The US government isn't in need of a thousand high-skilled hackers. They are in need of a million normal employees with some basic security awareness. Anyone with a modicum of skill can find thousands of areas to improve. The issue is that almost nobody is in a position to get anything changed. Even basic software choices are a multi-year epic.

The NSA isn't actually supposed to be a massive Statsi-like bureaucracy, it's meant to crack codes used in wartime so that our troops know what the enemy will do next.

And provide the standards to be used within US systems ... Which is basically a definition for bureaucracy.

You're thinking of the CIA. The NSA's job is to spy on citizens.

>The NSA's job is to spy on [US] citizens

They're not supposed to (according to for example the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978).

If a US citizen needs to be spied on by the US government, the FBI is supposed to do that.

What the spook box says and what's inside are two completely different things, by design.

> If a US citizen needs to be spied on by the US government, the FBI is supposed to do that.

Semi-autonomous collections systems generally aren't capable of determining citizenship.

Once the data is at rest, much of it is made available to a surprisingly large number of federal and state agencies - and even local agencies via fusion centers, etc.

The system is built for dissemination. Within that, some checks on citizenship could be possible for some data. But even then, once a foreign person is part of the data/comms transaction, all the related data is available - citizenship of the other participants is no barrier.

Well I obviously have no clue what the numbers are on the offensive side doubt they are smaller than a thousand. But there are def thousands of cyber security professionals working for government through myriad of contractors purely because of caps.

Um, NASA?

The government is able to employ tons of smart people that could be making way more money elsewhere.

They might not get the absolute best security people in the world, but they could get good enough - as good as they're getting from MS for a fraction of the price.

Additionally, government salaries aren't terrible when you factor in the pension. Most people want the money now. But if you want financial security in the future - that's a reason a lot of people chose to work for the Fed.

Almost all the work done at NASA is done by contractors that work in better conditions than allowed for by the federal payscale.

I mean this is categorically not true, but definitely makes for a pithy comeback.

At least in the Shuttle era, I once heard it said in a way that was something along the lines of “contracted support is basically working to rule; NASA employee components are working to solve problems.”

Referring here to contractors as the body of private sector contract organizations that had outsourcing contracts for various support roles, not the individual people. Speaking to working environment.

> Additionally, government salaries aren't terrible when you factor in the pension. Most people want the money now. But if you want financial security in the future - that's a reason a lot of people chose to work for the Fed.

This varies by agency and field. The older pension system was replaced with a newer model a while back so a prospective federal employee is looking at the combination of effectively a 401k, a pension of 1% top salary per year of service, and social security. That’s not bad but your salary is capped at under $200k so you're not getting anyone with IT skills turning down FAANG positions unless it’s for a cause they support (NASA, the VA, etc. can do that a lot more effectively than Agriculture, etc.). In other professions, of course, that can be pretty different – if you’re an academic who isn’t able to/interested in switching careers to ad-tech, that might be a great job compared to getting in a cage fight for a handful of tenure-track positions.

This matters a lot for security because the defense needs to be everywhere. NASA will never run out of people who want to work on robots because rovers are cool; the IRS needs people who can modernize internal business systems and that’s not only not cool but will get mockery from the more clueless people they know.

  because gov payscale limits do not match market reality

The same people and corporations who leach off govt contracts and subsidies speak often about how govt spending is wasteful.

State/federal govts receive 10-20% of every single citizens salary on top of being able to literally create money. They aren't hurting for money.

This is entirely caused by corruption and incompetence.

Partly this is due to the concentration of wealth, inaccessible to taxing.

Naturally government pay would lag behind even the more mediocre H1Bs.

> Partly this is due to the concentration of wealth, inaccessible to taxing.

This has nothing to do with it. Contractors cost notably more, so if the goal was economizing it’d be an obvious step to cut out the middlemen by hiring staff directly.

The problem is that there’s an entire political ideology holding that government is inherently wasteful and its adherents will oppose any attempt to track market salaries because that allows them both to say they’re saving money at the time and later to cite the struggling/failed project as proof that they were right.

> The problem is that there’s an entire political ideology holding that government is inherently wasteful and its adherents will oppose any attempt to track market salaries because that allows them both to say they’re saving money at the time and later to cite the struggling/failed project as proof that they were right

Why is it a surprise that employees who are essentially unfirable don't perform well? Aside from a very small percentage where the hiring culture is exceptional, it's almost universal. This is a problem with governments across at all levels in almost all countries.

How many times do we have to match this movie before realizing that just increasing the salaries won't make a difference, and instead will be wasteful.

> Why is it a surprise that employees who are essentially unfirable don't perform well?

This is a great example of that political dogma: notice that you’ve accepted as an article of faith the trope that government employees can’t be fired or disciplined or that this is not true of contractors, despite neither of those being true?

