The actual form: https://www.opm.gov/forms/pdf_fill/sf86.pdf
Holy shit, who the hell goes though all this shit? Just get another job lmfao. Private sector probably pays more than this. (Also you wouldn’t have to worry about government shutdowns)
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.
What’s the reason why that form isn’t digital?
Over the last 15 years they’ve made it a web based interface with the most recent version being halfway decent. It also saves all your info so if you have to get a reinvestigation (every 5-10 years) then it is just updating your info.
It is digital.
Eh. It’s tedious, but I filled it out on company time, so no biggie.
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.
it looks a lot more involved than any background check I’ve done for industry. depending on clearance level your friends and family will be interviewed by FBI agents, and they’ll ask your friends for more friends to interview, etc. I think it goes back 10 years. they will also require you to do a polygraph, for higher clearance.
also lying on the form lands you in prison, which is definitely more intense than lying on an industry background check. oh, and you have to report any foreign contact, too, as long as your clearance is active.
and they’re really strict about drugs, debt, cheating (or being cheated on!), mental illness, having parents or spouses from other countries…
mental illness
If you have depression and get it under control, does that still count against you? I mean, it’s not like I’m piloting an airplane.
having parents or spouses from other countries
Welp, disqualified. My dad couldn’t speak enough English to naturalize, still a PRC citizen.
Wait, now I think about it, he meets the 55/15 exception, idk if he filed for natualization yet.
You wouldn’t get disqualified. They would look into their private life, determine if they are Party members, look at your financial history to determine if you or anyone in your family is undergoing financial hardship, or faces undo influence from foreign actors.
There are plenty of Chinese nationals with clearance. It’s a flag, but flags affect your risk level. It’s not an absolute disqualifier.
r/SecutiryClearance is full of interesting stories about this form.
Not ICE though. Anyone can do that.
ICE is just for people who applied to be a cop but got rejected. 🤣
That checks out.
I think this would also be required of people working in the private sector at companies that have been contracted to do certain things.
If filling out the sf86 is the hardest part of your job then you probably deserve to be working at Starbucks.
Its more about the invasive investigations after it.
You gotta go around asking all your relatives about their citizenship status. Amongst like a lot of other things.
Edit: I mean, I understand why, but still. Tedious. Given that government shutdown happen all the time, I’m not sure this is even worth it.
There are a lot of positions that don’t work directly for the government that still require an sf86. Many of them are considered critical workers or in many of the cases contractors have the funds sitting in the Treasury or with their company and continue to get paid even if there is a shutdown.
Even funnier is now many contractors factor in government shutdowns into the total cost of the contract so the work can continue while the government is shutdown.
I’m private sector and filled this out. It is very much worth it. If you have a clearance and can fog a mirror, you can get a decent job. If you have a clearance and you’re smart, the sky is the limit.
Oh look, these people are filling it out while on the clock. They start off without clearance, typically.
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.
Sounds like a diy novel writing experience
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.
I have a friend who used to work for a big time tech company with lots of defense department contacts, one of the sorts of companies where if he talked about his company helping the government read peoples emails and track you online and such, you couldn’t really be sure if he was joking or not.
He no longer works for that company, and I’m pretty sure he wasn’t joking by the way.
I’ve been fortunate to know a lot of really smart people in my life, and I like to think I’m not an idiot myself, but this guy is hands down the smartest person I’ve ever met and it’s not even close, he is scary smart.
And he made insanely good money while he worked for them, and the kind of shit they did on the company (and by extension, the taxpayers’ dime,) was insane, they were regularly flying out to Vegas and putting it all on the company credit card.
So yeah for a talented person, there is really damn good money to be made if you can get security clearance.
if you’re a contractor, yeah. actual government employees get paid peanuts compared to industry.
Yup… old buddy of mine went through this and lives a comfortable life with no college degree ever since. Very worth it if you can tolerate the ethical dilemma.
And you get to sleep soundly with the fact that if you did your job right more people died today than yesterday. Progress!
I got curious and started searching around, then came across this:
Hmm… (notice the text in the red banner)
Idk maybe in 4 years, kinda uncomfortable with this… joke of an admin doing a background check.
deleted by creator
pay six figures.
per month or per year?
For a real answer here’s roughly what DOD contracting makes.
With a degree you can probably start around $125k-$160k a year. Without a degree or experience I’ve seen people start as low as $78k a year, and as high as $115k a year. It all really depends on how much funding the contract you work for has.
5 years in experience, training, certs, whatever else there are people making anywhere from $180k-$250k.
10+ years in, $300k+. At this point you’re likely specialized in something through experience alone and can barter your salary to whatever since you might be the only person available for any given position. The pool of people who work in intelligence is small, I saw an RF engineer haggle their way up to $550k a year for a technical position.
This is intentional to rule out all the adhd people.
💀
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.
I strongly suspect that is not the determining factor in the yearly acid trip.
Yeah, it’s not like LSD shows up on ANY drug test. He could just as easy not do it and say he did. Unless of course, he really likes that yearly trip. Which I highly recommend BTW.
I suspect they have a question along the lines of “have you done drugs in the past year”, and this allows him to honestly answer yes.
Why commit pergury when you can have fun with a low level crime that won’t be followed up on cause they want people to be honest on security clearance questions?
I don’t understand. Is he telling his company that like, “sorry, I can’t get clearance because I do LSD yearly”?
That’s my understanding, yes. Probably the easiest way to get out of the work without outright saying he doesn’t want to do it.
Your brother’s name must be Chad
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.
