I check San Francisco City worker salaries on occasion (all public) and there are plenty of people making $300K+ a year for a secure job with a pension and not super stressful.

In my city pay rate is entirely based on tenure. People just starting out for the city have very low pay, people about to retire have insane salaries. Maybe it is more helpful to just generically say compensation and ease of removal needs to compete with the market.

I don’t think if you increased the pay you’d start seeing creative people at the entry level suddenly want to work for the government.

The bigger problem is with elected offices. We as a society aren’t wired to desire change. We generally prefer incumbents and people who maintain the status quo over anyone “radical” which is a dirty word in politics.

I went into the private sector over the public sector solely due to pay. If you do well in the private sector in your first couple of years, your compensation will shoot up. In the public sector your compensation is tied to years of experience so when I wanted to work for the gov, they required me to take a demotion and take only 40% of what I got in the private sector.

Purely Extrinsically motivated people are not going to solve the build problem.

Everyone has bills and debt. Make the compensation closer and intrinsic motivation can come into play.

Au contraire, it's far too easy to fire people in government for issues that have systemic root causes due to the nature of politics and public pressure. So the poor schmuck who pushed the button gets fired, and that's the end of it. No deeper evaluation or reports on how to prevent the issue from occuring in the future.

This leads to extreme aversion to any risk taking and creates bureaucracy.

This is opposed to the classic stories about junior engineers who lose their companies money, go into the bosses office expecting to be fired, and the boss says "why would we fire you? we just spent $X training you".

This sounded wrong to me so I googled and according to the first source I found, the layoff and discharge rate is 1.3% in the private sector, and 0.4% across federal, state, and local government.

The data come from Bureau of Labor Statistics: https://freebeacon.com/issues/workers-private-sector-3-times...

I see many of these same problems in large companies. Every one just tries to avoid being blamed. Those best at avoiding blame while assigning it to others rise up. Its politics.

And I would guess that the companies that have "blame" cultures end up doing much worse than companies that have "fixing" cultures.