I wanna upvote this so many times. I used to work in geointelligence surrounded by some of the world's smartest people doing some of the most amazing work I will ever see. We were doing things with pixel data that Google is still at least a decade away from, and the efficiency of the ground processing ingest systems were so insane that when the government tried to give the contract to someone else, it took their software 21+ days to do what we could do in minutes. But it took decades of fine tuning to get to that point, physicists and mathematicians working in close concert with engineers who understood hardware, software, and orbital mechanics equally well.

Meanwhile, I left and am now making double, in some cases triple, what some of my old coworkers are making, all because I'm in a hotter industry infused with VC cash, not because I'm any better.

And I absolutely miss it and understand why some of those people don't leave. The problems you get to work on and the access to classified data and close collaboration with so many world class research laboratories is unmatched. You'll never get that level of intellectual engagement working for a web company until you're in one of the handful of moonshot programs staffed by PhDs, but you will get money, so I chose money.

This does not correlate to my experience working in Los Angeles and Silicon Valley. SV programmers get paid very well, as well as programmers working in L.A. for Google or Facebook. However, among those high paid programmers there were some really high performers and a lot of people who were good but really just like the people who were just getting paid much less somewhere else. One thing was always true, once someone got a really big pay check they were quite convinced that their work was very special.

While the work at your previous employer sounds really cutting edge, how profitable were they?

There also seem to be some areas where highly skilled workers will take a pay cut to work on something they love. This of course leads to lower pay in that field. A common example is the video game industry.

Your previous job sounds like it might have been affected by both lack of a money printer and lots of folks who take lower salary because they love the work

As you might imagine, working on a classified program means you're working for the government, so your company's profitability is inherently a function of the lowest bid mechanism for contracting - to an extent, as we proved they can't just costlessly switch to the cheapest bid unless they want a system that doesn't actually work. It's maybe counterintuitive, as the federal government is the only employer that literally does have the ability to print money, but in practice, even though they often face and solve problems far more complex than any faced by industry, it is often not a money-making endeavor.

Specifically, the point of geointelligence is we're trying to gain a long-term strategic advantage over all other enemy and competitor countries. To the extent we succeed at doing this, the government itself doesn't earn a profit from it. Everyone else does. We try to tax them in order to pay ourselves, but people don't like taxes and they frankly don't understand the ways in which spycraft is benefiting them because all that ever gets publicized are our failures. When what we do works, you never hear about it.

I work at an engineering firm and that is so true. All the schooling and a professional engineering (PE) certification that if a mistake is made with your stamp on it results in you personally not being able to practice for a long time or never again. I see these young, brilliant engineers working on really cool stuff that I also work on, but I am not an engineer. I am self-taught, never finished my physics degree, and went and did whatever job struck my fancy: welder, machinist, IT (been coding since 1978 on Commodore PET 2000), project management, museum art handler, underwater hydraulics and electrical work (senior manager at a water show in SE Asia), ropework (just did a 300 foot drop inspecting a facade, and I am 56 now), entertainment engineering, owned my own design/build shop doing animations, displays, events, stage, TV, etc., 3D work in Prisms (now Houdini), etc... I followed my bliss as J. Campbell would say. Yes, sometimes I was earning way lower than my potential, but I gained knowledge and experience. Besides, I have been making a very good salary starting about 15 years ago. COVID has pushed me to setup a smaller version of the rapid-prototyping, mechatronics, design/build setup I once had, except now on a desktop scale as a side interest, hobby, and potential income earner. I know why the others stayed at your company. I had offers for silly money overseas, but when I saw it was a bunch of networked, low-producing, cocktail-party chameleons who I could not learn from, or enjoy their company, I passed. Life's short. Do what fulfills you and still supports you and your family. Your needs adjust when you are happy!

HN has a very strong web bias, so that comment is likely only looking at that kind of work. Here in Midwestern US, I see the same stratification that you do.