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Comment by Johnny555 | Hacker News Reader

Hmm...you have to move to Washington DC to work for them, they won't pay for relocation, salaries are capped by federal pay grades and are lower than a tech company in SF or Seattle would pay, no bonuses (or stock options, obviously).

I'm sure they have some bright (and altruistic) employees, but I'm not sure the best engineers in the world would work there when they can earn far more compensation at a tech company.

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Many people want to make software for the public good via the public sector. For some, the opportunity to do that outweighs the benefits of earning top-of-the-line paychecks.

It seems deeply cynical to correlate geographic areas with salaries and infer that the best engineers in the world will be drawn there, bar none. There are other incentives. Some might even say that engineering of this sort is better executed, or more trustworthy, when performed by people with civic motivations rather than mercenary ones.

You need to move to DC to work for USDS (https://www.usds.gov/join#relocation), but you can work for 18F from anywhere in the US (https://18f.gsa.gov/join/). The login.gov team includes both USDS and 18F team members (as the blog post says).

Also the salary cap is $161,900, as shown in this pay grade table for SF: https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries... Not a top-of-the-line private sector salary, but not some kind of hardship.

160k is a run of the mill senior engineer salary.... The best engineers in the world can earn 300k or more in Silicon Valley. It takes an altruistic engineer to give up half his salary to work for the public.

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