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Most of the top engineers would probably be contractors. The government pay scale pretty much forces you to become a manager if you want to move past GS-12. Including locality pay, GS-12 salary tops at a little over 100k a year[1].

I just looked at their website, and they don't mention anything about NSA, Amazon, or Google on the landing page, so I think it's just techcrunch adding it in as clickbait, even though the founders aren't going out of their way to advertise it.

https://www.federalpay.org/gs/2020

A single example, but Apache Accumulo came from NSA.

The majority of the best engineers don't even work for a FAANG. FAANGs don't offer remote for the most part. How many of the best decided they wanted more. The world is a big place.

NSA engineers on average would be scary good.

I think we're pretty good. Feel free to review the code and contribute as we release our open source packages over time. We all get better with time and collaboration.