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Comment by jki275 | Hacker News Reader

Defense contractors don't pay FAANG salaries. They can't, in general, because they're bound by labor categories and salaries set by the government, and the government isn't paying software engineers above what their GS software engineers get (max of about 128k in the DC area in general, if you're curious). There are a few jobs that can go a bit higher, but even they are capped around 150k as I recall.

I don't know what LM is going to pay for the skillset they ask for in that job announcement, I would bet that it's 150k or less, but the person w/ the skillset to answer it may be able to command a bit more as there aren't very many of us left.

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Defense contractors set their own payscales but also compete on price. I know software engineers right now earning north of 150K. Also, overtime is paid and billed in defense. Thus, if you do work overtime, your defense contractor wants to bill it and you get paid for it. My first year out of school I made nearly 100K on a 67K salary because of billed overtime. This was in 2003.

There is also the fact that finding ways to get more ads in front of people is not inherently motivating for some engineers when compared to building space systems or solving other interesting problems like deconflicting telescope laser alignment with satellite orbits.

> Also, overtime is paid and billed in defense. Thus, if you do work overtime, your defense contractor wants to bill it and you get paid for it. My first year out of school I made nearly 100K on a 67K salary because of billed overtime. This was in 2003.

When I worked at Raytheon (2002 - 2012) overtime had to be pre-approved (not every contract was eligible) and you had to work at least 8 extra hours in a week to get paid overtime (the 8 hours were paid if you hit the threshold; 7.5 and you didn't get anything extra). There was also an expectation, at least on my program, that you would be working overtime if it was authorized.

Companies have different rules and expectations. I was paid for every overtime hour I worked. Early in my career I was still learning and it was worthwhile, both financially and technically, right out of school. It can simply be a 9 to 5 job which is different than the commercial world I work in now where I don't get paid for extra time.

It should be noted:

Amazon is a defense contractor. Google is/was a defense contractor. Apple is a defense contractor. Microsoft is a defense contractor. SpaceX is a defense contractor. IBM is a defense contractor. ...

There’s a huge difference between having your primary business being services projects basically as an extension of the government and your revenue center being unrelated private sector funding. Your corporate structure and business incentives are completely different as a result. I know Lockheed spend many millions of dollars trying to build a DoD-centric IaaS as AWS was being built and it didn’t really matter in the end because so many projects are going to GovCloud. Sure, lots of TS projects are not ever going to be in AWS but boy are people trying. VMware was bought before to try to contain the sheer sprawl of configuration in the Pentagon (your cost is almost entirely around organizational complexities rather than compute / storage cost due to being so heavy on labor costs in most enterprise orgs so the math is fuzzier but usually results in layoffs / workforce optimizations if successful).

Not when talking about payscales. To say defense contractors don't pay FAANG salaries when FAANG companies are in the defense business is a failure of awareness. I was simply pointing this out.

None of the FAANG companies derive any significant percentage of their revenue from defense. None of them are defense contractors in the real sense of the concept. They're corporations who have a defense business on the side.

You either are or you aren't a defense contractor. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have been competing for a $10 billion dollar defense contract. Google just dropped out. Aside, Boeing is considered a defense contractor by many, but only 25% of its revenue is from defense. Where do you draw the line?

You’re don’t get to make the determination that it’s a binary thing.

You may believe that, the market doesn’t.

Boeing isn’t a defense contractor by most people’s metrics. None of the faangs are by almost any standard.

What constitutes a defense contractor to you and I are obviously different, but I don't hold that it is a matter of opinion or interpretation. If you've been awarded a defense contract, you are a defense contractor.

Your definition is so broad as to be useless.

>Defense contractors don't pay FAANG salaries.

This is also a self asnwering question of sorts. If, let's say Lockheed would pay 'FAANG' salaries then it would be 'FLAANG' since the abbreviation is meant to encompass the top paying salaries.

The abbreviation is meant to encompass the top-performing tech stocks. It was appropriated for pay because they are also amongst the top-paying.

Well that's true. LM is known to pay lower than most of the defense industry as well though.

Wow, P&W also didn't pay very well, wonder how low LM is.

Not true. Billable labor rates are negotiated with the customer. The actual pay that an employee gets is based on market rates and the perceived value of the employee. The one may influence the other.

Sure it is. The government is the customer, and the rates they will pay absolutely drive the rate the contracting company is willing to pay their engineers.

Defense contracting is a very different vehicle from any other. Source -- I am a DOD contract software engineer.

It is extremely difficult to negotiate labor rates above a certain threshold; the government contracting officers can and will just refuse if they think you are demanding above-market rates. Sometimes you can justify some overage, but it's not easy, and it's not negotiated on a per-project basis.

You are 1000% wrong. Pay scales are "owned" by the DMCA. https://www.dcma.mil/DCMA-Pricing-Support/

A PhD with 20 years of experience = this pay band

You can pay your people whatever you want, but the gov will only pay your people what the DCMA says they are worth. If you pay higher, it comes out of profit (which is also metered by the DCMA) or some other source.

Source: A own a R&D engineering company that works for the DoD and IC.

I can pay a EE PhD $400k/year but the DoD will "only" pay me back around $175k for this person's time. I have to make up the difference.

Hence, for defense contractors, we "only" pay what the DCMA will let us charge.

In order, what matters are: tickets, experience, degrees, certs

Tickets?

Accesses to special programs.

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