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Comment by leguminous | Hacker News Reader

Part of the reason the US government needs to use consultants is because they can't actually pay enough to hire senior developers directly due to the constraints imposed by the GS pay scales. Often times the top levels of the pay scale aren't even available because there is some rule about how people can't be paid more than someone else. So instead they pay for consultants and all of their overhead.

(Of course there are more reasons as well, but this is a popular one that some of my friends in government agencies complain about.)

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Pay is a common one from the employee's side.

From the manager's side, it nearly takes an act of fucking god to open up a new position. Citizens pay attention to the number of employees, and they get mad about it. You really don't want to be the one to cause citizens to angrily call elected officials if you're in an appointed government position (i.e., an at-will employee.)

I have an unsexy government job. I've seen the leader of a pretty well funded government org get mad at IT for asking for three new positions one year. The IT group was roughly 100 positions, and it was acknowledged that it was understaffed in some key areas. One group with an annual software license budget higher than their employee budget asked for and was denied a single new spot.

Instead, that org's IT asked for and received budget for contractors. Contractors definitely cost more and can absolutely produce lower quality work. Their knowledge is gone when their contract is done -- so, best case, it's a multi-year contract that's similar to just hiring the damn person, but it ends up being way more expensive.

My current employer is even stricter.

In a similar vein, I've some friends who worked at a hush hush defense facility. The vast majority of the people at the facility are hired through a contractor. The employees are unionized, have a pension, and when a new contractor wins the bid, they have to agree to keep the staff in their current positions. I'm sure that weirdness is due to a mix of pay scales, hush hush reasons, and probably other reasons that I'll never know.

>In a similar vein, I've some friends who worked at a hush hush defense facility. The vast majority of the people at the facility are hired through a contractor. The employees are unionized, have a pension, and when a new contractor wins the bid, they have to agree to keep the staff in their current positions.

Not defense, but my government contract works the same way. I'm on company number two, but I know people who have worked for 4 different companies, all while doing the same job on evolutions of the same contract. There are people who have done full careers working onsite for my agency without ever converting to be a civil servant.

> Citizens pay attention to the number of employees, and they get mad about it. You really don't want to be the one to cause citizens to angrily call elected officials if you're in an appointed government position.

This week, after witnessing the largest insider trading infraction in US history, many citizens barely noticed. I no longer believe citizens pay attention to news. They’re conditioned to feel outrage at whatever social media tells them to.

On the other hand, I don't think most citizens care deeply about most white-collar crimes unless they're directly impacted. If you don't own stocks, why care if the stock market crashes? Heck, it might even be fun to watch all those richies with spare money to invest turn suicidal en masse.

There's a reason why "but his 34 felonies" never had any sticking power to anyone who hasn't been part of the resistance since 2017.

I don’t think it has anything to do with whether it was a white collar crime or not. If it was the other team that committed the crime there would be endless outrage from his supporters whether or not they understood the crime.

Look at the email server debacle, did the supporters understand what the crime was? Then Signalgate occurred and it’s crickets in the news now. Freedom of speech now means freedom to spread misinformation.

Haha, those yokels getting a laugh from all those richies losing money in the stock market, but jokes on them when they’re funding the joke with their retirement funds. And those coming tax cuts, who will be benefiting the most from those? Haha, the joke keeps getting funnier…

I understand what the email server thing was about. I also understand what the signal thing was about. I don't think it's possible to compare the two. One involved a device/software "helpfully" adding a phone number to group chat because it "helpfully" added the phone number to a contact that was not that contact's phone number.

The other one was a private email server, set up on purpose.

> jokes on them when they’re funding the joke with their retirement funds

Many of these people don't have meaningful retirement savings to lose. Or they're young enough that time in the market will expect to recover in 30 years.

I'm afraid that only the Sith deal in absolutes. Or something.

But yeah, I was thinking of that as I wrote it. I can confidently say that what I said still applies to my job.

