Until the GS salary cap is something that doesn't look like a bad offer from a decade ago, it'll be extremely hard to swallow the pay cut of working for the feds.
I get the "public service" discount, but it'd have to be something like 30%, not 70%.
I get the "public service" discount, but it'd have to be something like 30%, not 70%.
I left Federal Service in February 22 because the private sector doubled my salary.
My work is much easier in the private sector and I work a lot less. I’m getting paid double. I have a team now I can rely on. I didn’t have this in Gov.
Many Gov IT positions will go unfilled for months. I had one organization offer me 25k, fully remote to work there and I declined. Why? The amount of work is insane for a individual developer.
This idea that we shouldn’t pay people because they work in Government is insane. Peoples mistrust of government, but really it’s misguided.
Per year? That is $12.50 / hr
At the same time, "if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys". If red states don't pay competitive salaries in competitive fields, their citizens shouldn't be surprised if they end up scraping the bottom of the barrel to source their public servants. The service they experience while interfacing with this dreck then further reduces their faith in government, and the whole thing becomes a vicious circle.
Again, this is a hard problem to solve. I don't know what the answer is, but it seems to be rooted in a mis-alignment of incentives in government spending.
If the Digital Corps can't get it done with people who can only make 25k a year, I guess we need some free market consultants for 200$/hour!
Other examples include any building you see named Atre (https://www.atre.co.jp/) which are shopping centers above JR train stations owned by JR.
I have no idea what the equivalent would be for government IT, nor am I saying all government services should be privatized. I do agree though that it's about incentives.
Even in Japan people complain about government construction projects where the incentive is always to spend all the money so near the end of the fiscal period a bunch of random unneeded projects start to make sure all the money is spent for fear that budgets might be lower the next year if they don't use all the money.
I don't agree with the policies of most of the local elected officials where I live now, but that is more about bigger picture items. As far as day-to-day operation of the government, I can't say with a straight face that my old, deep blue, west coast community did things anywhere near as well as my new red home state.
Claim that government doesn’t work → defund it in the name of it being bad → government works even worse → repeat.
The strategy that follows is coherent and consistent - there won't be an attempt to hire great employees, the government won't have great employees and will be run appropriately for those realities.
The 'contradiction' only appears if you assume that secretly people believe that they can find good politicians and public servants even if their political opponents can't.
GS-7, and max, maybe, but would be hard, GS-11. Experiences of selectees pushing back on that salary due to how low it was vs. the market ($30-$50k) with requirements to live on DC or similar were met with almost disbelief and offense from that org when candidates pushed back, because the program was for "new grads."
Knew someone who turned it down and took a private sector interview/offer going on concurrently for $145k remote, despite providing offer/pay stubs to try at help the GS/PfP teams meet the on-paper salary even remotely close.
I’m guessing that this was actually a 7/9/11 position, with automatic annual promotions (apprentice, journeyman, master, iirc).
Still… that’s really low for someone who can get a decent tech job in the private sector.
Note that an ambitious person with the right skill set could probably be GS-15 in the DC area in their late 20s, and they would hit the GS salary cap soon thereafter. I’m not necessarily saying that’s a good thing (total comp still low), but I just wanted to throw that out there.
I meant that a motivated and skilled person who enters federal service at the age of 22 in a 7/9/11 position could probably be GS 15 in their late 20s in tech in the DC area.
You’re absolutely right that getting directly hired into a higher level is much tougher, although not impossible if you are connected.
Are they in DC?
14s and 15s are relatively easy to access in a few fields in the DC area at a young age (tech and contracting are the two fields I know people who have fast-tracked in the GS system in DC). Anywhere else… not so much. Those are usually mid-career or late-career positions outside of DC area.
GS 7 and walk through the steps as normal for that role, jump to a higher GS via a job change/similar.
If that’s the case, then they should approximately never get applicants who could also get private sector jobs.
I wonder if they are targeting vets who got a small amount of programming under their belt while serving… or something like that.
