Right now one of the fastest growing companies is the Israel cybersecurity company Wiz, founded by founders and investors from Israel's Unit 8200, their secretive cyber hacking group. Seems to me a massive security risk for any US company to be relying on critical security to a non American founded companies.
Wiz is the WeWork of cybersecurity. The Israeli tech sector is not that powerful but has lots of investments from the West (US mainly). My experience relates to yours. I think most people have high and unrealistic expectations of people coming from Israel but this usually comes out short.
This might be my ignorance showing, but how do you, as a hiring entity, even verify a candidate has experience in Unit 8200?
Or that these Unit 8200 alumni aren't dismissed "C-players", not good enough for them?
Israel has a mandatory military service, and they have been cultivating technical talent development in their armed forces for a long time. So I would think that the arrow of causality runs the opposite way.
In other words: virtually every Israeli has been in the military, and for the technically competent ones, were likely to be recruited into their offensive intelligence unit. Coupled with a government whose industrial strategy has been to promote business development in this sector, we are in a situation where practically every single founder of an Israeli tech company has a military service background.
Those with (offensive) infosec mindset end up founding infosec focused businesses, knowing that there is readily available investment available for them. As a result, the Venn diagram between the unit members and infosec business founders is likely to show a pretty big overlap.
And if you look at it more broadly, most Israelis served in the army which maintains an occupation which is illegal under international law, that is most countries on the planet deem it illegal. So, when I meet an Israeli, the instant thought that runs through my head would be: did this person participate in the human rights abuses? They might very well not have, but the possibility is there. This is a scary situation for me as well, because I do not want to be discriminating and prejudiced against anyone, but the facts are straight.
I guess it's good that Google's attempt to acquire Wiz fell through.
I created a throwaway account just for this.
I actually hired, and we later fired, a couple of 'engineers' from Unit 8200. They were technically quite weak, and when Oct. 7 happened, I wasn't surprised at all. If this was the cream of the crop, the defense community should seriously re-evaluate the efficacy of the IDF.