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Until the US federal government pays civilian tech talent competitively, this is always going to be an issue. Your typical hands-on-keyboard blue team engineer

Until the US federal government pays civilian tech talent competitively, this is always going to be an issue. Your typical hands-on-keyboard blue team engineer in federal government is a GS-12 getting paid around $68,000 per year (or $99k in very high cost of living areas like DC). They have expensive health benefits, 13 days of PTO a year, put a huge chunk of their paycheck (almost 5%) into a mandatory pension plan that consistently underperforms the market, and can literally go to jail for making mistakes at work depending on the statutory context they work in. The best people in these jobs burn out fast and quit or they end up having to abandon IC work for GS-14/15 jobs (max pay is around $190 for those) in order to keep up with cost-of-living and justify their careers. As a result, you have almost zero genuinely capable principal/senior engineers in government who have the authority to architect complex IT systems for security. Instead you get contractors who charge the taxpayers enormous overhead costs and cut corners wherever possible. If there's one letter to write your congress person to improve government - my vote would be for civil service reform to attract and retain actual top tech talent. They've done it for doctors and lawyers (both of whom can get paid well above the $190k GS pay ceiling), but engineering is still not treated as a comparably skilled professional trade.

2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
Yes, because civilian tech companies are never hacked. I do largely agree with your post but I'm also suspicious that stratospheric civilian tech compensation is a bubble.
- academia_hack 2y ago
  Totally. I think comp is a necessary but not sufficient precondition for fixing government technology. The actual solutions (good authentication and least privilege systems, robust monitoring, rapid intrusion detection and response, secure by default system architectures) all take talented people to execute and the government doesn't have enough of those in-house. Instead most systems are built with a 7-figure contract to Booz Allen and friends and then maintenance and sustainment is left as an exercise to the reader.
- ImPostingOnHN 2y ago
  I might take less total compensation in exchange for feeling like I'm making my government better. But I'd need to be paid more to suffer though any enormous bureaucracy, so it tends to balance out to needing market rates.
- ch4s3 2y ago
  Almost every job in government pays better in the private sector and usually by a lot.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - acdha 2y ago
    This is a common misperception but it’s not that simple. Here’s an old study discussing how it varies based on the field, where the lower level jobs do tend to pay better but higher-skill jobs have the opposite trend: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/52637 https://www.cbo.gov/publication/52637 Since the Obama era, this has gotten worse because there were a ton of people trying to score political points saying they were cutting waste by freezing civil servants’ salaries and that really got ugly in tech jobs because salaries were booming once things like the Silicon Valley wage collusion lawsuit and high demand for security, DevOps, etc. started raising the ceiling for the private sector. In 2010 the top end of the GS scale was competitive once you factored in benefits, hours, etc. but a decade later that just wasn’t the case. I knew multiple people who were trying to stay in the public sector but it was literally 2-3 times more money if they went private even though their skills were considered mission critical for their agencies. This sabotages contract work, too, because there isn’t anyone qualified to guide or review the work and that tends to burn orders of magnitude more money than simply paying more directly would.
    - ch4s3 2y ago
      That study is a decade old and covers a very limited 4 year period right after the big 2008 recession where the private sector took big losses and had a glut of college graduates competing for entry level jobs. Even then it shows specialized and highly educated workers doing far better in the private sector.
- loa_in_ 2y ago
  On the other hand, private companies treat security as an almost unnecessary expense, cutting corners. And playing roulette with whether they get hacked.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
    I think our whole paradigm of computing is unfit for the adversarial world of today. Our systems are like loaded guns where you need to hold 1000 safeties (some of them hidden) for it to (probably) not fire. It's absurd how hard it is to make anything.
    - loa_in_ 2y ago
      Oh, we're good on safeties. The problem is people for whom an additional click an hour or some thoughtfulness making some decisions is a breaking software issue.
autoexecbat 2y ago
Last time I was looking for a job I read about various interesting government jobs, and then gave up when I finally understood the pay structures.
