Yeah federal pay is rough and probably the primary reason I avoid government jobs, at least for the time being.
I don’t do anything remotely exciting, difficult or demanding for a company you’ve never heard of, yet I make as much as one of the higher paid NASA positions I’ve seen requiring extremely niche experience you will only get from and full of places. Probably more when you consider CoL and such.
Similarly, I saw a position with everyone’s favorite three letter agency. The job looked really cool, and required some modestly niche skillsets and experience in security, reverse engineering, exploit development. Only issue: the starting salary was very rough, particularly for the DC area.
The other thing is just the bureaucratic nature of the pay scales. I’ve seen jobs asking for a PhD or significantly more in YoE that probably requires because that’s what the GS requirements were. I’m not even sure if the usual “don’t interpret job requirements literally” is of any value. After all we’re talking about government agencies. I’d also hope agencies have become to relax degree requirements on certain types of positions but I doubt it. I was told for years, the federal government probably wouldn’t hire me without one.
All that being said, I’d probably be willing to hop on over if the work was really interesting and the pay wasn’t complete atrocious.
I don’t do anything remotely exciting, difficult or demanding for a company you’ve never heard of, yet I make as much as one of the higher paid NASA positions I’ve seen requiring extremely niche experience you will only get from and full of places. Probably more when you consider CoL and such.
Similarly, I saw a position with everyone’s favorite three letter agency. The job looked really cool, and required some modestly niche skillsets and experience in security, reverse engineering, exploit development. Only issue: the starting salary was very rough, particularly for the DC area.
The other thing is just the bureaucratic nature of the pay scales. I’ve seen jobs asking for a PhD or significantly more in YoE that probably requires because that’s what the GS requirements were. I’m not even sure if the usual “don’t interpret job requirements literally” is of any value. After all we’re talking about government agencies. I’d also hope agencies have become to relax degree requirements on certain types of positions but I doubt it. I was told for years, the federal government probably wouldn’t hire me without one.
All that being said, I’d probably be willing to hop on over if the work was really interesting and the pay wasn’t complete atrocious.