There definetly is old money in the city, but it's honestly about as prominent as Pac Heights old money in the Bay Area and absolutely gets dwarfed by out of towners.
But things began to change during the Cold War, and then accelerated during the military buildup under Reagan. The Washington metro area began to explode economically as defense contractors that had once been spread around the country started moving to DC. The acceleration was compounded again under Bush with the war on terror attracting a broader range of security and IT companies wanting to cash in on Federal largesse. A big part of the reason for this is that Republicans preferred outsourcing Federal work to contractors, to avoid Federal unions. Federal policy didn't care where the contractors headquarters were located, whereas older agencies like the Social Security Administration, Federal Reserve, etc, had always been forced to locate most of their work elsewhere, both the labor and most of management--mostly only the political appointees were in DC.
What the government should do is return to the old policies of pushing administrative agencies back out into regional centers. Though it would probably look different in the sense that what's more important now is pushing agency directors and other political appointees along with their teams out of DC, whereas in the bygone era the emphasis was on the mass of Federal workers. You want the leadership teams out of DC because that's what's attracting the companies, not Congress.
But DC has probably grown too economically powerful to reverse the course of things.
I understand there is some exaggeration here, but this take is far more accurate than the parent comment.
Personally I've definitely heard arguments from both sides, but I've never known which one was "more" true.
Talk to the carpenters and plumbers working on wealthy houses. Once you see people regularly dropping 200k+ to redo a bathroom, those government toilet seats don't seem all that extreme.
Apple is the only commercial enterprise I am aware of that attempts to have similar supply chain controls, and their products aren’t cheap.
Just say "F-35"...unless your only purpose is more overly simplistic "free market" cheerleading typical of HN.
yeah, people who actually create surplus value through their labor tend to get irritated by people who steal their wealth for themselves via political corruption. I'm sure Boeing and Lockheed earned their contracts fair and square despite SpaceX being 20x cheaper. Definitely wasn't their lobbying payoffs
How about people who time and again been bailed out by government, had friends in power pass laws and generally benefited from corruption, tax cuts, and special subsidies, or just piled up externalities cost on society and the environment?
You know, like most of the "surplus value creating" private sector...
The wealth in the area (if you can even call it that) exists because of networking, namely people with connections to decision makers in the government are very valuable because they can bring in companies lots of money when they win contracts. The way you get promoted in the area into the high paying exec roles is solely though people skills. The amount of metaphorical dick sucking that goes on would make any sane person barf (on one occasion I was working in the Pentagon with setting up some software, as a civilian, and my boss who was there with me told me to stand up when some upper rank military guy came in the room to show respect, because otherwise it would look bad for the company). If you aren't connected or know anyone, you basically fit into the standard working class, and really don't make that much money factoring in high cost of living
And those people pretty much are working towards making in the 200s. My friend who was in "systems engineering" (i.e microsoft word/excel operations) got a position where he made 220-260 depending on bonus, and that was considered EXTREMELY good for the area. I didn't have the heart to tell him that a fresh hire at Amazon can work 2 years and make that much at a minimum.
The thing also with government contracts is that government sets rates for how much companies can charge the government for a certain person with certain qualifications, and companies essentially try to pay people as little as possible under that value to maximize profit. This also drives salaries down.
And because that area is filled with those type of people who by their nature tend to be pretty materialistic (in addition to a lot of foreign presence with Korean and Middle eastern people who also tend to be materialistic), seeing endless bmws/mercs/audis may make it seem like there is wealth in the area, but there really is not - you can easily do the math on cost of living versus salary and figure out that all that shit is financed at maximum length loan terms. Have been in conversations where people talk about having 30k worth of CC debt like its a normal thing.
As far as tech goes, there are 2 things that happen. First, a lot of the work gets subcontracted out by the 3 letter agencies to all the companies in the area, and 2, the work is VERY compartmentalized. So if you do end up working on something in the NSA or on a contract for the NSA it could be literally some basic shit, like a library to parse some stuff out of http, and you ship that and you never see it used or know what the bigger picture is. So no, working for NSA, other 3 letter agencies, or contractors of, won't give you an advantage in terms of experience.
You may get a clearance but that is only valuable to companies in the area since they will hire you because of your clearance then shove you onto a project that you may be ever so slightly qualified for, so they can collect money from the government while not having to pay for your clearance.
TLDR; that area sucks, no smart people ever go work for government or contractors of. Because smart people realize that they can not only make more money in the private sector, but have favorable living arrangement, especially with remote work, and can do engineering instead of circle jerking management to get promoted.
Even without going into contracting or starting a business, having worked a high level job at an agency like the NSA comes with a resume boost. It may not mean much to a mid-level hiring manager on the west coast who only knows about the NSA from what they read on Twitter, but it carries some weight in communities that understand what goes into these careers.
Although, ex-mil psyops are not much lower on the list...
Should similar forms of micro-judgement stemming from macro concerns also be applied to candidates from other industries such as adult entertainment or legal cannabis operations?
But it doesn't actually matter: we're talking about "are there people who believe this and will that belief negatively affect me", not "should those people believe this".
Hiring managers need to build out their team with whoever will do the best job. You aren't entering into a relationship with their former employer, you're hiring the employee for what they can do for you.
HN commenters might say they'll discriminate against FAANG employees or NSA employees or otherwise hold weird grudges against employees of companies they don't like, but that's mostly just internet bluster. Real hiring managers (that you'd actually want to work for) aren't going to discriminate against good candidates just because they worked for a big company that the hiring manager doesn't like.
