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Comment by Damorian | Hacker News Reader

Just adding on to this. The government funded research labs and DoD contractors I've had offers from have been seriously sad, which makes me concerned on the quality of their missions, personally. Also it's frustrating because I'd much rather work in that space. I'm a senior dev making ~140k and was just offered 80k in a higher cost of living to manage a team of 10 developers with TS clearance working on spy satellite imaging. I don't consider myself a particularly strong developer, so who is taking these jobs?

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That's definitely a lowball offer.

Government research labs are on the GS scale (mostly). We're capped at $166,500/year in the DC/NY/SF area (and also, as it happens, the Denver area). $80k is what we offer fresh-outs. A senior flight software engineer managing ten developers with a TS should be near if not at the top end of the salary range.

Contractors doing that work should be similar or higher. I've tried to convert contractor senior flight software engineers to civil servants, and I couldn't... because our ~$150k/year offer was $30k/year too low.

Here are the GS pay scale tables. The job you've describes should be either a high GS-14 or GS-15. So, $133k/year and up.

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

If it was direct government employment did they clarify final salary? There's the 'salary' and then the locality increase [1] which is a base of around 15% and goes up to 28% for places like DC. 102k (1.28*80) is still not worth it especially without prior federal service as you have pension vesting etc to wait for before your benefits are worthwhile.

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

Fixed math.

That company might've just been lowballing you. I'm much closer to your current salary at my job and I'm not management or a particularly senior developer. If that was a job direct from the government, they might've put you on the GS scale, which sucks (although you don't need as much in retirement savings if you have a pension that pays 40% of your salary)

That's really weird... I made more than that as a jr engineer doing imaging satellite flight software. Most of us are over 100k in the Denver area.

Can you name companies?

I can! Denver: Northrop Grumman, Level 1 software engineer, 75k. Denver: Northrop Grumman, level 2 SWE, 82k. I talked to lots of colleagues at my level while there and they were all within 3k of those numbers at those levels.

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