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Comment by vippy | Hacker News Reader

One of my team members is a former Army Captain and Iraq veteran. He doesn't seem to mind.

And the only way anyone would be making $130K is if they landed at the top step of the GS-15 scale. I know most offers are made around the GS-13 level.

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Your pay is determined by your paystub from your previous/current employer by the Office of Management and Budget (edit: they do not take into account equity grants nor intangibles). You're also required to pass a drug test, as well as a background check and security clearance.

I'm somewhat turned off by the idea that people shouldn't be paid ~$130K/year for their service. You're asking them to pick up and move to DC, covering none of their moving, travel, or new living expenses.

Right, my friend said he needed to provide two years of salary information, and even then he was offered GS-13 step one. My point is that the USDS, 18F, etc, don't just offer $130k+ to anyone who walks in the door.

Exactly you could argue that civil servants should get more pay to make up for the lack of share options (adjusted for pension of course)

I bet at Cheltenham the BT staff on secondment are told don't mention sharesave to the Civil Servants :-)

And this is why the government has trouble attracting good people. It's not the pay that bothers me, personally. It's the bullshit policies, lack of workplace flexibility and the idea that intrusions into my own private life is at all acceptable. Oh and I have to move to the central government swamp while we're at it?

So then they pitch this as the only way people can help make things better offering below market pay along with all these trade offs?

Good luck with that.

Except the USDS, 18F, PIFs, and OCSIT are all attracting really great people. Now, HTTPS everywhere is a dubious project, sorry Konklone, but its difficult to deny that the problem of talent in government has always been one of the hiring process being controlled by contractors and the perverse economic incentives of the traditional bodies-in-chairs contracting model.

> Now, HTTPS everywhere is a dubious project, sorry Konklone

Well, I like it. =)

OH NOES! Hey Eric! :P

The problem we have with our project is that we're dealing with a ton of subdomains and not a lot of data I would consider "sensitive" enough to really necessitate encryption. While I appreciate the sentiment of the project, and value your commitment to privacy, for our use case it's definitely a bit of a pain in the butt.

That, and I know getting IT departments to move to install certs on their old infrastructure for things that might not require encryption is definitely painful. And the errors generated by expired certificates and "insecure content warnings" are confusing, and don't add value to projects that don't benefit from encrypted connections. We've been hearing all about it.

Honestly, now that I read down the thread, it kinda sounds like you don't have your shit together and you want to blame someone else who created something awesome for it.

It's not important whether you consider the data sensitive enough to bother doing your job. It's actually your users, which, if they've installed HTTPS Everywhere, they do.

So get your shit together! :)

FWIW, vippy's not referring to the browser extension, but to the federal policy:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2015/06/08/https-everywhere-...

Ah ha! Thanks!

Yes, thank you konklone. My primary complaint with the policy, and I'm hesitant to complain because, let me be clear, it is a good policy, is that we're now held accountable to a metric that adds engineering complexity and additional costs to our small team, and has created some confusion amongst our hundreds of customers who, arguably, don't serve content that, in my professional opinion, requires an encrypted connection to meet the needs of their millions of users.

I mean. They are attracting people who are better than the quality of the people the government usually gets. By a lot.

But that's a pretty low bar.

I have no idea why you're commenting to me about HTTPS Everywhere. So unfortunately I've missed whatever point you were trying to make there. Want to enlighten me?

And that's part of why we're talking about "service". The idea that you could put up with a little bullshit for a year to help your country.

That obviously doesn't resonate with you, but it does with some. Which is fine- you don't have to be interested.

(Sure, a no-bullshit government to work in would be great, but we don't have that yet)

See, this attitude is bullshit.

If you're asking people for help, you need to treat them like professionals and not children. That means don't get in the way them doing their jobs, don't impose bullshit requirements like literally asking people for their urine and don't do many of the other counter-productive things that government agencies have etched in stone as essential policy.

If you can't do that, your system is broken, and won't get as good of people as it ought to and that's the problem of the people who created it, not the people who are interested in doing you a fucking solid.

Sure, the system is broken. Except that system is our government, so it's all of our problem.

Yeah. And if you find a broken system you've generally got two choices:

  1) Work for it.
  2) Don't work for it.

I agree it's actually complicated to determine which is more effective in creating change. But I think you and I have merely chosen different approaches on this spectrum, rather than fundamentally disagreeing about anything deeper.

It depends on a few different factors, but your salary can be matched up to $158K. That includes DC's locality adjustment.[1]

[1] https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries...

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