I know someone who wanted to move from government contractor to government employee. He was already a veteran, had a degree, few years of experience as a contractor, etc. it took an entire year from “okay we can give you a job” to him starting.

More anecdote: a bunch of contractors were being fired (or whatever it should be called) because the project they were working on was a horrible shit show. I don't know what went wrong, but it was a lot of money that produced nothing and was publicly canceled.

A friend knew a hiring manager and was a quiet shoo-in for a job. HR dragged their feet for half a year and then, suddenly, moved at absolute light speed to get the job posting up, closed, and the shoo-in to be approved as much as possible.

It was because the contract was ending soon. Laid off workers (including contractors), veterans, and people with disabilities are given priority during the hiring process (which makes some kind of sense), but these contractors had such a stink associated with them that the HR people who presumably didn't want to work with the manager suddenly did, just to avoid hiring the contractors.

I worked at Raytheon in geointelligence services a long time ago and saw this happen and it wasn't a particular mystery why. Raytheon had acquired a smaller company decades back that handled all the ground processing for US spy satellite collections. This was a small group of like 50 people who'd been working in an extremely niche domain that was also classified and they'd been doing it for 20+ years each.

The government got angsty about being bilked by monopolies and started trying to mandate that contracts be split and awarded to different contractors. The first time they did this, they took the contract away from Raytheon and gave it to Lockheed, who probably felt the way the average reader of Hacker News feels, that surely this was a weekend project that five guys could do for a hundredth the price. It was not. Their solution completed the process of turning raw downlink data into human-legible imagery hundreds of times slower than Raytheon's. The government caved and gave the contract back to Raytheon.

A decade later, they overhauled the entire geoint enterprise to try and modernize it, bringing it to the cloud and using Kubernetes for everything, and did the same thing again. They gave the orchestration contract to Raytheon and the processing algorithms contract to Lockheed, with a rule saying the contracts can't go to the same company. Lockheed in this case just subbed the actual work back to Raytheon. The only way they could really do what the government wants, and have Lockheed employees working on this, is if they hired all the people who currently work for Raytheon, not out of any kind of nefarious underhandedness, but because these are legitimately the only people in the world who can do what they do at the level they do it.

>these are legitimately the only people in the world who can do what they do at the level they do it

Lol, is this a joke? Any good dev can do software development.

Most people aren't willing to work for peanuts, don't want to stop using drugs for a clearance, or are ideologically opposed to building weapons used to kill children or propagate genocide.

Sounds like Raytheon employees are all good on those fronts, rather than being good at their jobs. After all, if they were so effective, why wouldn't they work somewhere without all those caveats?

Not all software work is generic CRUD work. Some work requires actual, domain level expertise that has been built up over decades. Admittedly, this work is few and far between and usually you wind up shoveling shit into a dumpster fire...

That makes sense. An FTE costs 2x as much as a contractor to the government and the latter can be fired. I’m glad it is this way. Even DOGE is temporary.

They still don't generally need to use consultants. Even at the poor rates of pay in many government teams, there are still some decent technical staff who don't just chase the dollar. Bear in mind the salary standard is normal market, not FAANG/SV.

Consultants are nearly always used so that managers can say "we went with BigCo, its their fault" when things go wrong.

ie. they are generally a political choice rather than technical.

As a computer scientist who worked as a research scientist i was paid more as a Federal Surfguard (beach lifeguard) than i was doing TS cleared work with the government. The GS scale is fundamental a broken wager. When I gradated college the government was willing to pay 75K for employment. I had offers from private industry as internships making more than that per hour. They were easily 15K off my next offer and that was only because I thought I would like defense in general where the pay is pulled lower because they do so much government contracting. After exiting the defense industry I was making what I was predicated to make in 20 years at the government in 3 years in private industry. Not counting stock options etc.

