators will want to talk to.

When I filled mine out I was just out of high school so I filled out way fewer pages. Just family, neighbors, and teachers if I remember right.

I think this would also be required of people working in the private sector at companies that have been contracted to do certain things.

OP is a moron: jobs that require clearances and speaking fluent Chinese pay six figures. Go ahead and don't apply for those so people who are more willing to swim in the infinite dollars from the US defense budget can earn it instead of you.

r/SecutiryClearance is full of interesting stories about this form.

Not ICE though. Anyone can do that.

Oh look, these people are filling it out while on the clock. They start off without clearance, typically.

My brother does acid once a year to make himself ineligible for security clearance.

His company wants him to get security clearance so he can work on government contracts.

This is intentional to rule out all the adhd people.

They uhhh... just click and sign in my experience. I'm 90% sure this is one of like 5 forms I had to fill out to get my clearance.

Filling it out digitally on the OPM website takes like 2-3 hours, max. Maybe across 2 sessions, if there's some info that you gotta go get from others and come back with later.

Any clearance requires an SF-86, even contractors

If somebody would ask me to fill out such a form, ever, I would tear the paper into pieces right there and then, and have a lot fun.

I despise bureaucracy, and if somebody wants me to do a job, they can fill out their own forms.

Sounds like a diy novel writing experience