Since the eighties we've generally trended towards executives making awful decisions in service of the great number in the sky - irrational and arbitrary layoffs, consistent undercompensation, wealth hoarding, underinvestment in long term profits... these are all common place or expected in your standard 9-5 corporate America job.
It's so that they are dependent on them and they have the leverage.
It's also because no matter what he delivers and how happy they are with it, they always think they could have pushed him to deliver more, if they squeezed more of his hours.
Like a crappy restaurant owner who makes the waiters also mop the floor or do whatever when no patrons have arrived yet, because they can't fathom paying them to "sit".
Disregard what the Overlords might tell you; 2 is way more important, because when it comes to 1, the military program offices are VERY open to revisiting the charge schedule, if it means they get transparency and a better chance of something that might work. Those non-managerial pay ceilings were laughable pre-Covid, and now it's gotten just surreal, still based on a flat national average of what they consider the job role to be, something that's also gotten surreal, with Kinkos employees being included in sw engineer pay codes.
It's worsened by the fact they can't really take advantage of remote workers, somewhere with less CoL, in Alabama or Pakistan or whatever. Everything's on site, and it really does seem like every defense company I've ever worked is sited in some random shitty place where the local economy - if there is one - is composed of the company and three Applebees-like chains that service it.
They’re high, but not Meta high.
Employers in this industry could pay more out of overhead but then their numbers wouldn’t look as good as their competitors, the stock would underperform, and access to favorable credit terms would be restricted and in an industry with such astronomically (heh) high capital costs that’s very bad.
Most large contracts are cost-plus. Contractor direct costs + some agreed upon margin.
Fuel and similar commodities may look kind of like a cost+ contract, but it’s market price + X$ not market price * some profit margin so the incentives are different. It’s a net win for both sides if such variables are removed from the equation.