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Comment by tdhz77 | Hacker News Reader

Former Fed for 10 years. Loved working for the Federal Government. I made 100k+ as a software engineer.

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.

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I think government work culture is handicapping the salaries more than anything else. If a consultant comes in for a year at $200/hour, the government ends their contract when they're finished with them. When the government hires someone at $50k/year, they are stuck with that person pretty much as long as that person wants to continue working there. There's a common joke with civilian defense employees that you can't get fired without committing a felony. Government work culture has this maternal mentality where it feels the need to care for workers from cradle to grave. You can never get rid of low performers, there's no layoffs when priorities change, you just have the same people that need to be shifted around to do a mediocre job elsewhere. It's completely immune to outside market forces and that makes it literally impossible to compete with private sector salaries, who have no problem laying people off if a project doesn't work out.

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.

NY State has non-unionized positions called MC (Management/Confidential). My understanding is that it's sorta like contract work... you are "appointed" on a yearly or session basis. It's not a panacea though... if you look up kaloyeros, you'll see the dark side. It's disheartening how a single person in a particular position can bog down and kill the organization. It's not an easy problem to solve.

USDS salaries are even more absurd relative to the responsibility of the positions. Think 75%+ compensation cut even at the top of the GS scale for the calibre of people they are looking for; and the primary benefits of a Federal job like a guaranteed pension and job security don't apply in a meaningful way.

You really have to be in it for the service aspect.

I think there's an argument to be made for the networking benefits of government and military jobs. Having the experience and connections they bring may open doors that purely commercial employment does not.

I know there are non-corrupt cases of this, but it does seem like a close neighbor to things like regulatory capture, etc...

I think it is a neighbor, as you said, and I’d go so far as to say that this is transparently a goal of this program.

A goal to get people into government service? Yes. A goal to enable regulatory capture? Definitely not.

A lot of people cut their teeth in government defense jobs and jump to a contractor position doing basically the same thing for double the salary.

Outside of the federal gov, the benefits make it difficult decision to leave .gov mid-career. (Federal pensions are not as lucrative)

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.

> There's a common joke with civilian defense employees that you can't get fired without committing a felony.

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.

There are strong network effects at the level where clearances are actually hard to obtain, though. People leave government service (both military and civilian) to start consultancies and other businesses that sell products and services to the organization(s) they formerly worked for. Both they and the government workers buying their goods are incentivized to build strong relationships: the former so they can easily win contracts and the latter so they can continue to receive and expand their budgets/fiefdoms.

The DoD is implementing a new workforce category to address some of the deficiencies you mentioned [0].

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/

"You can never get rid of low performers, there's no layoffs when priorities change, you just have the same people that need to be shifted around to do a mediocre job elsewhere."

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.

Most governments have this problem. I've thought about this a lot in the Australian context and think the best way of solving the problem would be to hire on a 5 year contract that doesn't auto renew by default so you have to stay in shape for the job or look around for new options at year 4 - 4.5 and plan your exit.

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.

Partnership for Public Service, a much heralded public/private partnership between MasterCard, Workday (sp?), MSFT that interviews and places cybersec grads into GS roles for 2+ years and then preferred interviews into private sector, were insisting:

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.

> GS-7, and max, maybe, but would be hard, GS-11.

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.

It’s rather hard to get hired in a spot over GS 11/12. It happens but it’s not common. From 13 on I believe promotions are in front of a panel. Getting hired as a 15 would usually imply the hire-e was recruited.

Apologies if I wasn’t clear…

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.

Being in that area with friends who are highly connected in this arena and climbed ladder quickly, it’s a stretch to get a 15 in your late 20s

Just curious, and slightly belaboring a point…

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.

No that's an incorrect assumption, I dug into it.

GS 7 and walk through the steps as normal for that role, jump to a higher GS via a job change/similar.

> 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.

> I had one organization offer me 25k, fully remote to work there

Per year? That is $12.50 / hr

I worked for state government, in a very red state (read, does not like to spend on government) for my first “real” job at around $37k, circa 5-6 years ago.

This gets to the heart of a contradiction in red state philosophy which is actually quite hard to solve, at least in my mind. On the one hand, it's understandable if someone doesn't trust the government to spend their money wisely, and if they use that as a justification for voting for smaller government budgets. I get that part completely. Governments have little if any internal motivation to spend your money wisely. If anything, they have a vested interest in spending 100% of their budgets, regardless of whether it's spent wisely, so that their budgets don't decrease in the following fiscal year.

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.

The actual "philosophy" is the privatization of government functions. Concepts like "libertarianism" and "government is inefficient" are constructed to push this agenda. In the US this force can be so destructive that it willingly starves the government to prove its inefficiency and pushes services to the private sector, which is oh-so-well-alligned with its incentives (healthcare, owning infrastructure and other natural monopolies).

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!

Why do you assume that these ideologies are "constructed" in order to support a pre-existing agenda, rather than the (imo) much more likely possibility that the ideology is legitimately held and the "agenda" flows naturally from that belief?

Yes, I don't know what would work. I often like to bring up Japanese trains/subways which are privately owned and AFAIK the reason it works is because the train companies own buildings and land around their stations so they have a positive feedback loop, the more people ride their trains, the more their buildings get used, the more their land is worth, and visa versa. ~10 or so of the famous buildings in Shibuya are owned by the Tokyu Corp including the famous one with the giant screen, the 109 building (10 + To, 9 = Kyu), and the new 50+ story one directly over the station. The also own the building Google moved to. They own grocery stores at probably around 50% of the stations on their lines.

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 agree that this is a problem, but I don't think it is that simple in practice. My personal observation moving from a blue state to a red state a few years ago is that the quality of the service I get from the state and local government is drastically better in the red state. I don't think I can read very much into that, since it's a minuscule sample size and every state and municipality is different. But it's striking to me how much nicer the employees are, how much better the services are, and how much less apathetic everyone seems to be, despite what I assume has to be lower pay.

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.

Given that you don't like the policies of your elected officials, but you enjoy the higher quality of services you seem to be getting, and appear to be drawing a relationship between the two, how will you be voting next election?

How do the populations compare? I think lots of folks overindex on blue vs red when the more relevant variable may be scale/density.

I don’t think it’s a contradiction. It’s a cogent and coherent philosophy.

Claim that government doesn’t work → defund it in the name of it being bad → government works even worse → repeat.

Reminds me of the PJ O'Rourke quote: "The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast

That isn't a contradiction. The philosophical position is that the government shouldn't be sucking good employees out of the private sector.

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.

The real reason is that don't want to pay a lowly programmer more than a lofted manager and they have a stack of 15 managers on the project with the most junior one making 40k. Its a cultural thing within the government itself.

Given the tone of the quoted comment, I expect that was a typo for 250k. IE. They offered me 250k fully remote, but I turned it down anyway because it would be so much work.

> This idea that we shouldn’t pay people because they work in Government is insane. Peoples mistrust of government, but really it’s misguided.

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.

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