I didn't think it could be that bad, and then I went looking. Apparently to get a pay level that aligns with typical base salary in tech for senior level IC positions, you'd have to be an agency director of a large agency or in the Cabinet. And that doesn't even take into account losing RSUs and smaller bonus payouts.
This actually goes a long way in my mind of explaining why the US government does so much contracting of people for work as well. It's probably not possible in the current legal framework to pay high quality tech workers a fair compensation for the market, but they could hire a firm as contractors for a project and that firm could pay fair compensation. I just wish more firms were honest rather than milking the government.
There are a few ways to get an IC role that pays more than the GS salary cap, but they are fairly rare. Some jobs have an "ST" level that is classified above GS for senior individual contributors in scientific or technical roles, and some agencies (like the CFPB) have their own pay scales that go beyond what the GS schedule allows.
I only worked with one computer scientist in an ST role during my two years at USDS. He was an ACM Fellow and had a PhD from MIT, so it's not something anyone should expect to get just because they had "senior" in their title at a FAANG.
Contractors don't have the same statutory caps on how much an individual role can pay, but salaries are part of contract bids, and a bid can be rejected if an individual salary is too high.
Yup, to emphasize, this is "we want to hire linus torvalds for a specific project" level exception, not "we'll be handing these out to line programmers because comp is higher in that sector" level exception.
You won't be getting one of those unless you're exceptionally well-known enough that an average practitioner in your field would perk up their ears when someone mentions your name as a potential hire.
And really, for the tier of people that would be getting those exceptions, that's still not a great rate of pay and they'd still be taking huge paycuts to work for the government. Like ok, we can get $300k a year for Linus but... he can walk into fifty companies and drop off a resume, cold, asking for triple that and get offers before he's back to his desk.
> I just wish more firms were honest rather than milking the government.
Generally speaking, they aren't.
I remember commenting (years ago) on here on an article about the government paying a million dollars for what amounted to basically a Wordpress installation that anyone here could do in ~half an hour.
Maybe a million dollars sounds like a lot, but to those who've actually _worked_ as a government contractor, it seems fairly reasonable.
Consider:
* You need to have past relevant qualifications for other government agencies, so the only people who can install blogs for the government are those who have installed blogs for the government. If nobody has ever installed a blog for the government, they'll leverage the closest relevant experience they can.
* You need to have a contracts attorney on staff for the duration of the contract, and since you likely don't want to fire them every few weeks, that's a year's commitment at (conservatively) $200k
* You need to have a physical address -- weirdly, the government isn't keen on home addresses and/or 100% distributed teams
* You'll need to hire a software architect (maybe 2) to justify the changes needed to __competitors who also likely placed bids on your contract and didn't win but who also have existing contracts managing the database, network, etc__
* Those competitors want you to fail so that the contract will get rebid so that they can try again, now armed with the information you presented them
* Nobody in the government wants your project to succeed, and will actively try to get it to fail quietly
* If it ever seems as though your project might achieve success, every stakeholder will want to jump on board your ship -- not in an effort to sink it, but so they can make their mark on the project and have their names associated with a potential success
* It takes decision-by-committee to get even the smallest thing done, and a Wordpress blog is comprised of mostly small things. The smaller the thing, the bigger the committee. (I once had to bill the government 24 man hours at a median rate of $100 an hour because the CTO of the agency pulled 4 of us in a meeting for 6 hours to "discuss" which header background we preferred -- one was a winter shot that allowed visibility of the building, the other was a summer shot where trees obscured it... the winter shot felt dead and colorless, but the summer shot obscured their fancy new $130 million building)
Ironically the amount of oversight and red-tape is so intense that it becomes self-defeating. The only companies who are capable of successfully bidding and executing the contract are the exact sorts of companies you don't want winning the contract. The small, agile team full of domain experts isn't going to be able to jump the hoops to win the bid - they don't even have a contracting lawyer / combat-disabled veteran owner / etc.
I don't like the idea of my tax money getting wasted by Lockheed or Accenture on a failed project with no recourse, any more than anyone else, but I'm not convinced that micromanaging the bidding and execution actually resolves that. At a certain point you're chasing away the talent and selecting for the players that are willing to play your games rather than the best ones to do the job.
The way I always viewed it was that the USG just was willing to pay a large amount of money to sit in meetings and talk to contract officers, and if that's what they want to spend their money on, fine, we'll provide that service. Which is exactly why everything is expensive and nothing gets done.
It's the contracting version of "nothing is getting done, let's add a daily meeting to make sure that productivity remains high". At a certain point you'll chase away the 20% who are getting the work done, but you'll always have the 1xers and 0.1xers who are content to sit in meetings and take home a check every 2 weeks. If you keep doing it - that's what you'll be selecting for, and you'll end up with the Dead Sea effect but with contractors instead of employees. Which is where we are today, it's a toxic environment and the only thing that can survive are organisms that are specially adapted for it.
