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Comment by yazaddaruvala | Hacker News Reader

I've heard that the salaries of government employees are capped. I'm very curious how this will play out.

The Air Force can easily afford to pay Silicon Valley salaries (sure the officers who are being taught to code can be paid less), but if the Air Force is artificially limited by red-tape to offer competitive salaries, wouldn't these software developers choose to leave as soon as they've learned?

The other issue is paying these officers competitive salaries, would have quite the ripple effect. Higher ranking officers would all need to get paid more, or software developers would need inflated ranks, but with some designation where rank did not determine command.

I have zero insight and am just speculating. If anyone has more insight I'd love to hear it.

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This is a bizarre thing that keeps popping up here. This assumption that as soon as somebody learns how to code, they pack up and move to the Bay Area. Since when was Silicon Valley the only place with competent software developers? We exist all over the planet, often getting paid very different amounts, and usually, yes, very much less than Bay Area developers.

In reality, the USAF here is competing against the cost of defence contractors. Which it turns out, is pretty easy because they've been charging megabucks for everything for two decades because their only competition has been other defence contractors. Thanks to politics, right or wrong, they've had no capacity to ramp-up on in-house development and submit their own bids to really compete on price.

I really hope we're entering into an age of reality where public organisations (military, government, healthcare in the civilised world, etc) —and more, the people funding them— realise that in-housing development work is so much cheaper than farming it out.

To be fair on them, one of the reasons it got so expensive was probably also because it all followed waterfall and the USAF would pile on every conceivable, often contradictory requirement, rather than start with an MVP and iterate.

Plus it would take huge amounts of salesman/consultant hours to get through the bidding process, plus each successful bid has to effectively pay for all the costs of other bids that failed for the consultants to be profitable.

Oh most definitely. The tender process is awful from start to finish, regardless of market. If nothing else, as you say, it funnels huge amounts of resource away from where it needs to go (the product, developers and engineers) and into the pockets of salesmen, managers and shareholders. It just doesn't make sense for public money.

But MVPs aren't always themselves a viable development target... Especially here in a military scenario where the finished product tends to be the MVP. Safe enough and hopefully effective.

For the Air Force, the MVP is often something that can do a lot of damage. Some things require expensive upfront design. One cannot just iterate through two week sprints until the crew survives.

however, that MVP - used in a test environment - can lead to much more useful feedback from real people on the ground in days or weeks, vs years to build then deploy then getting ignored because it doesn't do what the users need.

There's a balance to be found, and it sounds like some of these skunkworks approaches are starting to get more formalized.

Government pay scales don't apply to government contractors, though. It would definitely be possible to develop things at a lower cost than defense contractors do, but not with the artificial limits on salaries imposed by the law.

I've had several reads of this now, and don't understand which way you're arguing.

The current US Government pay scales are more than enough to match average developer salaries in much of the US. No, they're not going to get super-rich but they could get paid more than enough, help their country and have a stable job that doesn't rely on finding ways to monetise faddy bullshit ideas.

Honestly, I'd much rather work for the US Govt. than some snazzy SV company, regardless of pay.

> This assumption that as soon as somebody learns how to code, they pack up and move to the Bay Area... In reality, the USAF here is competing against the cost of defence contractors.

Exactly. The airmen that can leave, will leave to defense contractors, not silicon valley.

The armed forces training people to go into private versions is nothing new. The difference here —that you don't see in military engineering or mercenary work— is the USAF can control both supply of and demand for developers on its internal projects and undercut contractors.

And if they have transferable skills on exit, all the better for them.

Why couldn't they do the same with any other kind of military contracting?

The cost to get up and running. You're taking hundreds of millions in capital expenditure for an engineering R&D lab. Double that if you want to actually produce something.

Compared to a pile of consultants, laptops and whiteboards. Software is cheap to make.

One thing I was disturbed by going from the US Navy to working privately in software development in Seattle is how much of a secret pay is in the private sector.

You can pretty much look up how much money anyone in the military makes. Base pay is trivial to look up, and all the other allowances (housing, hazard, etc.) can be looked up.

https://www.dfas.mil/militarymembers/payentitlements/militar...

The same is true in the government, AFAIK.

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

AF vet, and frequently frustrated by this taboo. It's so contrary to the interests of everyone except the employer, but folks become visibly uncomfortable whenever talk of comp comes up.

Well, the American folks anyway. I work with a lot of Europeans, and they don't seem to share the norm.

Europeans are open with their salaries?

I don’t know about the rest of Europe, but here in Germany people have openly talked about their salary with me in several occasions. Granted, it wasn’t any coworkers, it was always a friend or someone I knew.