Not even being a 7/9/11 for an in demand technical area (esp. if in the DC area) strikes me as extremely short-sighted.
Each person hired by the government is a massive, open-ended liability that can most likely never be fired, never be demoted or take a pay cut, regardless of changes in circumstances for the employer. I think the USDS was a huge step in the right direction by focusing on having "tours of duty" where the term of employment is fixed. I think the government should adopt that much more broadly if it wants to be competitive with the private sector.
You really have to be in it for the service aspect.
It is rewarding work, especially if you’re self-motivated as there’s always new interesting work. But the salaries paid at tech companies are so nuts it’s difficult to ignore.
The place I used to work at has attrited about 30% of staff between burnout from 18 hour COVID work to greener pastures. One guy I worked with went from $125k to $500k. Assuming the tech economy doesn’t implode, even the awesome pension and benefits just aren’t worth that much.
That seems strange in the context of defense since the government has a high degree of latitude in revoking or refusing security clearances. There are certain appeal mechanisms, but there is still a lot of room for the government to keep the actual evidence secret and a lot of deference to the governments opinion.
At any rate, it could take as a little as talking to someone from the wrong country, or a crime much less serious than a felony to lose one and therefore one's job.
Along with a compensation boost relative to the GS payscale, it provides more flexibility in hiring and firing civilian employees.
[0] https://public.cyber.mil/cw/dod-cyber-excepted-service-ces/
I don't think this is unique to government, these are commonly a characteristic of any organization of large size. The larger the organization the higher likely hood it has these problems. It also isn't a matter of can't but unwillingness to do so by those with the reasonability to because it is extra work or would require an uncomfortable social interaction.
In addition to this, I would also reform certain benefits that government employee's get such as long service leave after 10 years. I'd make it available at a pro-rata rate from 2.5 years onwards so people can either bank it up or start using it earlier.
I feel like these two things alone would create a lot of flexibility for government agencies and departments that would allow them to take people on for serious work, over serious timelines but not be burdened by the threat of a bad hire that will stick around forever.
Never worked in Federal (Federal Contracting... don't get me started) - but I did work for years in a regional water service. We had about a 50% haircut, probably worse and with worse work-life setup in any regard.
Easily 1/3 of our department were do-nothing folks skating to retirement. I'm not opposed to paying well, but for any policy proposal to do so we'd really have to find a way of cleaning house, finding and retaining good talent, and working to rid the place of folks not only "phoning it in" but truly abusing their employer.
This actually goes a long way in my mind of explaining why the US government does so much contracting of people for work as well. It's probably not possible in the current legal framework to pay high quality tech workers a fair compensation for the market, but they could hire a firm as contractors for a project and that firm could pay fair compensation. I just wish more firms were honest rather than milking the government.
I only worked with one computer scientist in an ST role during my two years at USDS. He was an ACM Fellow and had a PhD from MIT, so it's not something anyone should expect to get just because they had "senior" in their title at a FAANG.
Contractors don't have the same statutory caps on how much an individual role can pay, but salaries are part of contract bids, and a bid can be rejected if an individual salary is too high.
You won't be getting one of those unless you're exceptionally well-known enough that an average practitioner in your field would perk up their ears when someone mentions your name as a potential hire.
And really, for the tier of people that would be getting those exceptions, that's still not a great rate of pay and they'd still be taking huge paycuts to work for the government. Like ok, we can get $300k a year for Linus but... he can walk into fifty companies and drop off a resume, cold, asking for triple that and get offers before he's back to his desk.
Generally speaking, they aren't.
I remember commenting (years ago) on here on an article about the government paying a million dollars for what amounted to basically a Wordpress installation that anyone here could do in ~half an hour.
Maybe a million dollars sounds like a lot, but to those who've actually _worked_ as a government contractor, it seems fairly reasonable.
Consider:
* You need to have past relevant qualifications for other government agencies, so the only people who can install blogs for the government are those who have installed blogs for the government. If nobody has ever installed a blog for the government, they'll leverage the closest relevant experience they can.
