employment market for applied cryptographers?

[despot]

Having devoted security personnel is a low priority at most companies.
General engineers will be tasked with figuring out how to incorporate
"security" and cryptography into products. I have visited many a company
where I am talking to a room full of very sharp engineers, but there is
a fundamental lack of understanding of cryptographic primitives and
their applications (let alone high-level protocols using those
primitives).

At large companies, having a few strong security engineers that can
provide support to the various engineering areas should be a norm (if
anything, from a liability perspective). At small companies, having
security engineers who are also capable of general engineering is a good
balance. It seems lately that neither is occurring, but this will
probably correct itself as security becomes a
military/gov't-demanded->(bank-demanded->)corporate-demanded->consumer-d
emanded feature.

Of note, in my (Washington DC Metro) area there has been plenty of
demand for cryptographic/information assurance/security engineers.

-Andrew

PS One (vague) example of the blunders that occur...

A friend of mine worked for a company and wanted me to meet a few of
their engineers. We started talking about cryptography and the engineers
told me a story. It seemed that this company had wanted to add
encryption to their communications products and some engineers were
tasked with building this feature. These engineers did some digging and
they discovered asymmetric and symmetric cryptography. Since asymmetric
cryptography seemed "better," they decided to use it (RSA algorithm) to
encrypt/decrypt the traffic. (Bad idea.) 

(of note, this was eventually changed to using a public key-based key
exchange of symmetric keys. These symmetric keys were then used by a
symmetric algorithm to encrypt/decrypt the traffic. I do not know the
details of the protocol used or if it was standards-based.)

Using this example, bringing on a (probably contract) "cryptographic
security engineer" would have saved a great deal of time and effort.