If we were serious about fixing this problem, existing federal pay scale constraints would not be a barrier to entry.

Legislation could be passed yesterday that would add arbitrary pay scales for special purposes such as these. Attach an AWS architect salary to a government job and I think you will immediately find the skill gap filled. Bonus points if you put incentive structures in the employee contracts so that the brilliant minds are directly incentivized to deliver, rather than via proxy of their lobbying container organization.

Or maybe add real progressive taxation that would get the $500k comps back into normal territory (by, among other things, taxing dividends, share options and the like accordingly).

Tough cookie!

If you can't do that, well, then you better consider secession or something. I don't want to live out my old age in a "New America, Yukon" military junta rump state because some people sit down, blushing, seeing Rubicons on all sides in 2021.

(The sad irony of course being that crossing Rubicons made military Rubicons then, I know. But it was a lack of meaningful other reforms too. So find a Gracchi metaphor instead, I guess.)

From there, we can give the agency the budget to do the job, and let someone who's actually close to the situation decide whether it makes more sense to contract it out or build an in-person team. A bunch of legislators who are well-known to be perpetually too busy conducting fundraising lunches with lobbyists to actually read the text of the bills they're crafting and voting on are never going to be making informed decisions on matters at this level of detail.

That said, appropriations is no barrier to hiring the necessary talent. There are plenty of well-run private data centers in the federal government, staffed by both federal employees and government contractors.

Also, it's my understanding that the micro-management is more a problem on the state and local level, like NY state politicians such as Cuomo forcing the MTA to take on debt for these stupid stations rather than improve service.

I'll match you against somebody willing to take $150k for the exact same work. I'll match 4 of you against 8 of my hires. I'm willing to bet that my $1.2M team will outperform your $2M team. I'll very happily match 50 of your team against 75 of mine. You could poach 25 of mine who prove to be superstars, and I'll hire more.

That doesn't mean that you are dumb or incompetent or less skilled. I just think that there are some very smart and capable people willing to work for $150k. I think that many of them are as good as any AWS hire. And I think they could be motivated by something besides money to create something as good or better than anything from AWS. Indeed, less money could itself be a strong motivation to outperform.

Thankfully, we don't live in a world where there are only 10 geniuses to go around. The world is much much cooler than that!

I'd take ONE top faang engineer over 8 government software contractors. There's so much tribal knowledge out there that people in the Midwest just don't have, not to mention a can-do attitude.

It blew my mind the first time I worked with a guy from Microsoft on something. We were having issues with some code, and he just popped open the kernel and started actively debugging things that I'd only vaguely even heard about. I feel like I was twice as good at engineering after that experience alone.

I had the same experience from the other direction later on.. a team of smart, hard-working coders had been dealing with stability/perf issues for years on some product. I was able to root cause and straighten all of them out in a couple of weeks, even though this was in an area of software development using a set of tools I'd never touched before.

I'll bet a single FAANG-hardened code wizard could outperform 20 or 30 government coders.

the hardest-core thing I've done was step my way through Windows startup into the container subsystem, on a real, physical target machine I had connected to my dev machine over FireWire. I felt like Indiana Jones. (It helped having the source code though!)

Don't be afraid to dig through heap dumps or decode assembly if you have to, although when you hit that point you're probably just going to have to swap out whatever component is misbehaving

I've done this at a company full of ex-Googlers. Some programmers are simply incompetent, no matter where they've worked.

The reason is not talent, but process. Governments are bureaucratic by nature, companies are meritocratic by nature. Obviously this is a vast simplification and there are exceptions but I wouldn’t bet on your team being one.

Although I've never worked in public sector so I can't make a cross comparison.

Wasting 500k on an expensive school that pretends you're going to be an engineer, then learning how to reverse a tree on a blackboard so you can be hired at Google or Amazon doesn't make you a code wizard. That's a very expensive code monkey.

If you think people's claims that they aren't motivated by money are anything other than lies they've learned they're expected to tell, perhaps you're just as ignorant as your $150K hires who have no idea that FAANG companies pay their developers $500K or more (which is the only reason you are able to hire them).

