The employees of the DOE labs aren't civil servants on the GS scale. They're paid more like defense contractors. The base salaries at a DOE lab can be comparable to FAANG base salaries if you ignore RSU part of the compensation you also get at a FAANG (which can be a significant portion of the overall salary).
Can you explain? I thought they were compressed pay “bands” still limited ton the GS pay scale? E.g., DB pay band still tops out at the equivalent of GS15
Re:CIA Labs
by tingletech on Monday September 21, 2020 @07:15PM
(#24549413)
the federal government is not the employer of anyone I've ever met from a Department of Energy Lab. LBNL you work for the University of California. LLNL and LANL used to be the same, but UC lost the contract to run LLNL and LANL in 2006. Bectel and UC formed a partnership that still has LLNL but got fired from LANL.
National Labs (and sites, e.g. Y-12) are either DOE or NNSA facilities. The government uses a government owned, contractor operated M&O (management and operations) contract to run the labs. M&O contractors are usually public/private consortiums or one of a few private contractors (see:Bechtel). M&O contractors are responsible for staff and operations, and are paid a fee based on a percentage (based o performance) of business the lab did over that FY. National Lab (and site) employees are employees of the M&O contractor, not the federal government.
I've never understood how this fit in with the whole GS scale thing, but the reasoning was straightforward: if we don't pay them well, somebody else might.