* You need to have a contracts attorney on staff for the duration of the contract, and since you likely don't want to fire them every few weeks, that's a year's commitment at (conservatively) $200k
* You need to have a physical address -- weirdly, the government isn't keen on home addresses and/or 100% distributed teams
* You'll need to hire a software architect (maybe 2) to justify the changes needed to __competitors who also likely placed bids on your contract and didn't win but who also have existing contracts managing the database, network, etc__
* Those competitors want you to fail so that the contract will get rebid so that they can try again, now armed with the information you presented them
* Nobody in the government wants your project to succeed, and will actively try to get it to fail quietly
* If it ever seems as though your project might achieve success, every stakeholder will want to jump on board your ship -- not in an effort to sink it, but so they can make their mark on the project and have their names associated with a potential success
* It takes decision-by-committee to get even the smallest thing done, and a Wordpress blog is comprised of mostly small things. The smaller the thing, the bigger the committee. (I once had to bill the government 24 man hours at a median rate of $100 an hour because the CTO of the agency pulled 4 of us in a meeting for 6 hours to "discuss" which header background we preferred -- one was a winter shot that allowed visibility of the building, the other was a summer shot where trees obscured it... the winter shot felt dead and colorless, but the summer shot obscured their fancy new $130 million building)
This is also why we need strong technologists in government to ensure the contracts are written correctly from the start.
For a more funny example of your point, I like The Pentagon Wars' Bradley tank evolution
I could mortar the cognitive dissonance together and build a wall.
The superpowers of the world have gone through several successive 'generations' of military technology without really having a war in which to use them. (Just skirmishes with pre-industrial desert and jungle people, and the occasional mismatched murky proxy war with export-grade technology.) These mega-elaborate aircraft carriers and fighter jets and tanks are like radar-enabled cavalry, and will be taken out with drones and handheld rockets, and whichever modern-day Kroll is clever enough to strategise will make an absolute, uh, killing.
> If one $50k drone can consistently take out millions of dollars of equipment, it doesn't matter how expensive or numerous that equipment was, or how good it would be at fighting some hypothesised similar adversary.
Because this isn't true anymore. It is really a $1k drone being able to take out millions of dollars of equipment with a 70+% success rate. That's a real game changer.
We don't need AGI to for ML to be dangerous. We just need people to use existing algorithms dangerously and/or recklessly.
I don't like the idea of my tax money getting wasted by Lockheed or Accenture on a failed project with no recourse, any more than anyone else, but I'm not convinced that micromanaging the bidding and execution actually resolves that. At a certain point you're chasing away the talent and selecting for the players that are willing to play your games rather than the best ones to do the job.
The way I always viewed it was that the USG just was willing to pay a large amount of money to sit in meetings and talk to contract officers, and if that's what they want to spend their money on, fine, we'll provide that service. Which is exactly why everything is expensive and nothing gets done.
It's the contracting version of "nothing is getting done, let's add a daily meeting to make sure that productivity remains high". At a certain point you'll chase away the 20% who are getting the work done, but you'll always have the 1xers and 0.1xers who are content to sit in meetings and take home a check every 2 weeks. If you keep doing it - that's what you'll be selecting for, and you'll end up with the Dead Sea effect but with contractors instead of employees. Which is where we are today, it's a toxic environment and the only thing that can survive are organisms that are specially adapted for it.
I can understand having the sentiment:
> Nobody in the government wants your project to succeed, and will actively try to get it to fail quietly
But I actually think Hanlon's razor applies. I think individuals do want your project to succeed but there are often systemic issues that make it seem otherwise. These systemic issues are not easily affected by individuals.
They tried to hire the position directly, but couldn’t fill the position w/a qualified candidate at their salary bands.
So they sent it out as a ‘service’ and approved a contract for fulfillment that was more than triple the salary band, to pay for my salary and the overhead the private company is incurring to staff the position.
If they’d been willing to break the ‘band’ and compete w/the private market directly they could of spent double instead of triple, but then they’d have to figure out how to deal w/the union and non-union staff since the salaries are public record…
I recently got offered a GS-11 (with promotion to GS-12 after a year) position and it's just not worth it. This wasn't for tech either; this was for a rather odd skill set.