If your goal is successful projects, what you’re looking for is accountability and managerial discretion. The managers you think can’t direct civil servants directly aren’t magically more capable of selecting and overseeing contracts, either, and without technical staff they won’t have someone they can turn to for advice who doesn’t have a financial conflict of interest.

> This is a great example of that political dogma: notice that you’ve accepted as an article of faith the trope that government employees can’t be fired or disciplined or that this is not true of contractors, despite neither of those being true

Nice strawman. It is harder to fire govt employees than to fire private employees. Disagree?

Just look up at-will employment law that doesn't apply to government entities. Looks like you're the one following political dogma and accepting articles of faith and tropes.

Otherwise why would ignore that a very consequential law is different for private vs govt employees?

> The managers you think can’t direct civil servants directly aren’t magically more capable of selecting and overseeing contracts, either.

Where did I say they cannot? Please stop with the strawmen. They just don't have enough incentive because it's very hard to fire them, unlike managers in the private sector.

> Nice strawman. It is harder to fire govt employees than to fire private employees. Disagree?

Let’s see, so it’s not a straw man when you say government employees are “essentially unfirable” but it is when someone corrects you?

Lets ignore the personal back and forth, and get back to the argument.

It is harder to fire govt employees than to fire private employees. Disagree?

At-will employment law doesn't apply to government entities.

A very consequential law is different for private vs govt employees.

> The managers you think can’t direct civil servants directly aren’t magically more capable of selecting and overseeing contracts, either.

Never said in my comment they cannot direct civil servants. They just don't have enough incentive because it's very hard to fire them, unlike managers in the private sector.

That's like the farthest I've seen goalposts move within a span of two comments. You went from "essentially unfirable" to simply "harder to fire" and continues to act like you're so right. Like it's almost pointless to discuss something with someone who pretends those are even close to the same.

That's three comments where folks are attacking me instead of addressing the topic because they know they lost the argument. Sad to see that happen. And also look up the meaning of the word essentially.

> Lets ignore the personal back and forth, and get back to the argument.

I mean, were you not attempting to make an argument when you said that government employees were “essentially unfirable”? Your argument just sucked/was factually incorrect and you want to steer away from the “interpersonal” aspect of someone pointing that out.

It’s gauche to point this out on HN but you aren’t engaging in good faith here - wnd when someone else engages you in actual good-faith you fall back to juvenile debate-club attempts to frame them as the wrongdoer.

That’s highly rude and a bad attitude and approach to bring to this community. Act better and take some accountability for your own misbehavior.

I had two options, either continue the personal back and forth by debating that you folks don't understand the meaning of the word 'essentially', or take the high ground and debate the topic.

Sad that both you and the other poster lost the argument so hard that you have to resort to ad hominems and make it about me instead of the topic. Thats very telling. And also look up the meaning of the word essentially.

> Why is it a surprise that employees who are essentially unfirable.

A government needs employees right? One way to attract and retain employees is to offer competitive wages, another is to offer a relatively low workload and high job stability. Government worker salaries are easy targets and the people who set them are elected officials, so its not a surprise most governments today lean on job security over wages.

> This has nothing to do with it. Contractors cost notably more, so if the goal was economizing it’d be an obvious step to cut out the middlemen by hiring staff directly.

It certainly has something to do with it.

The market rates for engineers was distorted because FAANG had a lot of money to throw around, so therefore hiring staff at government pay rates is quite difficult and is subject to the General Schedule (https://federalnewsnetwork.com/pay-benefits/2023/12/biden-fi...).

Contractors work from bills and projects, where the money is carved out; I agree it’s terribly inefficient.

The other issue is how difficult it is to get into government vs getting in as a contractor.

I tried the former many times without success; the latter? Easier than FAANG or finance.

Yes, the GS scale is a problem. My point was that it’s not a problem because we’re trying to save money – if that were the case, someone would notice that raising the cap to allow a $300k civil service job is cheaper than allowing the same job to be performed by a $500k contractor who takes home less and is replaced more frequently.

Politics enters the picture because the pay cap is derived from the salaries for politicians rather than what expertise is valued at on the open market:

https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/pay-admi...

Yes, but “saving money” is your point and strawman; I never said anything about saving money, nor did I imply it.

GS in general cannot grow when the market pay was distorted by both lack of tax funds; and when those driving market pay has a disproportionate amount of wealth to corner the labor market, in order to prevent the hiring of engineers by other industries.

I think you misunderstood: I agree that lack of tax funds is a problem in other areas but in this specific case it isn’t because the same or greater amount of money is already being spent.

Yup. When a VC-backed company goes bankrupt, no one bats an eye. When Solyndra's loans go bad, even though it was a tiny fraction of the government's green energy portfolio, you get headlines and congressional hearings.

