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Comment by Amezarak | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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