In Norway this is an open database which gets published annually and anyone can search in it to see what other people make.

It's not a digital wild-west open style though:

1. You have to authenticate using something which identifies you specifically as a citizen.

2. Another caveat is that people who gets looked up will be notified about that, with information about who it was who looked them up. (so it can't be used for direct covert spying)

That said, this system allows for a certain degree of transparency, and makes it easier for journalists, press, researchers etc to dig into issues such as social inequality.

I understand the motivation (even though I fundamentally disagree with it), but I find this rather inconsistent with issues such as 'the right to be forgotten' and other privacy initiatives put out by the EU.

I can see this one being taken to the EU Court of Justice by someone.

Norway is not in the EU.

But they adopt GDPR, nonetheless.

Technically correct is the best kind of correct ;)

Pragmatically correct is better than technically correct :)

Norway will be subject to EFTA court, which is almost de-facto Court of Justice.

Granted, how someone might sue and escalate an case is a different thing altogether.

In Finland you can go and check how much somebody else earned and paid taxes. You can’t do this online, must visit the tax office in person.

This is balancing between privacy and transparency of tax system.

I don’t think the EU privacy legislation applies to this kind of public functions.

Here in Finland people are somewhat secretive (especially the older generation) about their pay but tax records are public information so you can calculate it from there if you really want to know how much someone is making. Though the system is kept offline on purpose and thus you have to go to the tax office and browse the paper records and take notes.

Keeping the pay secret is kinda puzzling on traditional fields as the salary structure is very rigid on those due to strong unions. Doesn’t apply much in IT though where it is just minimum wage set by unions and you negotiate for (much) more.

European bank. Salaries were confidential and discretionary. Then they adopted a salary grid based on title and business area mostly to reduce the bonus component (a disproportionate amount of the comp was in bonus). Employees were happy, first because it meant a large base pay uplift for pretty much everyone, and because transparency means base pay ceases to be something to discuss about, everyone feels like he is being treated fairly.

Then I believe it triggered all sorts of problems. Front office base salaries is higher than middle office, no one will take a pay cut so it prevented front to middle office moves which is is an undesirable effect. It is also expensive, they liked having the ability to hire more cheaply. They dropped the grid after a couple of years.

But all the time the numbers were confidential (but when there is a grid it’s a matter of minutes before an accurate table circulates).

Some. Brits aren't.

A strong case against being open with the numbers is it that it could limit your ability to negotiate a higher rate with a potential new employer.

In the air force / navy / army etc there is only one employee to choose from so this never comes up.

That's a weak case - friends/colleagues will most probably have 0 effect on negotiations on some new job. As written this hurts everybody except the employer, but if some folks across the pond are dumb enough to play this game, they deserve the effects

I've had multiple employers tell me that it's a firing offense to discuss pay with my coworkers. Most people don't know if that's legal or not however and just remember that HR or the employee handbook said not to discuss what they get paid or they'll be fired.

Guaranteed pension and benefits for life after 20 years with substantial subsidies are worth a lot.

Given the choice between a typical developer's life (outside a tech hub or hot spot most programmers aren't compensated much different from any other low social status white collar worker), moral issues aside, I'd take the military job any day.

A person can join the military at 18, retire at 38 and be in a prime position to capitalize on his network as a consultant or "small business owner" contractor, or else just sit back and enjoy his generous pension and health and other benefits. That's a big deal.

Unless you have to work in a SCIF

Well then, take the military job if it is that simple. There's probably nothing stopping you joining.

Military retirement after 20 years isn't all that generous, it's about $40K. It's nice but you're still probably getting a job if you've got a family.

$40k household income for life, and that's still above median for many parts of the US (though about 2/3rds median for the US as a whole). Are there other job opportunities, outside some police departments, that offer similar compensation and let you retire at age 40?

Yes it's great, it's equivalent to over a million dollars with a safe withdrawal rate. I'm just saying you're probably still going to be working, not actually retired.

$40K is the figure I got from a Navy commander who's been in over 20 years. He and his family are used to approximately triple that level of income. He doesn't feel he can retire.

Lower-ranking people will be used to living on less, but will also have proportionally lower retirement pay. If you're a lower-ranking person and can get significantly higher pay in the private sector, it's not necessarily a dumb choice to go for it.

You can work for the military as a civilian, too.

Usajobs.gov

Good luck.

The article talks about enlisted doing the coding, not officers.

