Now wait...he was working there after out of the CIA...
However....there was a time when the government...even under Bush...was recruiting scads of Computer Geeks with little or no history as the standard was at that time...security checks were not as well comp[leted for time eliments etc....promoting many of them rapidly who had the skills needed at a time there were not enough to handle the volume of intelligence checking that was happening on line.
Snowden might have very well been one of the scads of techies let in without too much checking beforehand.......this guy was on the computer traveling the world as a kid...like most geeks do...they wanted computer geeks...fast!
Pay, intelligence/education level, and job task are not a metric amongst bureaucrats or cronies, it just IS...
People are often paid first for their brains, and second for their special skills. He clearly used his brain to develop special skills.
A gentle word of caution - much of this is so broad as to be essentially meaningless, and that is not an accident. Real data about this guy is going to need to be double-sourced at least. There is nobody in it at the moment who doesn’t have a highly sensitive vested interest in precisely what information is to be shared, least of all a company who just got burned talking about the guy who did it, or the agency who hired them to hire him that is now concerned with damage control.
When it comes to degreeless dropouts, WHG, III, aka "Trey", or Mr Bill, did considerably better. Without having to flee to Hong Kong, even.
Maybe you have too much faith in the educational system, Mesta.
I.T. is one area you can prove yourself on the job. He might very well have been worth it.
If he dropped out of HS he’s either really dumb or really smart, probably the latter.
What he makes and what Booz Allen charges the govt for him are totally different. I was a govt contractor with “a major consulting firm”. This “firm” charged the US Govt $150.00 per hour for me, believe me I was lucky to get 40% of that.