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Comment by neodymiumphish | Hacker News Reader

Agreed! I left the Air Force with 12 years of service, 4 SANS certs, certification as a federal law enforcement officer, and experience working against APTs. At the time I left, I was getting less than $80k in compensation (excluding healthcare, cause I don’t know how to account for that), and accepted the first job offered ($103k). Left that less than a year later for a job paying $140k plus bonuses, and now I’m in an even better spot 2 years later. The military can’t compete unless they change how they pay their service members.

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Part of the “problem” is that much military pay is “hidden”. An e-6 at 12 years makes $55.6k. That is very low compared to the private sector. However, basic allowance for housing (BAH) for an E6 with dependents is another $20-40k, so let’s call it $30k. Finally there is retirement. Retirement is harder to calculate, but traditionally if you reach 20 years then you get half your pay for the rest of your life as soon as you leave the military. An E6 @20 would get almost $30k/year, which will automatically increase with inflation. If you retire at 39 (enlisted at 19) and live to 80 you get $1.2M in inflation adjusted payments. The net present value of that is not something I know how to rigorously calculate, but $1M seems in the ball park. That’s an additional $50k/year over a 20 year career if you make it.

That means if you are a 12 year E6 and plan to stay in to 20 your real total comp is closer to $130k/year, and that’s not including BAS, retention bonuses, and other compensation. And it excludes tricare and other VA benefits post retirement.

The total potential compensation for military personnel is far more comparable than it looks, but is heavily weighted to non-cash compensation.

* Apologies if I’m being too pedantic here to much, but I wanted to make sure people who aren’t familiar with the subject can understand what I’m getting at as well.

You forgot to mention the fact that retired members can be recalled, that would dramatically factor into the calculations.

As well as the fact that many roles are tied to holding an active clearance, and while some things would be available in those amounts, debt generally is not one of them (a big opportunity cost).

I think getting recalled as a retiree is about as likely as a regular civilian being drafted though. Both theoretical risks but about equal, for career planning purposes.

We've recalled retirees, most recently in the mid 2000s. There were a lot of them recalled in the gulf war in the 90s.

So a bit more likely than the draft.

I'm technically also subject to the UCMJ for the rest of my life as well.

That retirement plan no longer exists just for the record.

The "total compensation" numbers that military recruiters tout are not actually real.

I know, I lived it for 23 years.

BRS still pays at least 40% of base, plus potentially more via TSP assuming people are moving out of the G fund.

Only if you do 20 years.

That's the thing people don't understand about all that -- those fake numbers are including a pension that for the majority of people who are in the military will never exist.

BRS was an attempt to give those people something, so they have some TSP matching, but even that only kicks in after six years IIRC.

Also DOD healthcare is worth every penny the service-member pays for it.

But it would take you much more to jump to that $140k if you were not in military.

It wasn’t like you could get that right of the bat.

Military experience is valuable on itself.

Yes you don’t want to stay there for whole career- but doing 5 or 10 years is going to pay off later. Just be good for your mates ;)

Did you get BAH? In high CoL areas like DC metro the housing allowance is like an extra 33k, tax free.

I did. Not quite that high, but ask any member of the military living in those areas. It’s not even set to cover 100% of the costs anymore…

I mean, the reason you're getting that much is due to the experience and creds you earned during service. I can't even post into real security roles at my current company because they only want external candidates with federal experience. They post internally for 1-2 days as a formality. Even then, most of those roles are under $120k. The only roles available to me are shitty ones like application security champion and managing/configuring SAST tools.

Also a major point not covered was defined benefits vs the 401k model.

So the real reason here seems to be that they know candidates with previous federal roles can be picked up for under 120k?

That seems irrelevant when they can have internal employees also filling it under $120k. The real reason are the connections. They want people with a federal background so that they have ties to the federal authorities since the work together on reporting intelligence. It's all about "networking".

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