The disparity is extremely but to be honest I liked the idea of working for the government. There was a lot of drive to solve for the mission and smart people. But the level risk mitigation made working extremely difficult. The government impressive getting people to work as hard as they do and I respect it, they were a good employer but political offices severely shackle it from doing even better work. In wages yes but even in allowing experimentation, political appointments waste a ton of energy and time to. Its like selecting the worst person for the Job in a non meritocratic way and expecting things to run smoothly is a poor idea.

if you work for the government you can get your student loans forgiven without the tax burden, you get retirement, you get 1 hour of k-time (time off) per week of work, which means a day off every 8 weeks, or 13 days+ a year of PTO, plus sick leave, plus health insurance that is pretty good, plus...

maybe it's different at the federal level, but at the state level it's pretty hard to beat the benefits, unless you're strictly looking for hourly wages. Not everyone needs $500,000 a year, nor wants it.

> They still don't generally need to use consultants. Even at the poor rates of pay in many government teams, there are still some decent technical staff who don't just chase the dollar. Bear in mind the salary standard is normal market, not FAANG/SV.

The stated policy of the current admin is to "traumatize" federal employees so the number of these people is likely dwindling fast. Burnout was already a problem before the current admin - if your efforts hit a bureaucratic brick wall one too many times that private sector job starts to look a lot more appealing.

Another reason why consultants are good in government is because of unions. I am generally pro-union, but a side effect of unions, at least in my experience, is that you will have a proportion of incompetent people who can not complete anything and you can not effectively get rid of them. Consultants who are clearly incompetent or even just not a good fit are much easier to get rid of.

Although the large consulting firms are also not great if they are just shipping software requirements overseas for cheap software dev labor, that also can be very ineffective. So many never ending government projects are a result of this. On the surface everything is competently managed (grant charts forever, with perfect org charts), but at the strategic level of actually getting it to work and on-time is lacking (because there are a ton of cautious "professional managers" who don't know how to actually ship.)

> I am generally pro-union, but a side effect of unions, at least in my experience, is that you will have a proportion of incompetent people who can not complete anything and you can not effectively get rid of them.

I am so tired of people who have "experience" repeating this talking point.

1) If an employee is union and being a freerider a manager has to document their failing before being able to fire them. And, yes, the union is going to defend them and make you do your job and put those documents in writing. The problem is that most managers don't want to put things in writing because, lo and behold, most of the time you wind up with written documentation that the manager is the problem instead of the union employee.

2) Union employees often hate freeriders more than managers do. Someone freeriding is making your own job far more miserable and if you can get rid of them, your own life is going to improve.

3) I can count the number of the freeriders I have encountered in union positions on one hand. I have lost count of the number of those people in non-union positions.

> there are still some decent technical staff who don't just chase the dollar

They are probably not chasing the job security either.

Working for the Federal government used to provide a solid pension, solid healthcare for life, and rock solid job security. The first has been mostly eroded away over the last decade. The last of course has completely evaporated over the past 3 months. AFAIK you still get healthcare for life if you manage to retire. All in all, I can absolutely see why someone would take the US civil service deal 20 years ago. Not so much 5-10 years ago.

https://www.nteu.org/blog/2025/04/08/Senate%20Passes%20Budge...

Healthcare may be vouchers soon.

Healthcare has also been eroded away as it is frequently needed to pay extra for concierge or direct primary care to be able to see a doctor, otherwise you are being seen by a physician assistant or nurse practitioner first.

I heard that __used__ to be the appeal, now that goodwill and soft power has been completely nuked.

Not just that political reason - you can scale a workforce up and down much more quickly with them.

And that is one of the more charitable political reasons that exist. I'm guessing Dolette and the like didnt drop enough campaign contributions. Betting in a couple months Tesla is gonna get a big fat contract.

Theoretically, there's some sort of arbitrage happening.

There is some department in the government that's very unsexy and has a very real problem that could be solved by a smart finance MBA student diligently working on it. But there's no way that diligent young employee would want that job. Nor no way if he had it that anyone would take him seriously and put his changes in place.