Agreed completely, and many times the contracting owner is a figurehead with zero job responsibilities who just takes down a grand salary so that the contractor employing him is eligible for more contract opportunities.
I think you better gave examples of government being inefficient. But also I was to add that there are places that do milk the government. Both of these can be true. It's not homogeneous. But you're right that we should be more nuanced and it's good to have an insider perspective.
For a more funny example of your point, I like The Pentagon Wars' Bradley tank evolution
This got me reading about the history of 'armored fighting vehicles', and eventually this early model, which I still can't stop laughing at: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8b/Simms_Mo... It, uh, certainly can't be faulted for its complexity.
That's actually kind of a brilliant design given the time period, once you look at other designs of the era that either have no idea what they actually want to accomplish, or try to do everything and so succeed at nothing at all, or both.
Oh, tell me about it. I think that's the kind of innovation that's happening now with the drone warfare you see in Ukraine. People tell me that "Russia has 100k tanks to Ukraine's 10k", and I think: those high-level numbers do not matter; what matters is what happens when the two meet on the battlefield. If one $50k drone can consistently take out millions of dollars of equipment, it doesn't matter how expensive or numerous that equipment was, or how good it would be at fighting some hypothesised similar adversary.
The superpowers of the world have gone through several successive 'generations' of military technology without really having a war in which to use them. (Just skirmishes with pre-industrial desert and jungle people, and the occasional mismatched murky proxy war with export-grade technology.) These mega-elaborate aircraft carriers and fighter jets and tanks are like radar-enabled cavalry, and will be taken out with drones and handheld rockets, and whichever modern-day Kroll is clever enough to strategise will make an absolute, uh, killing.
As someone that works in ML, this is actually what is concerning to me. Everyone is talking about AGI (artificial general intelligence) but I don't think that's something of huge concern yet. We have already entered a world where you can create drone "mines". It is cheap and easy to build a drone that can have an explosive payload, hide, and automatically seek out enemy combatants or vehicles. (Note that drones are pretty difficult to detect) The tech is a little difficult now and requires oversight if you don't want to violate international war laws, but it is definitely possible (and rapidly getting better).
> If one $50k drone can consistently take out millions of dollars of equipment, it doesn't matter how expensive or numerous that equipment was, or how good it would be at fighting some hypothesised similar adversary.
Because this isn't true anymore. It is really a $1k drone being able to take out millions of dollars of equipment with a 70+% success rate. That's a real game changer.
We don't need AGI to for ML to be dangerous. We just need people to use existing algorithms dangerously and/or recklessly.
It's amazing (in the most uncharitable sense of the word) that a bunch of private sector office workers who joke about how relatable The Office is don't realize that stuff like Pentagon Wars (for feds) and Parks and Rec (for state and local government) are also basically documentaries for their respective industries.
I could mortar the cognitive dissonance together and build a wall.
So did you go with the summer shot or winter shot?
I can understand having the sentiment:
> Nobody in the government wants your project to succeed, and will actively try to get it to fail quietly
But I actually think Hanlon's razor applies. I think individuals do want your project to succeed but there are often systemic issues that make it seem otherwise. These systemic issues are not easily affected by individuals.
There are many situations where the government isn't managing work well but because that fiscally helps the contractor, the contractor works - hard - to keep the status quo in place. That is to the detriment of all of the other companies that could do it more efficiently.
This is also why we need strong technologists in government to ensure the contracts are written correctly from the start.
This is one of the great accomplishments of the "small government" efforts in politics: all the money leaves the system. Imagine a business that losses all it's money, every year, by design.
The current system also incentivize quid pro quo via revolving door for high level government employees. You accept under market pay with the government, but expect to be repaid for favors to the governed entities by taking a job with them afterwards. Or selling your services to them. Or getting a niece or nephew hired. Etc.
My current position was put to bid as a contract from a school district.
They tried to hire the position directly, but couldn’t fill the position w/a qualified candidate at their salary bands.
So they sent it out as a ‘service’ and approved a contract for fulfillment that was more than triple the salary band, to pay for my salary and the overhead the private company is incurring to staff the position.
If they’d been willing to break the ‘band’ and compete w/the private market directly they could of spent double instead of triple, but then they’d have to figure out how to deal w/the union and non-union staff since the salaries are public record…
Right. There's literally no-one paid by the Federal government that makes the same as your average Google L6, according to what I can see; and to get to that kind of a level you need to be e.g. Joe Biden, Tony Fauci.
This actually goes a long way in my mind of explaining why the US government does so much contracting of people for work as well. It's probably not possible in the current legal framework to pay high quality tech workers a fair compensation for the market, but they could hire a firm as contractors for a project and that firm could pay fair compensation. I just wish more firms were honest rather than milking the government.