To your second, well, /shrug. A reasonable number of folk might well jump at the chance to have a job like that on their resume, and there's likely a fair amount of possible cross pollination w/ various folk in the DoD/military to bring up bodies and relevant expertise (i.e. security).

You still have to pass a marijuana drug test to work there, for heaven's sake.

I hate to break it to you, but that's normal in the vast majority of companies. So far, I've only lived in two states where it was legal, and in both the laws specifically allowed employers to test for pot. I'm in healthcare, and the company I work for tests everyone on entry, and people randomly after that.

If it's ever legalized at the federal level, expect employer testing to be specifically allowed. Transportation companies, surgeries, heavy industry, and a lot of other companies will filter for this, either because they or their insurance companies don't want the risk.

We're talking tech here—the Digital Service—and I've never worked at a company that drug tested their programmers. Not once, since the 90s, during the full-swing War on Drugs.

Anyway, the marijuana test isn't the only antiquated, sclerotic thing about the USDS (and Federal employment in general). But it's certainly a representative example.

What security engineer worth his salt is going to accept half the pay to work for the government where things move at a snails pace?

Problems of red tape are not limited to only government ,it is function of most large organizations

Plenty of security engineers are constantly frustrated at the lack of security focus in corporate sector, investments are only made when it affects revenue . Even after all the ransomware companies some times do the bare minimum and buying insurance

Government on the other hand cares about security for different reasons, they take it lot more seriously. They don't sacrifice security in the interest of sales.

I would anyday prefer to work for some org where security actually matters not where it is inconvenience

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/17/us/politics/russia-cyber-...

Government doesn't care about the security of your personal information, hence why they treat their security engineers with contempt by offering them paltry wages and drowning them in red tape.

Most companies I know treat Security engineers similarly and pay not all that much higher. There is world of enterprise IT outside the silicon valley, the pay is not all the much higher. Despite all the recent threats and ransomware attacks security is not treated as it should be.

Windows still dominates most orgs, but never thought I would live to see any significant numbers - but here we are.

Is that how people approach it? Yes some do, and there are fantastic people who are working the government in service to the nation. Certainly not all and almost never for government contractors.

That's the spirit at least. I don't think it's actually working unfortunately because trust in government is so low. There was a time though...

Compensation is only one aspect of a job. Plenty of people work in defense while private sector pays more, public service motivation, job security, benefits, better work hours, more seniority driven promotions there are a ton of reasons.

Doesn't mean it is the most efficient way to run an org, point is there are enough qualified people who value the other benefits more than just the cash.

Funny you mention 170k Amazon is known to have a fairly strong cap on base salary compensation. Usually at 150-170k range.

Also, the fact that government jobs are so capped like that is a conspiracy to make the public sector suck, basically. We should fix that too, but I recognize it cannot be done in time, hence allowing that the design work to be outsourced.

Or in another words, you're trying to find the one honest person, in the stack of AccgemloitteBMizantPMGataBCS proposals. And everyone else is bidding with the profit expectation of tossing entry-level, over-hyped developers on it, and then crossing their fingers nothing goes wrong.

hahaha

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I am trying to structure the contract to avoid this stuff, by making the deliverables include both the contractors running their own working deployment, and the government also running their own. For the latter, there should be a tech transfer period where the contracter needs to do training and promptly answer questions, and then a government independence period where the contractor is not allowed to intervene at all to prove the knowledge has actually been transferred, and government isn't entering an IT-support protection racket. Only then is full payout given.

Yes, that means finishing the entire project will take quite a bit longer than doing all the dev work. Yes, that also means the project is riskier for the contractor and has less ongoing reward, and so they will need to be paid more initially. But it's worth it in the end.

If there is some gotcha here where the private sector can get out with too much proprietary IP or a weak and dependent customer in the government, do let me know, that is not my intent. I'm trying to envision a transitional project to get out of today's privatized world to one with better US state capacity.