- treesknees 2y ago
  The pay will almost always be lower than equivalent private sector tech positions. The difference is in benefits, retirement and pension. A nice balance might be working somewhere as a civilian contractor for those government projects.
  - halJordan 2y ago
    With that attitude, the pay will always be lower. Letting the dogma be self-reinforcing isnt the winning strat. The difference isnt even benefits, retirement, and pension. Maybe in the 80/90s or even 00s that was the case, but it's a dead philosophy carried by dead justifications.
    - cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
      Citation needed.
    - tossandthrow 2y ago
      The (employment) contract value should be the same, not the pay. There is less inherent risk for public sector jobs than for companies that can go bankrupt. Hence for the contract value to be the same, the pay needs to be a bit lower.
      - autoexecbat 2y ago
        You can get a president who wants to dismantle your whole department
  - evilduck 2y ago
    My spouse is a federal civilian employee with a scientific background and a special pay rate accommodation for it. Relative to her industry the pay discrepancy is still about 20% lower. In software roles the top end of the career is roughly the starting pay of junior developers everywhere else. It's not just lower, it's horribly lower. They can absolutely make adjustments if congress needed or wanted to. The DoD as of 2019 does direct officer commissions for cybersecurity roles bringing people in as majors IIRC (it's still not as good pay as civilian cybersecurity roles but the gap is smaller and it has the prestige and lifetime benefits of being an officer).
shrimp_emoji 2y ago
"Improve" government by scaling it back down to where it was when pennies from tarrifs could pay for it instead of 25% Federal income tax that already gives you mediocre results.
- Vicinity9635 2y ago
  But then who would pay for all of Israel's bombs? Think of the foreign nation whose citizens are happier and healthier than you with single payer healthcare?
  - immibis 2y ago
    The bombs could be produced with fewer leeching middlemen, just like everything else
- academia_hack 2y ago
  Counterintuitively, scaling government down goes hand in hand with increasing the attractiveness of the civil service. Right now if a government agency wants to do something like make a webform where you can apply for a passport, they have zero web developers on staff who can do it. Instead they must pay a team of non-technical officials and lawyers to make and adjudicate an RFP. Then pay a contracting firm to put a developer behind a government computer to do the actual work. Putting this contractor in a seat can easily cost the taxpayer $500k a year despite the contractor only receiving $130k of that money. The rest goes to the HR department, IT Department, C-Suite, lawyers, lobbyists, and shareholders at the contracting firm. The government has their own HR/Lawyers/IT too, but the contractor can't use those so the tax payer ends up double-paying overhead and missing out on economies of scale on every contract. This is one of the many reasons government websites are always $50 million dollar boondoggles that an intern could have done better. The government ends up spending millions of dollars feeding leeching middle-men before they can hand that money to a mediocre dev deep in the bowels of Accenture's cheapest subcontractor. If an agency just could hire a few strong web developers directly and then assign them to whatever task is needed during a particular sprint, we'd see a massive reduction in cost and increase in the quality of engineers working on our country's most important work. But most agencies are literally not allowed to spend more than $120k on an in-house engineer, while no one bats an eye on them spending 5 times that on an Accenture contract placement.
booi 2y ago
I call BS. I've never heard of anybody in government "going to jail" for some sort of mistake. Sure, there's all kinds of threats and regulatory control but when it comes down to it barely anybody is held to any kind of responsibility. It's practically impossible to fire someone in the government for incompetence and that's coming from engineers I know in government who work with essentially weaponized incompetence.
- SkyPuncher 2y ago
  Well you clearly haven’t put any effort into finding examples. https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/former-federal-government-contract-officer-sentenced-prison-accepting-bribes https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/former-federal-government... Yes, he shouldn’t have accepted bribes, but in the private sector this would have been extremely unlikely to result in jail time. Even if jail time isn’t a common thing, it’s far closer to happening to the average person working in the government than it is to those working in the private sector. The private sector simply fires bad employees. The government seeks to be made whole.
  - saalweachter 2y ago