He doesn't want to work for that unsexy department. The people at that unsexy department do not want to work for him.

Put a consulting company in the middle and he has a job title that sounds cool and that organization gets their problem solved.

( This is how someone explained business consulting to me. )

Only place this falls apart is that Accenture / Deloitte are really not sexy. Like being a federal employee at a similar pay scale would actually be more sexy. McKinsey/BCG maybe this makes sense.

>Accenture / Deloitte are really not sexy. [...] McKinsey/BCG maybe this makes sense.

Those happen be 2 different types of consulting categories.

Accenture/Deloitte are more "professional services" type of consulting. Things like IT technology integrations and business process reengineering with software. So installing a multi-million dollar ERP software package like Oracle Financials or SAP and helping the client company migrate to the new accounting system. Also a lot of "staff augmentation" type of work. E.g. a lot of USA Homeland Security contracts for Accenture were IT services related: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22homeland+security%22+awar...

McKinsey/BCG is "management consulting". E.g. the CEO is considering opening a new international subsidiary but needs some research on various "strategies". So McKinsey consultants taps their vast network of other companies in the industry, creates spreadsheets of scenarios, writes up reports, etc.

The "professional services" category may be on a lower tier of prestige than "management consulting" but in general, most college graduates who prioritize career advancement will still prefer the (typically higher salary) job offer from Accenture/Deloitte rather than a government office such Veterans Affairs. Where government jobs often win candidates is the "no travel lifestyle" if it's a local office. Consultants can get quickly burned out by commuting on airplanes every week.

Well, they are a lot more appealing than government jobs at least, and have a very strong system for recruiting and hiring people right out of college.

Consulting employees make more money and are not subject to the absurd federal hiring process. Plus they can jump between projects more readily.

You would be surprised at how new grads see these companies, especially those coming from business/accounting degrees, etc

It's not too bad

It absolutely has been a great jumping off point. My finance brother makes bank now outside of the big 4.

The story for private equity is similar. How else do you get some high flying MBA to care about running a plumbing business?

Being paid better is quite sexy.

That was Edward Snowden's explanation as well, for why he was technically employed by Booz Allen Hamilton while doing sysadmin work for his former employer, the NSA.

> they can't actually pay enough to hire senior developers directly

I had the impression that it was also easier to fire contractors. (Well, not to renew their contract.)

If a developer who works directly for the government is underperforming, their boss has to jump through many, many hoops to fire them.

This is close to what I wrote myself, but the problem here isn't being able to fire people because they underperformed. The problem is what to do about temporary jobs that finish. They performed exactly as expected, maybe even exceeded expectations, but when the work is finished, you still need to get rid of the position, and they can't do that with permanent civil servants.

We need to get rid of this insane idea that a job exists for any reason other than the value your work provides to the organization.

On one hand it's true, on the other people want stability in their jobs. You need a compromise between flexibility for the employer and stability for the employee, and one such compromise (in this area) is having a consulting company whose contract with the client can be easily terminated, while keeping the actual people doing the work with a job and stable income.

Another reason in favor of reliance on contractors, at least in a couple of federal agencies I’ve worked with, is to improve diversity metrics. For agencies that require lots of technical workers, the reality is that means a heavily male workforce. But agencies (up until a few months ago) liked to tout that they were “model employers” with very diverse workplaces, and near gender equity. Then you actually show up and notice the building is full of the usual (for tech) contingent of white and Asian dudes but they don’t count as employees for diversity statistics.

The greatest reason they need to use contractors in general, not just "consultants," is that hiring a civil servant is opening a position forever. The federal government certainly can downsize, as we're seeing now, but they rarely do, and they don't hire people for six-month contracts. They hire them permanently, and would then need to go through a layoff process to reduce staff.

