As a Canadian, I would much prefer our government pays comparable private sector salaries.

In India, they ramped up salaries after years of delayed pay commissions. Now cyber security guys in Government (even on contractual terms) are paid better than their private counterparts on average. For instance a malware reverse engineer might be paid around INR 600,000 (just starting out) - INR 40,00,000 (technical managers) on average in private sector. In Government, they vary between INR 10,00,000 - INR 50,00,000 per year along with a lot of extra perks. The downside is that positions are few, the hiring process is painfully slow and involves a lot of bureaucracy.

There is a woeful lack of cyber security acumen in government to actually amp up their hiring practices and strategy.

They will when people are all leaving for better pay elsewhere.

They don’t in the US, so I doubt it.

And who will do necessary work for the government, to keep the societies that make the FAANG profits possible running? Having a bit of a private/public pay gap is understandable, but when it gets to the current 2-5x it gets a bit much.

They’ll pay better when they cant hire people at the current salary?