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).
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!