Easy to be irresponsible with other peoples money.
What is definitely going to happen is you will attract the cowboys who have convinced themselves and can convince you to pay top dollar. They will come up with lets do kubernetes + service-mesh + multi-cloud hybrid + blockchain + crypto + AI/MI on this COBOL ... They will take top dollar, make a bigger pile of mess, sell it as a success story and move on make bigger messes.
It can attract people who are already good software developers absolutely, but the second point being made is that you also attract a lot of charlatans as well and so just throwing more money at the problem isn't exactly a great solution.
You need a solid culture to go with the money.
Highlighted in the sibling comment: "you will get whatever candidates decided to live in Mississippi"
As if top talent never decides to live in Mississippi and accept 250k/year as their salary ceiling...
It's not impossible and $250k is nowhere near the ceiling. But you're not going to find those jobs on a causal LinkedIn search like you would in California.
I find it hard to get roles in the midwest (large metro in Ohio) clearing 200k, though sometimes bonuses get you up there.
I always assumed the reported 250k plus salaries were fake news or only reserved for children of powerful people.
$250k total comp isn't even particularly high at one of the big companies.
It definitely isn't easy to find those numbers if your CoL doesn't require them. You'd need to move to those areas.
I'm not a sack of chemicals whose desires can be reduced down to some pithy pseudo-scientific Maslowian quip. The only thing I crave from my job is cash so I can take care of me and my family. 250k/yr for a COBOL position would suit that end just fine. You can keep your autonomy, mastery, purpose, and all the other foofoo, just hand me the check so I can be on my way.
I thought you were against reductionism?
sounds like purpose, of which you need mastery of some skillset to earn your autonomy to furfill.
That said, I'm sure there's much easier ways to earn 250k than untangling a governement codebase. Not that they are offering that to begin with.
>just hand me the check so I can be on my way.
Yeah, you probably wouldn't pass clearance with that attitude if we're being frank.
Fed govt migrations are ALWAYS shitshows. The army alone has like 20 individual email services. The pentagon is to org complexity what big tech is to technical complexity. It’s turtles all the way down.
This is literally one of the largest bureaucratic challenges on earth. There’s no simple fixes
There's a time and place for democracy - but large IT projects are not. Do a thorough need analysis, compare with what's reasonably possible using COTS software, and adapt or discard what is not possible.
This is the funniest possible response. The 'thorough need analysis' is the reason we are where we are now!
The thoroughness is so thorough that the needs change faster than the analysis can be completed, obviating the analysis in the first place.
Ironically, my friend has programmed COBOL on DoD mainframes, and still does as a consultant, having interacted with them for decades. Back in the 1970s she had a surplus IBM minicomputer that her father brought home for business use, and learned COBOL on that, and used the computer for furthering her legal research.
We want government to be cheap. You get what you pay for.
Worked at a big bank migrating some old code to new stack one time:
- Original developers are gone.
- Existing users don't understand the systems outside of their own narrow use-cases.
- Code which was committed to repositories didn't match the actual running code, because people would go into production servers, manually edit the code there, in place, not document or commit the changes to repo. There were like 20 years of adhoc changes made in this way.
Anyway, it was a hilarious shit-show, but kinda fun at the same time (if you're able to ignore incompetent leadership pressure - a skill I mastered during this time).
I remember the first time I saw this at a small company. The head programmer was the only one with the actual production source, despite a working source control system. He complained about how people didn't appreciate how hard it is to make builds work. I should have left when we lost three man months of code to losing email. I only left after screaming at the head programmer for refusing to stop making the repository unbuildable at all.
Sure, but it’s not like the consulting firms are paying their “contractors” more, they just siphon up the difference for their shareholders.
That’s exactly how it works, look at contract government salaries compared to anything in the private sector. They charge the government more as rates “go up”, but that certainly isn’t passed along. If large contracting companies really offered value to the government _and_ kept up with market rates for their employees, the state of federal software wouldn’t be what it is today.
I rejected the idea that the consultancy would get a rate increase based on "market rates being higher" and then just capture it all - in my (admittedly somewhat limited and path dependent) experience that just isn't how it works. It's more like we pay randmeerkat $X, we bill them out at $X * factor + overhead. "Market forces" mean we have to go Y > X in renewal or we will lose randmeerkat & friends, so now they get $Y and we bill $Y * factor + overhead. It's of course usually more complicated in general, and overhead especially likely isn't that simple.
Nowhere in there is the assertion that X or Y is what randmeerkat would get on the open market. Importantly, their market isn't really "programmers", but "programmers that work in govt + contracting halo". Which is part of why the idea: I could get $N more in SF tech may be compelling for you, but isn't compelling for them (unless too many people actually make that change, instead of just talk about it).
Also there are many other ways they can raise there rates, but if the claim is that it is due to market on the developer salaries that are going to be a line item, there is going to be at least first pass look at a) is that true (find some market data and wave hands) b) did it actually get spent that way (may come up in an audit).
So the real answer seems to be not "They get more and I get nothing" but "I get a bit more, and they get more scaled by what I get", i.e. "win-win".
There is lots wrong with the system of contracting, but I don't think criticizing a cartoony straw-man of it gets anywhere useful.
Do you think they aren't? I don't know any now, but the last one I did was making more than that 15 years ago.
Old crufty legacy systems in a big bureaucracy are many peoples idea of hell. Empirically speaking, good pay and job security aren't enough to have people knocking down your door for that kind of work if they have other decent options.