Hacker News has a disproportionate population of people who work in fields and locations where you can easily expect to make six figures straight out of college, and as a result HN has some seriously skewed ideas about how much money is "real" money. When I got my first programming job (in the mid-'00s, in a town with a population of ~250,000) I made $15 an hour. I was absolutely delighted to get it, and it was enough to live well and save some money besides.
Of course, $22.60 in modern Seattle is less impressive, depending on whether he lives in the city proper or in the suburbs. But you can't expect tax-funded jobs to have the same kind of ridiculous salaries that Amazon and Google can afford to pay. And the guy's an activist. This has got to be a dream job for him--a chance to make a difference in something he's passionate about. Some things are worth more than money.
> initially, at least, on a three-month trial basis to work on redaction and disclosure of data.
The '90s ended a long time ago.
Don't get me wrong, I think he should make as much as he can get away with making, but 22.00 an hour really isn't scraping the bottom of the barrel for programming work in a lot of places, not even in the US.
I live in a pretty cheap area of the US, and the only place I've seen jobs paying that poorly is on odesk (and most of these jobs are taken by people in low cost of living countries).
If you're working for $22 an hour, you're selling yourself short.
Uh, seriously? This is less than what high school kids routinely get paid to do HTML ($30/hr, and that was in the 90s)