Well this sounds like a story.
Odd, but not that exciting. :)
Since that skill is odd but required by every single contractor that does classified work there's a whole lot of opportunity out there I wasn't aware of until recently. The lack of quality people doing it in the GS ranks now makes a whole lot more sense to me. Prior to me understanding that it was just an annoyance.
It looks like it may be a little above L3 salary today (moving in the right direction!), but still far below L3 TC, and a Google L3 job is not even remotely comparable to a GS-15 job.
IMO if the government had a separate band of GS pay for highly competitive job markets which paid 50-100k more, they would be a lot more successful.
Also, DC Metro is an extremely high CoL area (not SF levels but probably around Seattle levels). Normal GS-15 pay is $112k-146k and you'd trend towards the bottom of that in most areas.
So, $112k average at the peak of your career, with a required Ph.D. More realistically as a new hire you might be GS-12 (which only takes a master's) which is $68k-89k, so you make $68k in most areas. That's certainly not great as far as competitiveness with tech salaries, that's pretty close to the bottom of the market these days for a new hire working entirely remote, not even highly-desirable talent.
My take-home in the first full year at work was $147,500. The second was $178,500.
Feel free to adjust for inflation.
There’s lots of important government projects. I actually think the rate of BS/meaningful may be higher in government than private given the number of cow clicker/BS-type projects.
The IRS has to process tax returns and get out refunds.
The USGS has to be able to detect earthquakes.
The NWS has to be able to deliver critical weather data.
I could go on and on.
My experience was very different than yours has been. My impression was that it was largely bureaucrats looking to further their own position in the massive bureaucracy. It was virtually impossible to do any "meaningful work". The handful of people passionate about doing good for the world were constantly blocked by other bureaucrats who were only interested in maintaining (or expanding) their tiny island of power they had accrued.
I vividly recall needing data from another agency to help solve a problem we were working on and being told that it would be virtually impossible to get any cooperation because it would make them look bad if we succeeded using their data. My entire time as a Federal employee was filled with similar such moments. All of the work I did, which ended up proving some seriously privacy vulnerabilities in another project, was dismissed because people didn't want to hear it. The experience forever changed my view on government.
The plus side is I did meet some fantastic, although terminally frustrated, people while I was there. It is a great place to meet people who have similar ambitions.
For someone looking for meaningful work I would advise staying far away from the federal government.
But it's not a fair wage - that's the point.
Gov spending on salary and perks is really hard for congress to swallow (except for their own salaries). It just hits wrong during election season.
Of course, having powerful people who control trillions of spending be not be very well paid themselves above the table has...myriad exciting ways to go wrong.
As a taxpayer I'd rather government leadership paid extremely well and heavily fund GSA audits to ensure strong oversight (and jail time) for those that abuse the position. Fun fact: GSA saves taxpayers $10 for every $1 spent.
However, we've been losing lots of talent recently to fortune 500 companies that poach our federal talent, and our contractor talent.
200% increases in compensation are not unusual for those leaving NASA federal, or contracting gigs.
I don’t do anything remotely exciting, difficult or demanding for a company you’ve never heard of, yet I make as much as one of the higher paid NASA positions I’ve seen requiring extremely niche experience you will only get from and full of places. Probably more when you consider CoL and such.
Similarly, I saw a position with everyone’s favorite three letter agency. The job looked really cool, and required some modestly niche skillsets and experience in security, reverse engineering, exploit development. Only issue: the starting salary was very rough, particularly for the DC area.
The other thing is just the bureaucratic nature of the pay scales. I’ve seen jobs asking for a PhD or significantly more in YoE that probably requires because that’s what the GS requirements were. I’m not even sure if the usual “don’t interpret job requirements literally” is of any value. After all we’re talking about government agencies. I’d also hope agencies have become to relax degree requirements on certain types of positions but I doubt it. I was told for years, the federal government probably wouldn’t hire me without one.