    I'm not really impressed by someone going to jail for accepting bribes, even if it's less likely to happen in the private sector. Show me someone going to jail for bringing down prod or making the wrong architecture call or choosing the wrong platform/backend/language or even just getting burnt out and spending a week on the clock re-watching all of Star Trek: Voyager. I want to go, "Holy shit, that could have been me!", not "Well no shit he went to jail."
    - vdqtp3 2y ago
      > just getting burnt out and spending a week on the clock re-watching all of Star Trek: Voyager That's a Tuesday for some GS folks. Not all, some of the best folks I ever worked with were GS11-12's. Some of the worst also. Very few in the middle.
    - soverance 2y ago
ForHackernews 2y ago
I'm not sure more money => more talent in quite the direct relationship you're suggesting here. If this were true, the cryptocurrency industry would be the most secure in the world, since they pay their engineers the most.
- fxtentacle 2y ago
  Stealing crypto money is an order of magnitude more difficult than stealing internal data from an average government office. So in a weird way, yes, the cryptocurrency industry is more secure.
ForHackernews 2y ago
Meanwhile... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40944505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40944505
christophilus 2y ago
Even if they matched pay and benefits, the bureaucracy is insufferable for anyone who likes to get shit done.
- dylan604 2y ago
  Any where that would take a very literal act of congress to make changes, then yeah, that'd be a nope for me.
wredue 2y ago
It is extremely easy to burn out cause if you’re the best and have aspirations to move up, you’re just fucked. You will be blocked at every single opportunity while others around you fail upward. I guarantee that someone in the org saw a password file and said “yo? wtf? Let’s get a proper secrets vault going we can do it ov…..” *punched in the clit, thrown out a window*
radpanda 2y ago
> a GS-12 getting paid around $68,000 per year (or $99k in very high cost of living areas like DC) One valid sounding concern that I’ve heard is that the WASHINGTON-BALTIMORE-ARLINGTON, DC-MD-VA-WV-PA GS Locality Area underpays folks in DC by including farflung areas like PA and WV that skew the cost-of-living analysis. Whether that’s an intentional cost-cutting move or bureaucratic incompetence I’m not sure, but in the end the DC-area federal government pay ranges I’ve seen have struck me as quite low.
csa 2y ago
While I agree with some of your points regarding salary, this is all just wrong: > They have expensive health benefits Hmm… maybe more expensive when compared to private tech industry jobs, but cheap compared to owning your own business. > 13 days of PTO a year Starts at 13 days for first 2 years, then is 20 days from 3-15, then 26 days from 15 on. Plus medical leave. Plus it’s usually easy to get people to donate leave in the event of a medical emergency. > put a huge chunk of their paycheck (almost 5%) into a mandatory pension plan Not mandatory at all. The government puts in 1% for folks automatically. They match up to 5% total. > that consistently underperforms the market It literally is the market. They have funds for S&P 500 and Dow total market, plus a few others, all at super low fees. None of these funds are speculative other than the total market that the fund represents.
- academia_hack 2y ago
  In terms of benefits, here's an anecdotal comparison with a senior engineer (5-10 years experience) at a mid-level start up I worked at. * Federal Pay (GS-12): $100,000 * Startup Pay: $150 base + $25 k bonus + equity * Federal Health Insurance (United mid-tier plan, no family): $2,500/year * Startup Insurance (United mid-tier plan, no family): $0/year * Federal Leave: 20 days (after 4 years in federal government) * Startup Leave: Unlimited * Federal Sick Leave: 13 days * Startup Sick Leave: Unlimited The pension I'm talking about actually isn't the TSP (which is fine, but slightly more expensive than comparable Vanguard funds). All federal employees must contribute 4.4% of their salary to the FERS now which is taken out of their base pay just like their health/dental/fegli. It used to be 0.8% but congress gutted it a few years ago. FERS takes decades before it's more than pocket change and the same money invested in the market would yield higher expected returns without requiring you to work 20 years in gov to benefit from it.
  - niij 2y ago
    I'm following you on pay. But to act like "unlimited" pto or vacation time is a good benefit is a joke. Unlimited, to me, is 365 days off per year.
    - 2y ago
devwastaken 2y ago
This is a funny statement considering that the Fed isn't hiring anymore than any other tech corp. Across the board tech hiring in the U.S. is at an all time low relative to candidate population. Tech could drop salaries to 40K/year and get just as many resumes discarded in the trash.
DANmode 2y ago
If you keep competent and benevolent tech people, scientists, or lawyers around, people might understand.
ccorcos 2y ago
I agree with you but I am unfamiliar with all of these details. Can you draft a constructive letter that we can send to our representatives?
redwood 2y ago
Good point, but with the mass layoffs and salary balancing going on, the government may find itself in a relatively more competitive place than it used to

