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Comment by prpl | Hacker News Reader

We could actually just pay more money to public governmental employees, allow them to build careers (and raise families), and stop contracting out everything. This would also increase competition for such roles.

How we got here is ultimately, especially for CA, land and legal cost, cost of living, and public employee salary relative to private salaries. That’s endemic to major metro areas in the US, with some small exceptions, but especially true in CA.

Before it was shut down, we did see a real reversal with 18F in getting things through, for software projects. Of course, they weren’t even being paid industry wages there.

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> We could actually just pay more money to public governmental employees

When their pensions are taken into account, government employees are ridiculously overcompensated already. They’re basically minor nobility at this point.

I have done the numbers for myself, and even taking pension and treating an extra week of vacation as a 1/52 pay raise, doing a software job for the government would be a huge step down for me financially. Basically gives me 0% chance of ever buying a home where I currently live

For every underpaid government software engineer there's an overpaid paper pusher, and they're both paid the same amount.

> me 0% chance of ever buying a home where I currently live

The housing crisis is the Everything Crisis. It’s destroying competence of government services, as no one ambitious will accept this fate.

It destroyed competitiveness of our industry because you can’t pay a worker less than it costs to rent.

It’s causing apathy and rise in extremist views among younger population as they realise they have no path to dignified future.

I am hoping that China does well for itself and one day we can just consider them as an example of competent and coherent governance and sort out our shit.

I guess we'll see how I'm doing in 20 years to compare, but as of now, my dad is a former California public employee on a pension who had to move to the middle of the desert to stay within his budget, does all domestic work himself, and regularly needs to ask me for money. "Minor nobility" is a laughable characterization of his status in life.

For what it's worth, it's also quite illuminating these days to compare injury history with him. We've had a lot of the same stuff happen, but when it happens to me, he always overestimates the effect because he's still suffering from never recovering properly thanks to a lifetime of no-premium but shitty Kaiser HMO treatment that used the lowest-cost option for literally everything, whereas I had to pay for stuff but at least got the latest available surgical procedures and proper supervised rehab, so my injuries actually healed and I'm not just suffering for the rest of my life like he does.

To be fair, we should all work to normalize retiring at 55 - it’s eminently doable but the earlier you decide to the easier it is.

Then you would have two retirees for every three working age people. And given that only ~70% of working age Americans are actually working, it would mean three non-working adults for every two adults with jobs. Either the retirees would have a really low standard of living, or workers would get much smaller share of the value they create than they currently do.

If you are not already retired or close to retirement, you should assume that the normal retirement age is ~70 years. Anything lower cannot be sustained with the current demographic structure.

but nobody likes working even longer to pay for others to retire earlier.

You can do it entirely “yourself” if you adopt FIRE concepts early in your working career.

This is an absurd statement.

You're right and everyone -- including government contractors -- has been quietly shouting this for ages, but existing efforts have already been ideologically co-opted and new efforts are too brash and can't wrap their head around spending more to save more.

Also 18F was not truly shut down and still lives on at GSA, albeit only the worst parts. They're hard at work adding as much red tape as they can imagine to procurement of software and recently boasted about their collective organization answering a whopping 1200 emails in a month.

> Also 18F was not truly shut down and still lives on at GSA

No, 18F is gone. All of the staff were fired and the organization no longer exists within TTS.

> has been quietly shouting

That’s one hell of a contradiction

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