They cannot leave until their contract is up. They literally cannot leave as soon as they've learned if they still have years in their contract. Additionally, the military dangles a lot of incentives to re-enlist, and people who have spent a lot of time in the military sometimes have trouble adjusting to life outside it. But yes, people will leave. There's always more. You would be surprised how many bright people choose to join the military even though it doesn't make economic sense for them.

I'm on mobile and copy paste isn't working, but enlisted pay grades are publicly available. They are much lower than SV salaries and they are set in stone.

You get specialist pay don’t you? An enlisted person who pilots a helicopter or works in a special operations unit gets paid more. You could just have specialist pay for developers.

But anyway this whole ‘you need to pay them the same as civilians’ is nonsense anyway - soldiers are already paid a fraction of what private security get now and it doesn’t seem to be a major problem causing people to leave to do that equivalent job.

People join and stay in the military for great reasons other than pay, such as comradeship, family history, sense of duty, the challenge - appeal to those.

Sort of, but not really. Being in SOCOM (special operations command) units, you'll often get extra training in the form of Additional Skill Modifiers. For instance I was a UAV Pilot trained to fly the Hunter TUAV who got put in a Shadow 200 TUAV unit. I went back to training for a few months and came back with a W2 ASI denoting Shadow 200 qualification. That made my job designation change from 96U to 96UW2, which depending on the role, can mean extra pay.

Generally socom operators get paid more due to hazard pay, which is a graded scale based on how likely you are to get maimed for life or killed. I can't speak for anyone but the US Army, but they only allow commissioned officers and warrant officers to fly helicopters. As a UAV pilot, I was in a group of the only enlisted pilots in the entire US Army. We were on the same flight status with the same awful yearly physicals of the helicopter / plane pilots.

> awful yearly physicals

I’m too curious not to ask what those encompassed.

The worst part of a Class 1 Flight Physical is a colon test, which involves a glove and some unpleasant moments. Funny story, we had a soldier who was a former gym rat and horribly homophobic. We were all up for this unpleasant experience and his best friend schemed with the flight surgeon who performs this physical. This could have likely gotten everyone in a lot of trouble but somehow everyone laughed it off.

Anyways, his best friend hid inside the room behind the gurney you bend over. When the surgeon did the colon check, his buddy came from behind the gurney. As the surgeon put his left hand on the soldier's left shoulder, his buddy put his right hand on his right soldier. This was right before the surgeon put his finger in/out for the colon check. Knowing what was going to happen we heard this big muscle bound guy scream like a 12 year old child and erupt in anger. Somehow by the grace of god he didn't assault the full bird colonel flight surgeon. Once he saw his buddy he realized he'd been had and got really mad but calmed down quickly. The rest of the 2 years he was in our unit that poor guy never lived it down. We were outside the room pretty much all on the ground crying laughing so hard.

You pay zero for housing, zero for medical for an entire family...not even a co-pay. After 20 years you get a pension for life. And for many, they are doing it for reasons other than to put more money into a CxO's pocket.

Oh, no doubt there are benefits. If I come across a little sour right now, a close family member recently graduated and signed up for the military without really talking to anyone, because the recruiter told him being a peon in the Army would guarantee him a job at Google.

In my day job, I work with enlisted (not Air Force) and a bunch of ex-military, so I'm pretty familiar with the situation. I have actually been wondering if military retirement drives down wages, because a bunch of guys take pretty low salaries that are only okay because of their retirement check. Great deal for them, and definitely well-earned - it's no cakewalk to earn military retirement, harder than anything almost anyone in the private sector has to do - but I wonder how it works out across the labor market.

I do feel like, outside of the officer corps (who for some reason seem to hold onto it more often), the sense of noble purpose often gets crushed out by the inanity and bureaucracy so many of them have to put up with. IME that's usually why they don't re-enlist.

An unsurprising number of Navy nukes re-enlist from the Persian Gulf. That $60k+ re-enlistment bonus is tax-free if you sign in a war zone.

Also, for people who joined the military out of high school, the private sector is frightening.

I work in the public sector for a lot less than the offers I get from the private sector. I haven’t once considered leaving.

Well I have, but that’s when the right decision drowns in politics and red tape, not because of money.

A lot of people would consider me an idiot, but I get a sense of duty and purpose from public service that is worth more to me than money.

Of course it helps that my pay check isn’t exactly bad. So it’s also a choice between good money and better money, I’m not sure how I’d feel if it was a choice between shitty money and great money.

The housing allowance for an O-1 in San Francisco with no dependents is over $4000. That’s a good deal better than the rent spending most Bay Area bigco engineers feel comfortable with. I’d argue the military is quite competitive with the tech industry when location is taken into account.

