Fish Out of Water: The Military Is an Impossible Place for Hackers, What to Do

Re:Fish Out of Water: The Military Is an Impossible Place fo... by Jtsummers on Sunday October 13, 2024 @06:47PM (#41832411)

No, because there are pay caps for federal employees. Often private companies can hire at a pay equivalent to 1-3 grades higher (or more) than the billets the government has for their equivalent people.

GS-12/13 is a common working level for these jobs. Even on the cyber side which gets a 25% or so incentive pay on top, it's not competitive with what industry would pay. And only a handful of truly critical programs might, might, be able to get GS-14/15 billets for their technical staff, that'll still only be for SMEs with years of experience or certain key skillsets. Above GS you start requiring congressional appointments as well, and they aren't going to setup hearings so they can pay people over $200k, it's easier to get a contractor willing to pay that much.

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Re:Fish Out of Water: The Military Is an Impossible Place fo... by thaumasiotes on Sunday October 13, 2024 @06:55PM (#41832474)

That is a question of whether they're allowed to hire people, not whether they can afford to.

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Re:Fish Out of Water: The Military Is an Impossible Place fo... by Jtsummers on Sunday October 13, 2024 @06:58PM (#41832491)

Then why did you write:

> if they can afford to pay Anduril to hire those people, they can more easily afford to hire the same people themselves.

They can't afford to hire the same people because they can't (as in, they legally cannot) pay the salaries those people are going to demand. That's what I was responding to. The gov't cannot afford to hire the same people themselves, they can hire other people at lower salaries but not the same people.

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Re:Fish Out of Water: The Military Is an Impossible Place fo... by thaumasiotes on Monday October 14, 2024 @06:25AM (#41836107)

Because that's obvious? Hiring someone is always cheaper than hiring someone else to hire the original person.

You can't transform something into an affordability problem by wishing. Do you think giving the government more money would solve their hiring problem? No? Then their hiring problem isn't related to what they can afford.

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Re:Fish Out of Water: The Military Is an Impossible Place fo... by jki275 on Sunday October 13, 2024 @10:23PM (#41833645)

13 is basically the max unless you get into management. There are a very few 14 positions and nearly no 15s.

Almost no one in tech gets into SES, and they wouldn't want to -- SESs don't write software.

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