Not to discount how great SpaceX is but these are two completely unrelated things.
Do you want the government to hire contractors without contracts?
Do you want the government to hire contractors without contracts?
If you don't want to pay for that because the government is then expensive, fine, but eventually you'll have an incompetent government that is slow and still expensive due to the mishaps it leads to, for itself and it's constituents.
Also, there will be hell from the public when the govt. makes a mistake. So, there's all sorts of bureaucracy, checklists etc, to keep that from happening or to at least have people accountable. Which also slows stuff down.
Federal government can pay enough to get software engineers. FAANG salaries are an outlier. They could easily target some midwestern state, put the headquarters for federal software agency there, find a feeder school, and get employees fed to an agency making a comfortable 6 figures in a low cost of living area. Will there be some attrition? Sure. But plenty will stay cause thats where family is, and where they have their house, and thats where there kids go to school and etc.
I can guarantee you that the contractors they hire from Accenture and IBM are using devs that arent making FAANG salaries. Its kind of a meme how bad some of the government contractors are, its pretty well known you can just be a body that sits at a desk if you can get a security clearance and make easy money just manually running an SQL script once a week on some of these government contracts.
The real reason nothing gets fixed is because the federal workers get free salaries and benefits packages that far outstrip their value that oversee these projects, and the contracting firms get easy money.
They have this already: midwestern schools which have affiliations to the military and act as feeder schools for technical people into the military industrial complex.
These people still make more than the GS schedule cap by mid career with TS clearance. It surely doesn't pay faang salaries, but $150-200k with 25% bonus/profit sharing, and totally paid family health care, and <asks someone> 320 hours of pto. Plus, these places often have nice company events, like corporate retreats to nice locales (including family), etc.
[1]https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/6974...
The maximum amount any federal employee can earn is $170k, with zero equity.
When I've been a contract developer, I've probably been making more than board members in some countries, but that seemed to be accepted over the short term. There's also an issue where enterprise companies wouldn't trust their IT departments, for historical reasons so the good people left or they got consulting businesses in and that made everything worse...
There is also the fact that they have more take home pay then you might expect, because government salaries are exempt from FICA taxes
https://www.federalpay.org/employees/top-100
Even ignoring those searching through different departments shows plenty earning over 174k -- Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (6), Immediate Office of the Secretary of Education (8), Maritime Administration (34), etc.
(Of course then there's state employees where PE Teachers get multi-million salaries)
What state PE teachers are making multi-million dollar salaries? I hope you're not conflating huge D1 coaching programs with "PE teacher."
[0] https://www.federalpay.org/employees/occupations/medical-off...
Using common logic we see in the field on why ic should be paid lower than team leaders.
Second, a good physician - even a run-of-the-mill family doctor - should be collaborating with their peers. They're keeping up to date on new practices and informing the next generation of those practices by reporting observations of the results of today's practices and any anomalies that arise.
I don't think it's unreasonable for some developers to make more than most physicians or for most physicians to make more than most developers. Neither field is narrowly defined.
The proof was a list of federal employees earning more than X
Administrators who are Senate approved can also get exemptions to the salary cap.
There are plenty of non-doctors earning over 174k too.
(Average doctor salary in Canada is USD140k btw)
I have no idea what you're talking about or thinking about. A percentage of tax receipts? Why on earth would that make more sense than just money up front?
I’ll grant you that dusty old war bonds are unlikely to get strapping young devs very excited, but I’m sure that they can come up with a higher risk, higher reward financial instrument with some imagination.
In a smaller company, the stock may appreciate due to your actions, but there's absolutely no reason to think most employees would do anything that moves Google's stock price. And even less to think anyone would do anything that would impact US government tax receipts.
Working for Google and getting RSUs isn't really higher-risk, higher reward compared to a salary.
That’s exactly what I said, that they need to come up with a higher-risk, higher-reward instrument because bonds aren’t high risk, high reward enough to act as an incentive. Your problem clearly isn’t that the subject matter calls for insulting or dismissing, it’s that you decided in advance to act insulting and dismissive regardless of what the response may be.
The government makes the rules in the first place, I’m sure they can figure something out. At least I object to the claim that it’s obvious that they can’t.
Why bother doing that when they can give you money and you can invest it in lottery tickets, beanie babies, bonds or Google yourself?
Except in the event of a startup, where you don't have the ability to buy in yourself to such a high-risk, high-reward outcome yourself.
But there isn't be much difference between Google offering you RSUs and just more salary (assuming the 'more salary' also vested)
They can recruit very good software engineers out of the Southeast & Midwest for under 170k just fine. It's still going to cost them 6 figures, but they are going to be able to hire good talent.