All that being said, I’d probably be willing to hop on over if the work was really interesting and the pay wasn’t complete atrocious.
It's just the opposite. With a few rare exceptions, a federal employee cannot make more than a congressional salary. And since they make just over 174k year, that's the highest a GS-15 can make (after the mandated raises). Hence, GS-15s start at 172.6k.
GP was referring to the US Digital Service, which is for mid- and senior-level tech folks.
And there’s lots of benefits (23 paid days off, 13 sick every year), pension, etc etc.
This won’t compete with FAANG or with HCO, but in most areas of the country (or full remote) this is fine for a programmer’s pay.
I hear the complaint that fed doesn’t pay for tech and I think that’s not true.
The BLS has median programmer pay $90k in 2020 [0] so government pay is certainly competitive. This is median too, while the lowest possible GS13 pay is $100k.
[0] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
GS is also (like all companies, etc, etc) adjusted per locality, so not every GS13 step 4 will be the same.
Yes, GS is adjusted for locality and it’s up and down. But $100k is the minimum for GS-13, step 1 in most localities and is higher in high cost of living areas like DC, NY, etc.
But if you want a programmer job in government it’s not a big pay cut unless you’re a superstar working for Google or something. If it’s a decision of random Fortune 500 or government, government will usually pay more, AND have more benefits and stability.
Thanks. I think I just needed to see it from someone outside of my program.
The 23 paid days off per year is only after 15 years of service. Someone new, without prior military service, would start at 13 paid days off per year.
The pension, for those hired after 1984 is roughly 1% x 3 yr high salary x years worked. (If you your three year high salary was $100,000 and you worked for 30 years, you get a pension of $30,000 per year.) You would also collect Social Security. (Feds hired prior to 1984 have a much higher pension and don't get Social Security.)
[0] https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries...
If you retire at 62, you get 1.1% per year of your high-three salary for the annuity. This is in addition to whatever contributions you make to TSP, which are matched to 5%.
They are actually higher than that based on locality pay, here are FY22 numbers.
DC for example:
GS12 Max $116,788
GS13 Max $138,868
GS14 Max $164,102
GS15 Max $176,300*
Silicon Valley by comparison:
GS12 Max $126,742
GS13 Max $150,703
GS14 Max $176,300
GS15 Max $176,300*
> I hear the complaint that fed doesn’t pay for tech and I think that’s not true.
While the federal govt does pay, in many cases the federal pay is not as competitive as it needs to be for high demand specialties that require a good amount of skills.
Recently I was talking with an executive about building a software security capability within our engineering division for the space domain.
Trying to hire great talent capping out @176k is simply not competitive with all the local FAANGs and startups doing specialized software security work in the aerospace/aeronautics domain.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
The US median dev salary is $110k and it looks like you can hit that as a GS-12 in most locations.
I don’t doubt you’ve looked that up and it’s true if you say it is, but that number completely baffles me. How are so many devs so poorly paid?
Maybe you are just out of touch with what your average software developer is paid?
That’s a normal (and still very good) salary for devs working in quieter metro areas.
I left the Bay Area five years ago. My salary is now $100k, a substantial pay cut from my SF years. But quality of life is soooooo much better here, in so many ways. It’s worth the drop in pay.
Philly suburbs are quite expensive for housing. It seems about $100k to support a family is decent but not "very well off". I image that extra $10k could make a big difference. A single person making that (or a dual income family around $200k) would certainly be well off.
Philly suburbs can be expensive (although that’s not universally the case) but Philly proper is relatively affordable.
In either case, it's $300k+ to be in a decent neighborhood for about a 1500sqft house. Cheaper than many cities, but more than smaller cities or rural areas. And anything with land is outrageous ($500k+). And property taxes can be high.
It really seems to be a tale of two cities. On one hand, housing can be affordable for the people making six figures, but on the other we have the highest extreme poverty rate for any big US city (not sure if that's still the case, but was a few years ago).