2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago

Yes, because civilian tech companies are never hacked. I do largely agree with your post but I'm also suspicious that stratospheric civilian tech compensation is a bubble.

academia_hack 2y ago
Totally. I think comp is a necessary but not sufficient precondition for fixing government technology. The actual solutions (good authentication and least privilege systems, robust monitoring, rapid intrusion detection and response, secure by default system architectures) all take talented people to execute and the government doesn't have enough of those in-house. Instead most systems are built with a 7-figure contract to Booz Allen and friends and then maintenance and sustainment is left as an exercise to the reader.
ImPostingOnHN 2y ago
I might take less total compensation in exchange for feeling like I'm making my government better. But I'd need to be paid more to suffer though any enormous bureaucracy, so it tends to balance out to needing market rates.
ch4s3 2y ago
Almost every job in government pays better in the private sector and usually by a lot.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- acdha 2y ago
  This is a common misperception but it’s not that simple. Here’s an old study discussing how it varies based on the field, where the lower level jobs do tend to pay better but higher-skill jobs have the opposite trend: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/52637 https://www.cbo.gov/publication/52637 Since the Obama era, this has gotten worse because there were a ton of people trying to score political points saying they were cutting waste by freezing civil servants’ salaries and that really got ugly in tech jobs because salaries were booming once things like the Silicon Valley wage collusion lawsuit and high demand for security, DevOps, etc. started raising the ceiling for the private sector. In 2010 the top end of the GS scale was competitive once you factored in benefits, hours, etc. but a decade later that just wasn’t the case. I knew multiple people who were trying to stay in the public sector but it was literally 2-3 times more money if they went private even though their skills were considered mission critical for their agencies. This sabotages contract work, too, because there isn’t anyone qualified to guide or review the work and that tends to burn orders of magnitude more money than simply paying more directly would.
  - ch4s3 2y ago
    That study is a decade old and covers a very limited 4 year period right after the big 2008 recession where the private sector took big losses and had a glut of college graduates competing for entry level jobs. Even then it shows specialized and highly educated workers doing far better in the private sector.
loa_in_ 2y ago
On the other hand, private companies treat security as an almost unnecessary expense, cutting corners. And playing roulette with whether they get hacked.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
  I think our whole paradigm of computing is unfit for the adversarial world of today. Our systems are like loaded guns where you need to hold 1000 safeties (some of them hidden) for it to (probably) not fire. It's absurd how hard it is to make anything.
  - loa_in_ 2y ago
    Oh, we're good on safeties. The problem is people for whom an additional click an hour or some thoughtfulness making some decisions is a breaking software issue.

autoexecbat 2y ago

Last time I was looking for a job I read about various interesting government jobs, and then gave up when I finally understood the pay structures.

