Schedule C Word Doc: Fill & Download for Free

You used the right term when you said “agents” but “hire” is perhaps a bit misleading. Many of the CIA’s foreign agents are not financially compensated and some agents opt not to be compensated at all. Agents agree to be recruited for any number of motivations, some of which are entirely unselfish. So, when I was an undercover intel officer trying to secure the cooperation of a foreigner to utilize him/her as a clandestine agent (i.e., source, asset), there was not a hiring process in the same way that Microsoft hires programmers or Starbucks hires baristas.CIA officers abroad are tasked with “bringing into the fold” foreign agents who, for the most part, are used to secretly provide sensitive intelligence of interest to U.S. policymakers. I think you’re asking more precisely how that would work and it’s something that the general public has very little understanding of so I’ll try to explain.In this example, I am the CIA officer (an American spy, working undercover in Country B) and you are a (non-American) official of Country C who is also posted to Country B. In other words, you and I are both foreigners and strangers living and working abroad in the same place. The “hiring” process might look something like this:I notice you. It might be completely random (I overhear your conversation at an embassy diplomatic reception we were both invited to) or you could have been recommended to me or come onto my radar in some other way.I size you up. I mainly have to decide two things: A) do you have access to something (classified information, i.e., secrets) that my government would find useful and, B) are you the type of person who might be enticed to give (or sell) me those secrets.I convince you to like me and trust me. This might take weeks or months (and it is done partly in conjunction with #2 above) but you’re not going to go along with my plan if you think I’m a douchebag.I make you a “job” offer. It’s not a job in the normal sense of the word. I won’t ask you to sign a contract. You won’t have a regular work schedule. You won’t be expected to quit your current job. In fact, you MUST keep your current position in order to qualify for the “part-time” one I’m offering you. You’ll need to discreetly make copies of the classified documents that sometimes come across your desk.You accept my offer. There could be some negotiating here. Maybe you argue for a higher salary or an annual paid vacation or eventual U.S. citizenship.We switch to more secure (i.e., out of the public eye) meeting arrangements — perhaps at a CIA safehouse or an alias-rented hotel room. You bring me the above-mentioned, classified docs and the real spying begins.To read more on this topic, see my response to an earlier,related Quora question: Brad Robinson's answer to What does it feel like to be a double agent?

I've been working in M&A for the past five years with a focus on technology companies. Below are my thoughts on what it's like:The job can be very demanding since client requests and new opportunities arise without notice, and hence the job is pervasive through your week/weekend/holidays. Additionally, relative to other industries, younger professionals are provided with outsized challenges of managing workflow (mostly via PowerPoint presentations and Excel models), senior comments on deliverables, logistics (printing/binding books, ensuring said books arrive at the proper hotel, house, or client office, etc.), and handling diligence requests (imagine 10,000+ pages of reports and statistics that need to be analyzed/sent to potential buyers).However, once the steep initial learning curve is surmounted, I can't think of a better opportunity to hone critical financial thinking skills, learn the fundamentals of business from numerous high-calibre companies and contacts at the C-level, participate in the mechanics of how transactions are executed, hone negotiating skills (which, for what it's worth, can be applied to far more facets of life than one would presume), and multi-task like a mofo on any given day (i.e., schedule 12 meetings with your directors, the client, and buyers, while simultaneously completing a 40 page board presentation, analyzing the Big Data industry for another client, and sending over 3 docs requested by a buyer for another deal).Since it's a service-based business, your skills evolve based on the client/task at hand, and every new project is different in small-to-major ways from prior assignments. In other words, you'll never get bored from monotony.Hopefully that's a helpful high-level overview--feel free to ask a follow-up question that dives into the specifics of what I've described above.

CodingPseudo code? Be expected to write syntactically correct and well formatted code. You shall be coding in Google Docs. So get well versed in it. No more whiteboard!You can pick your programming language of choice. But I hear it’s recommended to choose one from C++, Java or Python. And make sure you know that one well, for you are expected to know it well.Data StructuresMake sure you are well versed in linked lists, trees, and hash tables at the very least. Know all their basic operations and make sure you can code them well. Most interviewers would stay away from graphs, but knowing it can come handy. Try learning tries and one self-balancing BST.AlgorithmsKnow atleast one O(n log n) sorting algorithm. Forget Bubble Sort. Learn BFS, DFS, Topological sorting, and Dijkstra’s algorithm (maybe A* too). And know your Big O’s well. Learn about NP-Complete class. Check out the Travelling Salesman, knapsack, SAT and halting problems too.Try out books like Cracking The Coding Interview, Programming Interviews Exposed. Read through Glassdoor. Try competitive programming.Operating SystemsThe probability of you being asked to code a multi-threaded program is slim. But nonetheless, be expected to get drilled on OS theory (think process, thread, semaphore, mutex, deadlock, concurrency, scheduling, system calls and so on) and Linux commands. I have found Robert Love’s books to be a great primer.DatabasesThis is a bit of grey area. Unless your role demands it, you might get away with no database questions. But mind the Design Round. And since Scalability is such a big word at Google, better get yourself to speed on NoSQL, sharding, scaling, and so on.And one last thing. Read Get that job at Google from Steve Yegge, which even Facebook was so keen on recommending!Good luck!