Slight aside on yards, front yards are typically out of course, but I was astonished when I visited one of my coworkers in South Philly and he had a sizeable backyard behind his rowhome. Don’t know how common that is, satellite imagery is too low-res to tell, but I see a decent number that look like they’re 1/3 of the lot!
Also, perhaps my standards are skewed - walkability and bikeability are pretty important to me, which means I’d want smaller lot sizes anyway. Big SFHs on big expensive lots aren’t so appealing as a result :)
Most of the yards are small - a couple hundred sqft. So maybe we have different preferences for yards. I have fruit trees, a garden, bees, playset, etc. That takes up a lot of room. The garden alone is about the size of many of the yards I've been to in Philly.
Yeah, walkability isn't great here. I don't feel safe biking on any road. There are quite a few cyclists around though, so it can be done (bunch of stores within 2-4 miles).
I hate how expensive land is around here. I'd love 10+ acres. Rural areas are much cheaper.
If you want a lot of space and to be near a lot of people, you’ll have to pay more. You’re basically paying to have more than your neighbors at that point.
(That aside, if you want that much land, why haven’t you moved to a more rural area then?)
"That aside, if you want that much land, why haven’t you moved to a more rural area then?"
My wife won't go for it.
Then you've got "market-competitive" wages that actually needs to get stuff done on a fixed timeline and are willing to pay to get the staffing to do it, deliberately, rather than just letting people fall into it. And finally the FAANG club and lead/architect tier positions, paying the most for top talent, with the latter two cohorts being smaller.
Think about the stuff that everyone was trying to offshore to india 10-20 years ago and that's the cheap tier. And there's a lot of it.
When I was poking around after my bachelor's, IBM Global Services was hiring around $50-55k in my area for java developers.
Atlanta can get you to 200k with a (relatively) reasonable CoL but the current housing situation there is rapidly degrading, so get in fast if you're looking. Traffic is miserable, which is true about anywhere.
However, the public transit is hilariously bad with a heavy reliance on buses running on hourly schedules and sitting in said miserable traffic. I think there's one very specific corridor that has the buses equipped to override the traffic signals, but it really led to absolutely nowhere useful to a tech worker and just mostly ran Emory students between dorms and campuses. They never expanded the idea any further. That said, if you can land a job and an apartment within walking distance of a MARTA rail station, you're living the dream. (Good luck with rent! Anything within a half hour walk of a rail station is 2x-3x the cost.)
Any attempt to market Miami as "a tech hub" is a scam. The pay offered is completely out of step with the CoL before COVID. You could swing a Miami senior level job with either an hour commute on some of the most dangerous Interstate in the USA (that's using the toll lanes, too) or a two hour-ish drive + train + bus commute (one-way for both times) utilizing public transport.
I can't speak much to Austin or Dallas, though I've heard highly conflicting anecdotes about them. I doubt you're finding $300k below a Senior Architect type title, though.
Chicago has a great pay-CoL balance, especially if you want to live downtown, walk or take the train, and not have a car. But even commuting from the suburbs isn't bad. I-90 into the city is always a parking lot though, regardless of day of the week or time of day.
If you didn’t go to college for comp sci it’s kinda hard to get your foot in the door. There’s coding boot camps now but those are pretty new
[0]: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
just pay us, I'd be happy to come work. I know they have the money too, I pay double their offering salary in the taxes I paid in 2021
However, there are a couple of significant things that are often overlooked. There's a strong mission that really speaks to some people. Additionally, there's a lot of structure applied which helps to enforce a work/life balance. Some people really want to dive in and work a lot of hours (which is generally allowed) but others (like me) struggle to turn work off w/o that structure.
You get far more money if you put that 4 % into a 401k or other investment vehicle.
Also, with loans being discharged, you have to have made a ton of payments, to the point that most will pay off their loans before they're eligible in a stem position.
Also keep in mind that TSP contributions are matched up to 5% of your salary. Consider the pension in the context of also maxing out contributions to TSP (which has the same yearly contributions cap as a 401k). A fair comparison should include the whole package.