To be 100% honest, if they offered $80k and military level benefits I bet you a ton of people would take that offer as long as it was guaranteed in writing they would be in the US writing code. Most developers are mediocre and paid in the $80-120k range depending on cost of living.

Honest question, how can one look at themselves unbiasedly and determine if they're a mediocre programmer?

If you don't:

A) Massively outperform compared to your peers.

B) Massively underperform compared to your peers.

You are almost certainly a mediocre programmer.

If you are in the B category, it is usually pretty obvious to _everyone_ and you've probably seen your performance reviews at _multiple_ employers be below average.

If you massively outperform your peers, you probably find your boss at _multiple_ employers going out of his way to retain you. (i.e. Massive salary bumps, bonuses, promotions, etc.)

If neither of these are true, you are almost certainly mediocre.

For instance, I made a really stupid decision for personal reasons to leave a job where I massively outperformed my peers (my boss was really bad at hiring people) and received a 30k raise a couple years before I left. But, realistically, that was the _only_ job I had that kind of outsized performance and it was more to do with my boss's skill at hiring people than my skill as a developer.

At my jobs before and after that one, I've fell safely in the mediocre range. Never been fired, never had a PIP, and generally got "Meets expectations-ish" performance reviews.

At my current job, I underperform my peers but that is largely because I'm their first hire in ~3 years. I have alot of catching up to do as a result, and I've been there ~90 days.

Mathematically the vast majority of programmers in the world are mediocre by your definitions there. Was that the intent of your post?

Actually, the definition is very localized (you could be mediocre at a big co or a rockstar at a tiny backwater company) and relative. I don't think it's a stretch to assume that the majority of programmers are mediocre, the distribution curve of talent/ability not withstanding.

Yes. He was asking how to be unbiased about self evaluation. You have to paint really broad strokes to do that.

Is it perfect? No.

Do I think the 70% of programmers that probably fit this definition are mediocre? Yeah.

Keep in mind I am calling myself a mediocre programmer.

The allure would be job/salary security for 10-20 years (albeit at a lower salary than SV), and retirement in 20 years with full pension and medical benefits for life.

The cap should be based on the private sector equivalent of a job. Having an absolute cap is counter productive.

I don't think the public is quite ready for just how much developers get paid. I doubt many would believe it.

We can't even afford fresh college graduates. But we can afford Oracle.

I'm not even sure all _developers_ are quite ready for how much they (can) get paid - if they choose the most lucrative jobs.

https://www.recode.net/2018/4/30/17301264/how-much-twitter-g...

Facebook's _median_ salary is apparently over $240k...

When I graduated college around 1990 I recall that was what financial firms in NYC were offering for real time/hft programmers.

And IBM's is around $50k.

Everyone hears about these $200k salaries, but most developers aren't making that. The median for the USA is around $100k, it's still a high salary for a job that requires only an undergraduate degree and no certifications, but it's not obscenely high like $240k.

Would be surprised if the average IBM developer salary is around 50k. My guess would be higher, proabably around 90k - 100k for US employees.

And the $50k IBMer in upstate New York lives about as well as the $240k Facebook employee in Menlo Park.

That's a sad statement about the cost of living near SF.

You can't make this shit up: the median home price in Ithica is $242k [0]. In Menlo Park, it's $2.42m [1]. A nice, even 10x.

[0] https://www.zillow.com/ithaca-ny/home-values/

[1] https://www.zillow.com/menlo-park-ca/home-values/

Wow, that makes my 160K 1500 sq ft house in the upper midwest (with easy access to 6-figure jobs) seem absolutely cheap by comparison. Only problem is property taxes are high (4K - 8K in this area). Oh, and typical corrupt Illinois politics.

Illinois is bankrupt, get out now.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/letters/ct-illino...

So is California.

He doesn't save as much, though. The FBer could save the IBMer's gross income every year.

What good does that do him? One typically saves for:

- Income replacement in an emergency

- Income replacement in retirement

- A down payment on a home

- A home improvement project

- A child’s college expenses less need-based financial aid

All of these are inflated by living in a high-cost high-wage situation such that the larger balance has you merely keeping up in terms of the capabilities your savings buys you.

The extra savings only make a difference if you move somewhere cheap before you draw them down. That’s a great argument for doing a few years in SV in your twenties but less relevant for senior talent.

Having a higher income and higher gross savings allows you to invest more in:

1. Rental properties

2. Securities - stocks, bonds, derivatives, REITs etc.

3. Investment opportunities not available to others. The $250k-earning employee (sorry, yeah I bumped it up $10k to make this argument) is an accredited investor.