So if they have a project that needs 100 people to do and is expected to take two years, they have two choices. Hire 100 people, hoping you can find something else for them to do in two years, or you can offer a two-year contract to a private company, letting them deal with the problem of figuring out what to do with the 100 people once the project is completed.

The contraints of the GS pay scale aren't real constraints. The federal government already has special bonuses paid to medical doctors to make their pay commensurate with rates in private industry, in spite of the fact that those rates are way the hell higher than anything on the GS scale. They could easily do the same for engineering labor. What they can't easily do is hire people for six months guaranteed with only conditional renewals after that, because very few people would agree to that unless you're paying them far more than they'd get in normal industry.

A major incentive for hiring work out to the private sector is the impossibility of firing GS-series employees. Ultimately, whomever the elites are who happen to be taking a lap through government today are interesting in maintaining a responsive chattel workforce capable of reaping and sowing the crops of the day. They depend on their slave drivers, I mean senior HR staff, to keep them informed about how their current staff mix affects their ability to react to the crises of the day. If you have tons of highly trained agroconomists in GS billets, what are you going to do with them?

>they can't actually pay enough to hire senior developers directly due to the constraints imposed by the GS pay scales.

I did a coop with the navy in college, and would have gladly converted over to a full time GS employee on graduation, but:

1. Actual, honest to god GS dev positions were super rare outside of DC

2. The application process through the usaJobs website had a ridiculous amount of red tape

3. As you pointed out, the salaries were laughably low, even if you included benefits like the pension and healthcare.

I eventually gave up and went with the private sector. I had interviews in a week, an offer within days, and was paid more than someone with years of experience on the GS scale.

I was bummed about missing out on the opportunity for a pension, but the higher salary helped me hit FI by my mid 30's. When the ACA passed I effectively had access to health insurance on the private market for the first time in my life.

TLDR: I would have been a fool to go into GS as a dev. Giving up on that was the best thing I've ever done.

It has been this way a long time. I interviewed and got a job offer with the Naval Research Lab in the late 1990's. It was a very cool job working on chips for space defense systems and I was told they could match any private offer and as a bonus I would retire with a full pension when I was 41 (I was 21 at the time). It sounded good and I loved the idea of making things that went into space. Then I started to get offers from companies in Silicon Valley. They were 50% higher and had free apartments for a few months plus a sign on bonus. I asked the NRL to match and they said there was no way they could. I moved to the valley...

When did you retire?

GS pay scales can support senior devs just fine. Maybe not the $500k Googlers, but normal ones.

What "grade" would a senior dev be at?

Pay scale for the DC area: https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries...

Senior devs are usually gs-15, step 10 which is about $195k in DC

I don’t think it’s the money, I think it’s the mindset. There’s more project managers than actual hands on engineers.

Where have you seen gs-15 senior devs? That oddball org that turned into DOGE? Seniors developers top out GS-13 without supervisory responsibilities.

Before DOGE it was USDS and they had lots of gs-15s. Especially back when they would just straight up match private sector salaries.

In my org (10000+), over the past 5+ years we’ve hired maybe 20-30 15s and 14s who are non-supervisory engineers. It’s not a ton but it’s more historically.

My point though is that people will take the jobs on government pay scale, but it’s organizationally very difficult to get the positions through HR.

I've seen GS-12 and 13 advertised commonly. That's still good money and as much or more than I make.

Yes, but sometimes you do actually want the $500k Googlers.

I promise you never want that.

I've worked with several of them and yes I do occasionally find that they would be the best suited for the work.

Matt Cutts went from Google to the US Digital Service and did some amazing work. Maybe he’s an outlier, but I don’t think so. There are a lot of supremely talented people willing to take a massive pay cut to do good, meaningful work.

Three things:

1. Exactly zero companies, much less startups, are like the US Government.

2. He had 2 years at the NSA prior to his Google run.

3. I'm pretty sure he's one of the highest profile google engineers, you're not getting that for $500k.

And you can have them. Once they're done making tons of money you have a chance to get the mission oriented ones.

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