Why would I work in person for less money when I can work remote? For in person work on critical applications like satellites, I'd expect (spitballing here) a staff eng to be making 300k base with substantial bonus/espp on top. Consider that most midsize tech companies are going to pay staff level 200k or above and ask how the company in question compares, before pricing in the crushing inflexibility of in person work.

Because the work is fulfilling and meaningful?

the average defense job is the exact opposite of fulfilling and meaningful

Not if you like showing roughly the same set of slides 5x per week in meetings with roughly the same set of people in each one

That's the line they gave all my peers who went into public interest and non-profits. Most of them left from burnout or because the low pay and high demands were exploitative.

Here's the trick these mission-oriented employers don't want you to know: you can use the freedom that money affords in order to build meaningful and fulfilling aspects into your life outside of work.

this is what church is for

That’s what they want you to believe so they can pay you less than Google. Meanwhile the googlers got rich and are doing fulfilling and meaningful work on their own pace once they quit.

If you think the gov’t work is actually more meaningful and fulfilling than what anyone at Google has been doing, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

Working on banner ads is the kind of thing you will tell your grandkids about.

The only folks I know who were doing actual meaningful gov’t work couldn’t tell their grandkids about it either. Still classified.

I assume people find meaning in different ways (perhaps I was being unfair to the tech-advertising business). I've always thought the Library of Congress, Smithsonian, NASA, or the National Park Service might potentially be amazing places to work, depending on the role. Looking at a full list of federal government agencies it doesn't seem crazy to me that people could find meaningful work in some of the others.

Nothing as meaningful as maintenance programming at Google, of course. At least the paychecks wouldn't be as meaningful.

That’s a good reason to pay more sense you want the best and brightest to work on fulfilling and meaningful problems

Defense contractors don’t give the government a discount for “fulfilling and meaningful” projects. It’s “f-you, pay me.”

Why should employees of that industry give the employer a discount?

My mortgage is meaningful too

Shame my mortgagor doesn't accept fulfillment and meaningfulness as payment options.

> I'd expect (spitballing here) a staff eng to be making 300k base with substantial bonus/espp on top

This is a fairytale in DoD work and while I think there's room for us to improve our compensation I'm not sure this is a reasonable number at the moment. Please don't flame me for this, just sharing my opinion. I work on a critical DoD new-work project.

The only way to achieve that number in this sector would be private consulting with a very strong network. I will say that it's a very easy world to network in, at least in my experience. I also find the work and location I'm in very meaningful and interesting compared to most of the private sector work accessible to me at this point in my career.

I don't think as many people love remote work as HN suggests. We have an extremely flexible hybrid and PTO policy here, and we're in a great midsize city that people love living in.

This is just a random jumble of thoughts in response. Cheers

I appreciate your insider perspective and insight here. I realize that most industries don't pay their engineers like tech companies do. I just wish that we as workers instead of accepting less would instead agitate for better wages across the board. I previously left a very engaging pharmaceutical research job to work in finance because the money I was leaving on the table got to be too much for me to justify, regardless of how much I enjoyed the work.

That number shows up very often for the Principal SWE LCAT on contracts serving agencies at Ft. Meade.

I don't work for the DoD, but announcing it seems like bad OPSEC?

In that case I am obviously joking

Always good to wrap up those loose ends.

Yeah, it just sounds like the ole "no one wants to work anymore" line when really it's you're not paying enough.

We pay $400-700k for L4-L6 and we have a hard time finding qualified candidates.

Then it’s not enough. This isn’t hard.

Your statement is trivially true in terms of market mechanics, but considering that $400k/yr for an individual puts him in the 99th percentile of all income earners in the US, the argument gets a little harder to make.

I reckon a L4-L6 engineer should be in the 99th percentile of talent and value for US workers so I don’t see the problem.

"400k" (he/she says they work for a private company so they haven't told us how much of that is actual cash in hand) and also in an unknown location which could be the bay area which in that case, just go work for Google/Meta/Netflix and make that money in cash/RSUs.

Yeah it's SF/Seattle/Chicago

$400k is base + bonus

I fail to see how the argument got harder, please enlighten me how the fact that other people make less means this job should pay less even though it currently can’t attract the talent they want

Maybe they haven't advertised the job anywhere.

Define "qualified".

Can design and launch a software product that will scale to 100M reqs/day on pretty much unlimited infrastructure.

It's also fintech, so there is no room for error.

That's extremely vague. What kind of requests? Scale to 100M requests a day with any budget for infrastructure? Or is just choosing naive autoscaling without considering costs not ok? Are the requests evenly spread out throughout the day?

What do you mean "no room for error"? Every networked application has errors. Do you mean that the application should never throw an error? Or that errors should always be retried an infinite number of times? Or that requests should not get dropped and should be guaranteed to me handled? And how do you guarantee that? It is quite impossible to have an application that serves 100M requests a day from real users and have 0 errors or dropped packets.

I'll take it. My resume probably doesn't match your qualifications, but hey I'm sure you guys are willing to train people up where they're deficient, right? For that kind of pay, I'd never leave - surely me being a drag on productivity for 6 months while I come up to speed is an acceptable trade, right?

Do you work in big tech, high finance, or private equity?

midsize fintech "startup" 1500 employees with ~$2B ARR.

I’m interested, work in finance, and am in Chicago. How do i apply?