How many middle class workers were robbed through income tax to pay for the $524million dollars lost on solindra? Government money totally ruins any private business, to the tune of a huge party where everyone takes as much as possible with no accountability

How many orders of magnitude more money is “robbed” by Comcast/Verizon/Charter, the medical industry, manufacturers who hiked prices up during the pandemic, etc.? Large organizations of all persuasion need oversight but that doesn’t mean we should give up on the concept any more than Enron meant we should give up on the stock market or private energy companies.

And when a big contractor has an 8+ figure write-off, they have a PR team working to prevent accountability and none of the people who were talking about private-sector innovation and efficiency will be asked whether they had a more realistic position now.

I think it's more about greasy palms than political ideologies. No proof though.

> Naturally government pay would lag behind even the more mediocre H1Bs.

Those "mediocre H1Bs" work their ass off compared to non-H1Bs because they get laid off/fired and deported on short notice with barely enough or sometimes no time to sell their belongings if they don't perform [1]. Meanwhile it's next to impossible to fire a govt employee for bad performance.

Maybe the solution is to fill the govt with mediocre H1B employees, not pay govt employees even more without accountability if they don't perform.

[1] https://www.timesnownews.com/technology-science/techie-on-h1...

> Those "mediocre H1Bs" work their ass off compared to non-H1Bs because they get laid off/fired and deported on short notice with barely enough or sometimes no time to sell their belongings if they don't perform [1]

H1Bs wouldn’t be so easy to fire if the skillset were rare or difficult to fill.

Instead, companies are gaming the H1B lottery to create much lower-paid indentured servants while a sliver of the business rakes in 40% to 60% of the spread.

And the Federal government employees are paid at the same level or less.

I don’t find the H1B abuse defensible, but certainly a useful discussion point on relative salaries.

> H1Bs wouldn’t be so easy to fire if the skillset were rare or difficult to fill.

By the same token a good chunk of government employees would be paid higher if their skillset were rare or difficult to fill, and they worked hard. The good ones that work hard switch to the private sector, even if the pay isn't much higher, so that they can get stuff done and not be surrounded by folks just existing while collecting a paycheck.

Within your disdain for government workers is a small sliver of truth. One problem with the Federal government--and why contractors are preferred--is that Government Schedule pay is decent for some jobs and insufficient for others.

For software engineers--and the reason contracting is better--is that government schedule pay is far below market. But you see the same problem even in private industries like Lockheed Martin, where the brightest engineers (with security clearances) are really doubling/moonlighting with other jobs and the managers look the other way.

Also: The private sector is extremely inefficient, when it's handling areas of high upfront costs/high risk. Private military companies

If you want to defund government, start by tearing down the TSA which nobody in any party believes is anything but a job-creating sham. Of course, the loudest calls for defunding or non-growth are for deparatments that provide real value--like the FDA or the IRS.

So while you're happy the government is being defunded, most US citizens don't feel like promoting a national security problem for short-term gains.

The US government spent $6.1 TRILLION dollars in 2023. I don't think raising taxes is the solution to the government offering a more competitive wage.

Is your entire argument that it's a really big number? Are we afraid of big numbers? How much do you think it should spend? It's the federal government, they do a lot of stuff. Stuff costs money. We can complain about how they spend the money, or that the money is being wasted or stolen, but pointing out that it's a big number isn't a very convincing argument.

That number is meaningless without also considering US GDP (even if you write trillion in caps). The US averages about 14% government spending as a fraction of GDP, placing it at ~90/140. For the size of the US economy, spending should be significantly higher.

You are ignoring state government expenditures.

>...The US government's Bureau of Economic Analysis as of Q3 2023 estimates $10,007.7 billion in annual total government expenditure and $27,610.1 billion annual total GDP which is 36.2%.[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending_in_the_Uni...

>For the size of the US economy, spending should be significantly higher.

The percentage shot up during the Covid spending and is still slightly above the historical average.

Is this actual spending, or are you rolling pass-through savings programs into this? Cause the caveat there is people always seem to want to count the outflow but not the associated inflow…

The single most well funded organization the world has ever seen struggles to pay the market rate, which the government also regulates?

This is a straw man. Even if the top richest people paid an additional 16 billion in taxes that would run the gov for like a day. Our problem is with spending.

I agree. We don't spend enough money on everything, most notably housing.

The top earners only need so many houses and places to live, even including corporate housing.

The median population doesn’t have the money to spend.

Isn't that a problem caused by inflation which is driven (right now) by gov spending.

No. Artificial inflation where the median wage doesn't adjust is from a handful of key industries and it's rippled across.

Focusing on government spending is a distraction.

How can we possibly spend more?

I’m not sure where that 16 billion figure came from, but what about the top 100 businesses?

The ones that have been gaming the tax system for 3 decades?