In reality, the USAF here is competing against the cost of defence contractors. Which it turns out, is pretty easy because they've been charging megabucks for everything for two decades because their only competition has been other defence contractors. Thanks to politics, right or wrong, they've had no capacity to ramp-up on in-house development and submit their own bids to really compete on price.

I really hope we're entering into an age of reality where public organisations (military, government, healthcare in the civilised world, etc) —and more, the people funding them— realise that in-housing development work is so much cheaper than farming it out.

Plus it would take huge amounts of salesman/consultant hours to get through the bidding process, plus each successful bid has to effectively pay for all the costs of other bids that failed for the consultants to be profitable.

There's a balance to be found, and it sounds like some of these skunkworks approaches are starting to get more formalized.

But MVPs aren't always themselves a viable development target... Especially here in a military scenario where the finished product tends to be the MVP. Safe enough and hopefully effective.

Exactly. The airmen that can leave, will leave to defense contractors, not silicon valley.

And if they have transferable skills on exit, all the better for them.

Compared to a pile of consultants, laptops and whiteboards. Software is cheap to make.

The current US Government pay scales are more than enough to match average developer salaries in much of the US. No, they're not going to get super-rich but they could get paid more than enough, help their country and have a stable job that doesn't rely on finding ways to monetise faddy bullshit ideas.

You can pretty much look up how much money anyone in the military makes. Base pay is trivial to look up, and all the other allowances (housing, hazard, etc.) can be looked up.

https://www.dfas.mil/militarymembers/payentitlements/militar...

The same is true in the government, AFAIK.

https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries...

Well, the American folks anyway. I work with a lot of Europeans, and they don't seem to share the norm.

In the air force / navy / army etc there is only one employee to choose from so this never comes up.

Then I believe it triggered all sorts of problems. Front office base salaries is higher than middle office, no one will take a pay cut so it prevented front to middle office moves which is is an undesirable effect. It is also expensive, they liked having the ability to hire more cheaply. They dropped the grid after a couple of years.

But all the time the numbers were confidential (but when there is a grid it’s a matter of minutes before an accurate table circulates).

It's not a digital wild-west open style though:

1. You have to authenticate using something which identifies you specifically as a citizen.

2. Another caveat is that people who gets looked up will be notified about that, with information about who it was who looked them up. (so it can't be used for direct covert spying)

That said, this system allows for a certain degree of transparency, and makes it easier for journalists, press, researchers etc to dig into issues such as social inequality.

I can see this one being taken to the EU Court of Justice by someone.

This is balancing between privacy and transparency of tax system.

I don’t think the EU privacy legislation applies to this kind of public functions.

Norway will be subject to EFTA court, which is almost de-facto Court of Justice.

Granted, how someone might sue and escalate an case is a different thing altogether.

Keeping the pay secret is kinda puzzling on traditional fields as the salary structure is very rigid on those due to strong unions. Doesn’t apply much in IT though where it is just minimum wage set by unions and you negotiate for (much) more.

Given the choice between a typical developer's life (outside a tech hub or hot spot most programmers aren't compensated much different from any other low social status white collar worker), moral issues aside, I'd take the military job any day.

A person can join the military at 18, retire at 38 and be in a prime position to capitalize on his network as a consultant or "small business owner" contractor, or else just sit back and enjoy his generous pension and health and other benefits. That's a big deal.

$40K is the figure I got from a Navy commander who's been in over 20 years. He and his family are used to approximately triple that level of income. He doesn't feel he can retire.

Lower-ranking people will be used to living on less, but will also have proportionally lower retirement pay. If you're a lower-ranking person and can get significantly higher pay in the private sector, it's not necessarily a dumb choice to go for it.

Usajobs.gov

Good luck.

They cannot leave until their contract is up. They literally cannot leave as soon as they've learned if they still have years in their contract. Additionally, the military dangles a lot of incentives to re-enlist, and people who have spent a lot of time in the military sometimes have trouble adjusting to life outside it. But yes, people will leave. There's always more. You would be surprised how many bright people choose to join the military even though it doesn't make economic sense for them.

I'm on mobile and copy paste isn't working, but enlisted pay grades are publicly available. They are much lower than SV salaries and they are set in stone.

Also, for people who joined the military out of high school, the private sector is frightening.

In my day job, I work with enlisted (not Air Force) and a bunch of ex-military, so I'm pretty familiar with the situation. I have actually been wondering if military retirement drives down wages, because a bunch of guys take pretty low salaries that are only okay because of their retirement check. Great deal for them, and definitely well-earned - it's no cakewalk to earn military retirement, harder than anything almost anyone in the private sector has to do - but I wonder how it works out across the labor market.

I do feel like, outside of the officer corps (who for some reason seem to hold onto it more often), the sense of noble purpose often gets crushed out by the inanity and bureaucracy so many of them have to put up with. IME that's usually why they don't re-enlist.

But anyway this whole ‘you need to pay them the same as civilians’ is nonsense anyway - soldiers are already paid a fraction of what private security get now and it doesn’t seem to be a major problem causing people to leave to do that equivalent job.

People join and stay in the military for great reasons other than pay, such as comradeship, family history, sense of duty, the challenge - appeal to those.

