I must confess that 'Harnessing Amanda Holdem' made me pause for a moment.
Working for the intelligence services is akin to Hotel California.
Like ticket inspectors on a London bus, people who work for MI6 could be anyone, and are #secretlyjustlikeyou. We see no reason why our readers shouldn’t put themselves up for the job (just remember to tip us off securely here when you’re tasked with making Vista work “just one more year” on a dusty PC behind a red door at SIS …
Did you not see Spectre? A large part of the job involves writing complex animations and unfathomable user interfaces on an unfeasibly large screen when you're trying to break a password.
(One day, just one day, I would like to see this represented by making every screen in the room go black and the words "please wait" in the middle of the screen, as all the computer fans kick in and the room temperature goes up 5°. Now that I could buy)
"A large part of the job involves writing complex animations and unfathomable user interfaces on an unfeasibly large screen when you're trying to break a password."
It's been done for decades; I usually visualize the climactic scene of "Wargames" when it comes to complex animations, unfeasibly large screen(s), and brute-forcing launch codes (passwords).
No, they have to do what would actually happen. The person writes the script to brute force the password and outputs a mostly useless progress indicator which only serves to prove that the program is still running. I'd like to see them have a single terminal which looks like this (at least if I'm the one who wrote it).
Please wait...
10000
20000
30000
40000
50000
60000
That would be realistic, although if they're going for maximum realism, they have to throw in some useless warning output as well:
Please wait...
10000
20000
Password "z0\x94F%": Partially valid header, best candidate so far.
30000
40000
Thats exactly what I was told on the first day
Job description : Civil servant
Department: Defence department
(although after a few years working there, our cynical take on it was
Job description: Tea maker/card game player behind boiler house on a friday afternoon
Department of wasting a shedload of money on something unnessasary and not buying the stuff we actually need