I'm in no way trying to contradict your comment that $200k is a lot of money in the United States.

I'm arguing that if you're capable of performing cyberwarfare, $200k is a fairly low salary. The $122k median "cyber security professional" is including a lot of people with CCNAs who configure firewalls for a living.

Ok, so cyber warfare operators make a median of $144k per year. Higher, but $200k is still over one third above that.

> The perspective on money here is wild.

The kind of people that tend to read about tech for fun, and have enough of an opinion on it to post, tend to be lean above average? At least I certainly like to think of myself as such.

People here are just remarking on what it would take to get them to take a job in the military.

"The kind of people that tend to read about tech for fun, and have enough of an opinion on it to post, tend to be lean above average?"

Sure, but they also tend to understand the importance of data and bias. So things like looking at the median instead of making assumptions would be expected more on here than other places.

But even knowing the median, that would just mean that you are objectively in a good position relative to the median.

You aren’t likely to compare compare yourself to the median, but to those whom you consider your peers. If you peers all have higher compensation, you’ll feel bad, regardless of the fact you are objectively in the top 90% of compensation for your role.

Maybe if someone is doing shotty analysis or is a narcissist. It's unlikely anyone knows what their peers are making without estimates relative to the median. It's also unlikely someone can even self-evaluate accurately without employment/comp data. Even something like levels.fyi doesnt go into actual attributes but basically what level someone is at a company. As an example, how does the defined benefits package in the military compare with the 401k model, especially considering for someone leaving the military and getting into the 401k model late (reduced compounding)? In many cases, a rational person in that sort of situation may see that the lower pay might not actually result in lower total compensation.

The real point is that you can still pull competent professionals under $200k because that's an attractive number to the majority of cyber warfare operators or cyber security professionals being that it's at least $50k over the median for either. Reducing that to $150k is still somewhat to slightly over the medians for either, and thus still a financially attractive number to the majority of the candidate pool. Money isn't the real issue here, it's the other restrictions, culture, etc.

The median cyber security professional reads the results of security scanners and then turns them into Jira tickets. That's not even remotely the same skill set that we're talking about here.

Most of the people working in government CNO are just operators. They're pushing buttons in a GUI when they're told to.

They aren't writing exploits or developing tools. Most (though certainly not all) of that work is done by contractors on very good money, or purchased from industry.