Generally socom operators get paid more due to hazard pay, which is a graded scale based on how likely you are to get maimed for life or killed. I can't speak for anyone but the US Army, but they only allow commissioned officers and warrant officers to fly helicopters. As a UAV pilot, I was in a group of the only enlisted pilots in the entire US Army. We were on the same flight status with the same awful yearly physicals of the helicopter / plane pilots.

I’m too curious not to ask what those encompassed.

Anyways, his best friend hid inside the room behind the gurney you bend over. When the surgeon did the colon check, his buddy came from behind the gurney. As the surgeon put his left hand on the soldier's left shoulder, his buddy put his right hand on his right soldier. This was right before the surgeon put his finger in/out for the colon check. Knowing what was going to happen we heard this big muscle bound guy scream like a 12 year old child and erupt in anger. Somehow by the grace of god he didn't assault the full bird colonel flight surgeon. Once he saw his buddy he realized he'd been had and got really mad but calmed down quickly. The rest of the 2 years he was in our unit that poor guy never lived it down. We were outside the room pretty much all on the ground crying laughing so hard.

Well I have, but that’s when the right decision drowns in politics and red tape, not because of money.

A lot of people would consider me an idiot, but I get a sense of duty and purpose from public service that is worth more to me than money.

Of course it helps that my pay check isn’t exactly bad. So it’s also a choice between good money and better money, I’m not sure how I’d feel if it was a choice between shitty money and great money.

A) Massively outperform compared to your peers.

B) Massively underperform compared to your peers.

You are almost certainly a mediocre programmer.

If you are in the B category, it is usually pretty obvious to _everyone_ and you've probably seen your performance reviews at _multiple_ employers be below average.

If you massively outperform your peers, you probably find your boss at _multiple_ employers going out of his way to retain you. (i.e. Massive salary bumps, bonuses, promotions, etc.)

If neither of these are true, you are almost certainly mediocre.

For instance, I made a really stupid decision for personal reasons to leave a job where I massively outperformed my peers (my boss was really bad at hiring people) and received a 30k raise a couple years before I left. But, realistically, that was the _only_ job I had that kind of outsized performance and it was more to do with my boss's skill at hiring people than my skill as a developer.

At my jobs before and after that one, I've fell safely in the mediocre range. Never been fired, never had a PIP, and generally got "Meets expectations-ish" performance reviews.

At my current job, I underperform my peers but that is largely because I'm their first hire in ~3 years. I have alot of catching up to do as a result, and I've been there ~90 days.

Is it perfect? No.

Do I think the 70% of programmers that probably fit this definition are mediocre? Yeah.

Keep in mind I am calling myself a mediocre programmer.

https://www.recode.net/2018/4/30/17301264/how-much-twitter-g...

Facebook's _median_ salary is apparently over $240k...

Everyone hears about these $200k salaries, but most developers aren't making that. The median for the USA is around $100k, it's still a high salary for a job that requires only an undergraduate degree and no certifications, but it's not obscenely high like $240k.

1: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/san-francisco-software-en...

2: https://www1.salary.com/CA/San-Francisco/Software-Engineer-I...

And $240k is very high for a non-management job, and compared to the median income and the minimum wage for the USA is obscenely high. Median household income is ~$60k, and median personal income is ~$30k. Minimum wage in the USA is around $15k.

In my books, 8 times the median income, or 16 times the minimum wage, is obscenely high. That kind of income disparity is not good for society.

But from the perspective of someone struggling to make minimum wage, I'll be it 100% is obscene...

[0] https://www.zillow.com/ithaca-ny/home-values/

[1] https://www.zillow.com/menlo-park-ca/home-values/

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/letters/ct-illino...

- Income replacement in an emergency

- Income replacement in retirement

- A down payment on a home

- A home improvement project

- A child’s college expenses less need-based financial aid

All of these are inflated by living in a high-cost high-wage situation such that the larger balance has you merely keeping up in terms of the capabilities your savings buys you.

The extra savings only make a difference if you move somewhere cheap before you draw them down. That’s a great argument for doing a few years in SV in your twenties but less relevant for senior talent.

1. Rental properties

2. Securities - stocks, bonds, derivatives, REITs etc.

3. Investment opportunities not available to others. The $250k-earning employee (sorry, yeah I bumped it up $10k to make this argument) is an accredited investor.

All of the above have compounding benefits over the years. Investing $25k today is better than investing $5k, even if both are 10% of gross income of our example employees. $25k savings allows you to put a down payment on a $125k rental property in a low-cost area every year.

> All of these are inflated by living in a high-cost high-wage situation

The "high-cost" only applies if you insist on living the exact same lifestyle as you would in a low-cost area: large house, boat, large vehicles etc. It's just common sense to limit your spending on overpriced things. In the Bay Area, housing is overpriced.

I guess we should agree to disagree :-). I think you should adapt your lifestyle to the area you live in. Here's an analogy: let's say I love fresh sushi. If I live near the coast and a healthy fishing industry, it'll be good and cheap. If I live in Las Vegas, it can still be had but it'll cost me. Do I keep up my expensive sushi habit in Vegas and complain about the cost-of-living? Or do I just eat less of it and accept that there are benefits to being in Vegas that outweigh the more expensive sushi?

Besides that, no $250k-earning employee is living in a shared apartment with a commute to make ends meet in SF. If they live that way, it's to maximize their savings.

When a majority of that $250k is in Monopoly money (i.e. most of the time), they absolutely are.

I don't think that's how it works.

You can only choose to apply.