treesknees 2y ago
The pay will almost always be lower than equivalent private sector tech positions. The difference is in benefits, retirement and pension. A nice balance might be working somewhere as a civilian contractor for those government projects.
- halJordan 2y ago
  With that attitude, the pay will always be lower. Letting the dogma be self-reinforcing isnt the winning strat. The difference isnt even benefits, retirement, and pension. Maybe in the 80/90s or even 00s that was the case, but it's a dead philosophy carried by dead justifications.
  - cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
    Citation needed.
  - tossandthrow 2y ago
    The (employment) contract value should be the same, not the pay. There is less inherent risk for public sector jobs than for companies that can go bankrupt. Hence for the contract value to be the same, the pay needs to be a bit lower.
    - autoexecbat 2y ago
      You can get a president who wants to dismantle your whole department
- evilduck 2y ago
  My spouse is a federal civilian employee with a scientific background and a special pay rate accommodation for it. Relative to her industry the pay discrepancy is still about 20% lower. In software roles the top end of the career is roughly the starting pay of junior developers everywhere else. It's not just lower, it's horribly lower. They can absolutely make adjustments if congress needed or wanted to. The DoD as of 2019 does direct officer commissions for cybersecurity roles bringing people in as majors IIRC (it's still not as good pay as civilian cybersecurity roles but the gap is smaller and it has the prestige and lifetime benefits of being an officer).

shrimp_emoji 2y ago

"Improve" government by scaling it back down to where it was when pennies from tarrifs could pay for it instead of 25% Federal income tax that already gives you mediocre results.

Vicinity9635 2y ago
But then who would pay for all of Israel's bombs? Think of the foreign nation whose citizens are happier and healthier than you with single payer healthcare?
- immibis 2y ago
  The bombs could be produced with fewer leeching middlemen, just like everything else
academia_hack 2y ago
Counterintuitively, scaling government down goes hand in hand with increasing the attractiveness of the civil service. Right now if a government agency wants to do something like make a webform where you can apply for a passport, they have zero web developers on staff who can do it. Instead they must pay a team of non-technical officials and lawyers to make and adjudicate an RFP. Then pay a contracting firm to put a developer behind a government computer to do the actual work. Putting this contractor in a seat can easily cost the taxpayer $500k a year despite the contractor only receiving $130k of that money. The rest goes to the HR department, IT Department, C-Suite, lawyers, lobbyists, and shareholders at the contracting firm. The government has their own HR/Lawyers/IT too, but the contractor can't use those so the tax payer ends up double-paying overhead and missing out on economies of scale on every contract. This is one of the many reasons government websites are always $50 million dollar boondoggles that an intern could have done better. The government ends up spending millions of dollars feeding leeching middle-men before they can hand that money to a mediocre dev deep in the bowels of Accenture's cheapest subcontractor. If an agency just could hire a few strong web developers directly and then assign them to whatever task is needed during a particular sprint, we'd see a massive reduction in cost and increase in the quality of engineers working on our country's most important work. But most agencies are literally not allowed to spend more than $120k on an in-house engineer, while no one bats an eye on them spending 5 times that on an Accenture contract placement.

booi 2y ago

I call BS. I've never heard of anybody in government "going to jail" for some sort of mistake. Sure, there's all kinds of threats and regulatory control but when it comes down to it barely anybody is held to any kind of responsibility. It's practically impossible to fire someone in the government for incompetence and that's coming from engineers I know in government who work with essentially weaponized incompetence.

SkyPuncher 2y ago
Well you clearly haven’t put any effort into finding examples. https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/former-federal-government-contract-officer-sentenced-prison-accepting-bribes https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/former-federal-government... Yes, he shouldn’t have accepted bribes, but in the private sector this would have been extremely unlikely to result in jail time. Even if jail time isn’t a common thing, it’s far closer to happening to the average person working in the government than it is to those working in the private sector. The private sector simply fires bad employees. The government seeks to be made whole.
- saalweachter 2y ago
  I'm not really impressed by someone going to jail for accepting bribes, even if it's less likely to happen in the private sector. Show me someone going to jail for bringing down prod or making the wrong architecture call or choosing the wrong platform/backend/language or even just getting burnt out and spending a week on the clock re-watching all of Star Trek: Voyager. I want to go, "Holy shit, that could have been me!", not "Well no shit he went to jail."
  - vdqtp3 2y ago
    > just getting burnt out and spending a week on the clock re-watching all of Star Trek: Voyager That's a Tuesday for some GS folks. Not all, some of the best folks I ever worked with were GS11-12's. Some of the worst also. Very few in the middle.
  - soverance 2y ago

ForHackernews 2y ago

I'm not sure more money => more talent in quite the direct relationship you're suggesting here. If this were true, the cryptocurrency industry would be the most secure in the world, since they pay their engineers the most.

fxtentacle 2y ago
Stealing crypto money is an order of magnitude more difficult than stealing internal data from an average government office. So in a weird way, yes, the cryptocurrency industry is more secure.

