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Comment by Wonnk13 | Hacker News Reader

> Living in Maryland, I've met several young people who put in a few years at the agency (including TAO) who then left for industry. Millenials don't care about a government pension, especially when you're in a windowless SCIF hacking Perl.

> The US Government as a whole has a massive talent retention problem. Only the mediocre will stay at NSA / CIA now and we'll probably see more of these leaks / hacks.

That's a verbatim comment I made on this site back in 2017 and it's still relevant. I don't mean to toot my own horn as much as to highlight the braindrain out of DoD / the alphabet soup agencies and into other sectors. It HAS and WILL CONTINUE to bite the United States in the ass.

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The US Government doesn't believe that inflation exists and also doesn't believe that a software engineer or similar professional should make more than 170k per year in the DC metro (GS-13) with 10+ years of experience.

This is only 15% higher pay than 10 years ago, meanwhile home prices are up 3x in the DC metro area.

Tbf, $170k is also the max that Amazon pays (more or less) in cash. I think the issue here is that the government is overweighting the value of pensions over stock, and underweighting quality of life concerns.

Are they overweighting pensions? Retirement after that salary would be pretty valuable. Not to mention the security.

I guess you can slice it two ways.

1) The expected financial value of a pension. Especially assuming that the millenial in question won’t be willing to tolerate poor quality of life long enough to make it lucrative.

2) Belief that the institution backing the pension will be willing and capable of meeting their obligations in N years.

Personally, I think I’d say that the pension would be close to the value of stock options, but I’d be unwilling to tolerate the crap long enough to actually earn a useful percentage of its theoretical value.

I only had one offer of working at a company with a pension program. The recruiter highlighted that the pension "existed" but was unlikely to pay out for a new employee.

I knew someone who was close to hitting their 20 year pension in the private sector, but the company instead decided they had a performance problem in year 19.

While the federal government has less incentive to play such games, betting on illiquid financial offerings that are contingent on a single entity liking you for N decades and still being around after Y decades is pretty suspect.

Yeah, there’s no way I’d value a private pension as worth more than $0. That requires orders of magnitude more trust in for profit corporations than I actually have.

With the government I’m confident that they’ll pay, I’m just not confident I personally would be willing to deal with it for 2-3 decades.

Who’s getting pensions in government? I thought they were all 401k now.

I don't know of any federal government 401k; everyone gets a "pension", it's called FERS (Federal Employees' Retirement System)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Employees_Retirement_S...

There’s a government program that is similar to a 401k, called the Thrift Savings Plan.

https://www.tsp.gov/

It doesn’t cover as many as you may expect.

A maxed out GS-13 (step 10) runs 130-140k depending on locality, which is new grad range for private sector tech companies. GS-15 hits the 170k threshold, but it’s rare to find technical, non-management roles at that level. (Source: The OPM pay tables for localities are publicly available, and I was a software engineer for a DoD agency for 10 years.)

170 was for the dc location, which carries a 30% CoL adjustment.

I'm still not sure where you're getting 170. The max base for GS-13 is step 10 at $103,309. Adding 30% is nowhere near 170. At the upper end of GS-13 in San Diego (29.77% locality), I was making low to mid 130s. Are you including recruitment/retention incentives?

USG's bigger problem is that they don't know how to manage software talent or software project ecosystems, than the actual pay.

As long as things continue the way they are you wouldn't be able to convince me to code for USG for any price once I retire in a few years. If anything USG has inspiring enough missions that they should be able to attract and retain talent at a discount, compared to optimizing ad click throughs for companies selling sugar water.

I like the all-caps yellling here, because it simulates someone talking in detail while the other person is not really willing to change no matter what you say.. so the volume increases .. it will ALSO BITE YOU when you treat intelligent people that way COMMANDER

Those SCIF buildings try their best to make it seem like a normal office experience with holiday events and food etc.

DoD jobs are ideal for developers who don’t want to learn anything new and just make money. I’d find a lot of guys close to retirement taking up those roles.

It takes someone who is admittedly done. Otherwise it feels no less life sucking than a retail job.

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