I will admit though, they're going to have trouble retaining the tippy top of the seniority ladder at 170k.
Now I agree the airforce or some branch could do this, but that would be a military intervention.
Our people go on to work at (eg) SpaceX and to found exactly the kind of startups that we're all dog whistling about. (Lars Blackmore?). Lean, focused, fast and providing valuable services to gov and private industries.
This discussion about how 'the government' cannot 'do this' is a vague rorschach blot that reveals people's own motivations only, and ignores the completely different priorities gov has. Do you believe the deep technical expertise that gov-funded experts are surely providing to Ukraine would be posted on Twitter?
It's just taxes, we definitely could.
The fact that we don't has a lot more to do with government culture and a post-Reagan idea that the government should be a thin and highly reactive operation than the money not being there.
Even if Congress corrected for that, they'd still be locked into slow moving pay raises, and they'd probably become a political target at some point, when some anti-spending congressperson begins harping on how there are so many federal employees make a quarter million dollars a year.
Being a military contractor, for better or worse, inoculates you from a lot of politics. So, yes, the government could pay competitively, but I would be leery about accepting such a position.
The way to make money working for the gov't is to get an established company to price gouge them through contracts so you can make a living wage.
The gov't is wasting a huge amount of money paying a 100% premium for engineers because they aren't allowed to pay what the market demands.
A "data entry specialist" and PhD scientist are paid off the same pay scale at different levels, which is great for equality but kind of difficult when you are trying to pay $31k (which is what someone with a BS in CompSci would get, GS-5) for someone who is going for $150k.
If you have experience or a master's, they'll pay you $51k.
It's absurdist. The GS scale caps out at $143k at GS-15 and requires a PhD and probably decades of work.
I don't see why they can't have like "Advanced Science" wage table, to compete for the best engineers and scientists rather than hiring either bottom of barrel or end of career people.
I make much more right now with 8 YoE than my boss in the gov't did and he had a PhD with 20 YoE.
* SETA: Systems Engineering and Technical Assistance contractor
* HQE: Highly Qualified Expert
* IPA: Intergovernment Personnel Act detail
* SGE: Special Government Employee
I get that space and defense are apples to oranges, but there is no reason to think it is significantly different.
Can a SpaceX employee comment here? Work at SpaceX looks stressful. Elon Musk looks like a workaholic asshole expecting all their employees to do the same, but without getting rich. Maybe government work is boring by comparison, but you get a personal life.
One of the members of my group just left for SpaceX last year, because he just wanted to work somewhere else for a change. He was one of the better FSW engineers we had seen, and I'm sure he's helping SpaceX do great things!
Another friend of mine went off to Amazon to oversee their warehouse automation.
And we just hired a bunch of really stellar folks from NG who were fed up with their workplace. They seem to love it here.
It's an industry. Changeover is pretty normal.
They have an atrocious Work-Life Balance rating and reputation. Like bottom 2%. Expect their mission to become your life’s mission; 50-60 hour weeks.
Why would any smart person want to work long term at a low paying job for a tyrannical government with extremely frustrating bureaucratic processes?
The best leave often apparently, how many of the best engineers actually stay for years?
One indication that I work with the best is where they go when their work here is done. In some cases, the finest work e.g. SpaceX has done is done with our alumni in leadership and contributor positions.
Another indication is top tier publications. Or the fact that our tech does what has never been done before by definition.
Another indicator is how many people are willing to work for a pay cut to be here and work on what we do. Speaking of coming from SpaceX and every major aerospace company.
Another indication comes from the partnerships we have where we collaborate as equals with any of those mythical "better" places.
It may not fit your world view or experience, but it is possible for good people with top notch skills to choose a career that does not focus solely on pay. We just work in an unprofitable domain. We don't work with incompetent people.
All to avoid pension liabilities, allow downsizing that can't be blocked by a union, and provide a layer of indirection to coders being paid anything close to market rates. We need a way to hire more full-time govies, but the culture has swung so hard to contracting that there are only small pockets left of in-house talent.
However, the same military has been unable to complete its stated objectives in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, etc. 10 times out of 10, the situation has remained exactly as it was before, or worse.
If the military fails at a core mandate that we mostly agree to be a reasonable one... what makes you think they could maintain complex code?
the military is under civilian control. The US military is very very good at killing people and breaking things. I have no doubt, given the orders, the US military could kill everyone and break everything they've been ordered to kill and break. Politicians direct the military, if objectives were failed to be met then politicians determined those objectives were no longer politically viable.
Worth a read.
You're presenting a false dichotomy, or lacking in imagination.