All of the above have compounding benefits over the years. Investing $25k today is better than investing $5k, even if both are 10% of gross income of our example employees. $25k savings allows you to put a down payment on a $125k rental property in a low-cost area every year.

> All of these are inflated by living in a high-cost high-wage situation

The "high-cost" only applies if you insist on living the exact same lifestyle as you would in a low-cost area: large house, boat, large vehicles etc. It's just common sense to limit your spending on overpriced things. In the Bay Area, housing is overpriced.

It’s just common sense to compare like with like. The appropriate comparison to a shared apartment with a long public transit commute in SF is the same lifestyle in another city. Which may not provide as much investment income, but is so incredibly cheap you could achieve FIRE or be an artist or whatever.

> It’s just common sense to compare like with like.

I guess we should agree to disagree :-). I think you should adapt your lifestyle to the area you live in. Here's an analogy: let's say I love fresh sushi. If I live near the coast and a healthy fishing industry, it'll be good and cheap. If I live in Las Vegas, it can still be had but it'll cost me. Do I keep up my expensive sushi habit in Vegas and complain about the cost-of-living? Or do I just eat less of it and accept that there are benefits to being in Vegas that outweigh the more expensive sushi?

Besides that, no $250k-earning employee is living in a shared apartment with a commute to make ends meet in SF. If they live that way, it's to maximize their savings.

Vegas provides plenty of dining and entertainment options to make up for lost sushi. It’s not worse, just different. The anolgoue in SF lifestyles would be a high-rise condo instead of a house, proximity to transit instead of a nice car, etc. The frugal options in SF are not just different, but straight-up worse.

When a majority of that $250k is in Monopoly money (i.e. most of the time), they absolutely are.

My family of four live on that FBer's income in a nice single family rental and still save over half that IBMer's gross income. I can mortgage a multi-family dwelling in the Midwest every 4-5 years or so, invest in stocks/index funds, and generally do a lot more than the IBMer will ever be able to.

This keeps being brought up but I'm sorry, no. The IBMer maybe has a larger house that they own rather than rent. In basically every other respect, the $240k-earning employee comes out ahead. The latter earns more, can save _way_ more, lives in an area with better weather, and can afford to retire far earlier.

Exactly, they can put much more into a 401k and then move somewhere cheap to retire and have a much higher standard of living than the $50k guy would.

It doesn't require an undergrad. I was in the US Army as a UAV pilot for 4 years, got out and got a job as a Unix Admin. I'm now a successful software engineer. Also, $240k is not obscenely high. Top end google engineers make more and that's about normal starting comp for a very talented engineer in certain segments of finance.

In one sense it's clearly not obscenely high - it's the median salary after all - _half_ of Facebook's employees make more than that.

But from the perspective of someone struggling to make minimum wage, I'll be it 100% is obscene...

It doesn't strictly require an undergrad, no, but it helps to have one.

And $240k is very high for a non-management job, and compared to the median income and the minimum wage for the USA is obscenely high. Median household income is ~$60k, and median personal income is ~$30k. Minimum wage in the USA is around $15k.

In my books, 8 times the median income, or 16 times the minimum wage, is obscenely high. That kind of income disparity is not good for society.

My point was that it is not high in the world of software development. There are ranges much higher than the GP's stated $240k. I work in an industry where that is the case (finance).

Not to mention the median for a developer in the Bay Area is around $125-130k [1] [2]. Those $200k+ salaries often quoted here on HN are top outlier employees at top outlier companies, not rank-and-file mid-level engineers at average no-name companies.

1: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/san-francisco-software-en...

2: https://www1.salary.com/CA/San-Francisco/Software-Engineer-I...

If that’s salary TC is significantly higher. That’s what a new grad can make there in their first year in TC.

if they choose the most lucrative jobs.

I don't think that's how it works.

You can only choose to apply.

Many folks who join the military did so out of a sense of purpose. Not all, to be sure, but many.

The second thing my acquaintances who enlisted cited was retiring from military with half pay after 20 years of service and access to veterans’ benefits which in hindsight looks pretty nice for most non professional career options otherwise.

It's not a bad deal, especially when you consider you could live with minimal expenses while in the military. Saving a lot is not hard even on modest military pay when your living costs are all covered. I can't think of any other opportunities where you could start working at 18, save a lot, retire at 38, and get a pension.

Living costs, food costs, most of your clothing, transportation, etc. You literally just pay for fun and off duty extra activities / extra food.

Working for the military can pay very very well -- if you're a consultant or work for a third party.

The best rank structure for this would be the warrant officer.

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