I suppose there are exceptions to this. If you were head of financial controls at FTX, you're in trouble. But if you were a front-end developer at FTX and you do good work, I'm not going to hold FTX's failure against you.
With that said, I understand the larger point you're making about government surveillance. I just don't see most people being able to opt out of Facebook. Moreover, the government can compel Facebook to hand over whatever data is provided by users voluntarily, making the private/public split less than airtight.
Remember a few years ago (maybe even 10 years now) when facebook started testing their facial recognition capabilities? You'd post a photo, and it would highlight all the faces, tell you who they were, and ask if you wanted to tag them. It likely has a photo of 99.99% of living people at this point, and has profiles on them, cross-linked with any relevant discussion people have had about them (even if they're not on facebook).
Any site that allows you to "log in with facebook" is running their analytics which tracks you across sites, and builds your "profile", and if you have a gravatar on one of those sites, there's a good chance Facebook can now associate you with any photo that has been uploaded of you, even if you just happened to be in the background.
People were writing about this stuff in the '80s; it seems like some don't realize we're already there.
Also, DC is much less wealthy than the Bay Area. The upper bound on salaries in the DMV is around $150-200k with 15-20 years of experience because of how prominent government employment is. It's a very solidly middle class feeling metropolitan area.
Sure, it's just a bunch of doctors (NIH), lobbyists, defense contractors and government lawyers that skew that towards only being upper middle class and probably not as many ultra high net worth people, but it's extremely affluent.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-income_countie...
I got the job through family, my uncle was able to get in the industry in the 80s.
I don't think that enabling capricious air strikes is the kind of work that is going to allay most people's ethical concerns.
Seriously for a second I was like, maybe the NSA isn't such a bad idea anymore. They're out there making Ghidra and other open source tools so that's nice. And then I read this and immediately thought of that monologue from Good Will Hunting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJHvSp9AKYg
That's gonna be a no from me dawg.
The surgeon general recently suggested that children should stay off of social media because it's bad for their psychological development: https://www.edweek.org/leadership/surgeon-general-kids-under...
There's growing evidence that social media is also bad for teenagers. Rates of teenage depression and suicidality have increased in recent years, and there is a direct correlation to social media use.
Cigarette companies are viewed as evil because they peddled addictive, cancer-causing products to kids. Our industry is peddling a different type of poison, and I suspect we'll have a similar legacy.
Often I've found that the people who think money isn't important think nothing is important.
Nobody who's ever read their pay stub wonders.
I would also point out that, historically, a lot of "startup" culture comes directly from people fleeing from the more conservative east cost workplace culture. Consider if you can get the life you want working for a security service.
Obviously making between 100 and 200k is a healthy salary, but we shouldn't pretend that it's at the top of the industry. You're agreeing to a very particular work culture in return for middle-industry compensation.
There is also still a concept of national service in such places. Even as a civilian, some people would rather design systems to protect their county than design systems to support real estate in the metaverse. Do you want to do data analysis to catch terrorists or track international drug shipments, or design another algorithm to better serve ads to elderly people needing regular diabetic testing supplies?
Edit: I also want to point out that there are many tech jobs available in the government sector (state / transit / local / etc). They generally pay less, but are also less restrictive. You don't have to sign up for an intelligence service (and everything that means) to serve your country.
A few months back the US Navy's CTO asked LinkedIn why technically-talented people were leaving his organization and hundreds of people flocked to the comments to answer him [1]. Based upon some of the replies there are secondary considerations that override the concept of "national service" and stop people from working in this space.
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/don-yeske-b7957510_peoplefirs...
Not to mention that those nominally earning more in SF/SV often have worse quality of life than those earning less elsewhere due to housing prices and overall cost of living.
Also, low cost of living is great. I have a fully work from home position so I could move to a lower cost of living location if I wanted. That kind of flexibility is unusual in government work in my experience.
Edit: Also - I wasn't saying the pay was bad, or that 200k was the max you'd get - I was saying it comes with a work culture you might not like. It's not a situation where the pay is so much better in return for restrictive culture.
If you have tech skills and a clearance you could probably bill around 200/hour for full time work which would be pretty healthy income.
Edit: article I wrote about the topic:
https://blog.clearedjobs.net/leveraging-your-clearance-to-be...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: also, you've been doing this quite a bit and we've asked you more than once before. We end up having to ban accounts that post like that. I don't want to ban you, so could you please review the rules and fix this?
My takeaway is that you get to do some very technically interesting and challenging work. But politics, both organizational and electoral, means your cool thing is likely to sit on a shelf. They are good places to be if you like building for the sake of building. Not so good if you like both building and shipping.
There’s an entire industry built around influencing how the Federal government allocates the vast sums of money that it allocates. Everyone in the industry is wealthy and nearly all of them live in that area. But yeah, it’s because the NSA.
because they are parasites leeching off the tax payers via corruption?
>a social network that often leads to high paying jobs
at least you are honest about it
Decades of blank DoD checks for ya
Here is a useful comment: working for that agency results in a strong technical experience, a security stamp of approval, and a social network that often leads to very high paying contractor jobs or the development of startup businesses that end up being worth tens of millions.
Did you ever wonder why there is so much wealth in the Maryland-DC-Northern Virginia area? Well, now you know.