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Comment by gkoberger | Hacker News Reader

While a funny premise, it comes off a bit like someone yelling at a customer service rep at a retail store. They didn't make the rules; they're just underpaid to smile and take it.

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If you're working as a company representative, either in retail or customer service or answering the NSA hotline, then listening to questions and complaints is exactly what you were hired to do. If you take those complaints personal then you should find another line of work.

There's a difference between calling a hotline and lodging a complaint, and generally being a dick for giggles.

Exactly. Calling and being a dick to some low-level person who answers the phones isn't my idea of clever.

She was pretty nice & helpful, all things considered

I doubt anyone working at the NSA is underpaid...if not overpaid.

You are joking, right? Government jobs seriously underpay.

On the NSA careers website looks like "Computer Scientists" make between $42,209 to $97,333.

I'm sure most of the pay is in the lower range. http://www.nsa.gov/careers/opportunities_4_u/professionals/i...

There are a lot of other perks that typically come with working a government job - vacations, job security, etc.

No one accepts a lower paying job just because.

Not everyone who works for the NSA is on their payroll; many work for contractors such as Booz Allen Hamilton.

You're missing the biggest point of having a government job. It's all the benefits, deductions and discounts you can have.

Government jobs seriously underpay.

This was true in the past, it hasn't been true for a very long time however. It used to be true that government jobs paid less in wages but more than made up for it in greater benefits. Now they are equal in wages and still have the cushy benefits.

http://money.cnn.com/2012/01/31/news/economy/federal_worker_...

http://www.cbo.gov/publication/42921

There are of course studies that contradict this, all of which conducted by unions representing government workers.

Can you point me to any government jobs that will pay you $100k right out of college? That's the sort of salary available in SF/bay area, and the sort of numbers that graduating students are looking at when considering getting a government job.

Also, from a sibling comment:

>No one accepts a lower paying job just because.

Some people accept lower paying jobs because they think the work is more interesting or that it is helping their country. Anecdotally, I've heard a good number of employees are leaving NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) to get (higher paying, faster moving) jobs at Google or SpaceX.

> Can you point me to any government jobs that will pay you $100k right out of college? That's the sort of salary available in SF/bay area, and the sort of numbers that graduating students are looking at when considering getting a government job.

> implying everyone lives in the SF/bay area.

Look, startup culture is nice, but some of us live in the Midwest. Government jobs have to be compared to cost of living and other metrics before they're useful.

I don't have any statistics on this, but I expect the majority of people getting $100k offers in the bay area right out of college don't live in the bay area when they get their offers. The only schools that are really in the bay area are Stanford and Berkeley, and although a lot of bay area tech workers come from those schools, many many workers come from other parts of the country.

My point is that if you're a college student graduating with a CS degree and you're looking for a job all around the country, no government agency will pay you as much as tech companies in in SF/bay area or finance companies in NYC. The salary difference is even large enough to make up for the relatively small cost of a recent grad moving across the country.

Can you point me to any government jobs that will pay you $100k right out of college?

Salaries are high in the San Francisco Bay area. This goes for private as well as public employees. I would think it's obvious that anyone that lives in a high cost of living area would need a high salary if they are to remain employed. Check this out - not hard to find $100k+ government workers living in the San Francisco Bay area. Did I say 100k+ government workers? It's actually not hard to find $300k+ government workers in that area.

http://www.mercurynews.com/salaries/bay-area

Be sure to sort it by descending salary (which it is not sorted thusly by default)

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