ForHackernews 2y ago

Meanwhile... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40944505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40944505

christophilus 2y ago

Even if they matched pay and benefits, the bureaucracy is insufferable for anyone who likes to get shit done.

dylan604 2y ago
Any where that would take a very literal act of congress to make changes, then yeah, that'd be a nope for me.

wredue 2y ago

It is extremely easy to burn out cause if you’re the best and have aspirations to move up, you’re just fucked. You will be blocked at every single opportunity while others around you fail upward. I guarantee that someone in the org saw a password file and said “yo? wtf? Let’s get a proper secrets vault going we can do it ov…..” *punched in the clit, thrown out a window*

radpanda 2y ago

> a GS-12 getting paid around $68,000 per year (or $99k in very high cost of living areas like DC) One valid sounding concern that I’ve heard is that the WASHINGTON-BALTIMORE-ARLINGTON, DC-MD-VA-WV-PA GS Locality Area underpays folks in DC by including farflung areas like PA and WV that skew the cost-of-living analysis. Whether that’s an intentional cost-cutting move or bureaucratic incompetence I’m not sure, but in the end the DC-area federal government pay ranges I’ve seen have struck me as quite low.

csa 2y ago

While I agree with some of your points regarding salary, this is all just wrong: > They have expensive health benefits Hmm… maybe more expensive when compared to private tech industry jobs, but cheap compared to owning your own business. > 13 days of PTO a year Starts at 13 days for first 2 years, then is 20 days from 3-15, then 26 days from 15 on. Plus medical leave. Plus it’s usually easy to get people to donate leave in the event of a medical emergency. > put a huge chunk of their paycheck (almost 5%) into a mandatory pension plan Not mandatory at all. The government puts in 1% for folks automatically. They match up to 5% total. > that consistently underperforms the market It literally is the market. They have funds for S&P 500 and Dow total market, plus a few others, all at super low fees. None of these funds are speculative other than the total market that the fund represents.

academia_hack 2y ago
In terms of benefits, here's an anecdotal comparison with a senior engineer (5-10 years experience) at a mid-level start up I worked at. * Federal Pay (GS-12): $100,000 * Startup Pay: $150 base + $25 k bonus + equity * Federal Health Insurance (United mid-tier plan, no family): $2,500/year * Startup Insurance (United mid-tier plan, no family): $0/year * Federal Leave: 20 days (after 4 years in federal government) * Startup Leave: Unlimited * Federal Sick Leave: 13 days * Startup Sick Leave: Unlimited The pension I'm talking about actually isn't the TSP (which is fine, but slightly more expensive than comparable Vanguard funds). All federal employees must contribute 4.4% of their salary to the FERS now which is taken out of their base pay just like their health/dental/fegli. It used to be 0.8% but congress gutted it a few years ago. FERS takes decades before it's more than pocket change and the same money invested in the market would yield higher expected returns without requiring you to work 20 years in gov to benefit from it.
- niij 2y ago
  I'm following you on pay. But to act like "unlimited" pto or vacation time is a good benefit is a joke. Unlimited, to me, is 365 days off per year.
  - 2y ago

devwastaken 2y ago

This is a funny statement considering that the Fed isn't hiring anymore than any other tech corp. Across the board tech hiring in the U.S. is at an all time low relative to candidate population. Tech could drop salaries to 40K/year and get just as many resumes discarded in the trash.

DANmode 2y ago

If you keep competent and benevolent tech people, scientists, or lawyers around, people might understand.

ccorcos 2y ago

I agree with you but I am unfamiliar with all of these details. Can you draft a constructive letter that we can send to our representatives?

redwood 2y ago

Good point, but with the mass layoffs and salary balancing going on, the government may find itself in a relatively more competitive place than it used to