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Comment by nodesocket | Hacker News Reader

I whole heartedly agree. The problem with government tech positions is they are not even competitive. Instead of hiring three mediocre or less than mediocre engineers at $60k, why not hire an amazing $150k - $180k engineer? I’m pretty sure they have ceilings on positions just so people don’t get outraged at government salaries, but incidents and times like these prove government needs to be competitive with private business to attract talent. Especially in national security and healthcare roles.

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> Instead of hiring three mediocre or less than mediocre engineers at $60k, why not hire an amazing $150k - $180k engineer?

In many cases, it's literally not legal for them to do so.

For example, at the Federal level: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Schedule_(US_civil_ser...

(These restrictions don't tend to apply to hiring one via a contractor at $250-500k/year, though. Sigh.)

Can’t hire a contractor at that rate either. DCAA controls that very closely.

If a defense contractor wants to pay someone that kind of money they generally have to pay the difference between what dcaa allows and that price out of their own overhead.

What's the difference between "overhead" and "salary" for the contractor? If they charge 500k for the job and give 250k to their employee, it doesn't really matter whether they billed him at an hourly rate of $30 or $300.

Overhead comes out of company budget. The company has to make it up. They can't charge 500k for the job, they can charge whatever the DCAA approved labor rate for the engineer is per hour. Anything else they want to charge the gov for they have to pay out of their pocket.

Actually I didn't phrase that right. Anything else they want to pay the engineer they have to pay for out of pocket -- they can't charge the government for it.

> These restrictions don't tend to apply to hiring one via a contractor at $250-500k/year, though.

They very well may have to go that route, i.e. some greybeard independent contractor that can name their price. It's a very limited skillset and God knows this ain't the kind of work that gets the super talented motivated.

Dad started out as a COBOL programmer before he got distracted by management and decided being a PM was a better path. This was his explainer to me once:

To hire someone who can do the job reasonably quick and well is really expensive no matter how you slice it. Consider it a 'job well done' if you can persuade them to:

a) Un-retire

and

b) Come out of said retirement to do actual work in the trenches again - as opposed to management.

In the private sector, these people have probably made the equivalent of GS-15 Step 10 for years if not decades. Good luck trying to convince them to jump back in for what is essentially a pay cut.

About ten years ago I worked for a consulting company that did lots of work for our state government. One particular state agency wanted to hire me to maintain the system we built for them but it would have been a nearly 50% pay cut. The only people they were able to hire on that pay scale were those who moved on the first chance they got from the private sector. Each time they'd end up giving us a contract to take care of things during the interim period and then train whoever they hired. Went through three cycles of that until I changed companies. Who knows, maybe they're still going through cycle after cycle of hire, programmer leaves, big contract the consulting company, train new person to take over. There's no way it was cheaper than just paying someone the going open market rate but the state pay schedule for that job classification simply won't allow it.

They aren't equipped to vet talent. If they hire a mediocre engineer for $180k, their situation has not improved.

> why not hire an amazing $150k - $180k engineer?

If you're making that kind of money, you have a lot better options than working on some ancient COBOL system that processes unemployment claims.

> If you're making that kind of money, you have a lot better options than working on some ancient COBOL system that processes unemployment claims.

There's more to life than money and tech. I'm sure there are plenty of people who would be happy to work on a boring tech stack in helping to address possibly the largest public crisis many of us will see in our lifetimes vs. working with the new fad of the week in pursuit of selling ads marginally more efficiently.

Then the strategy of undervaluing the work of creating and maintaining robust systems will be validated.

Why spend the money and invest now for the future, when you can lean on people to donate their efforts in times of crisis?

> Why spend the money and invest now for the future, when you can lean on people to donate their efforts in times of crisis?

First, no one said anything about donating effort...the scenario was getting paid a decent, if not quite FAANG, salary to work on an older tech stack. And sure, you _could_ take that approach. We tried it with pandemic preparation, let's see how that works out.

It's really not sustainable or realistic to rely on altruism. Taking a huge pay cut to work on awful systems nobody wants to deal with exceeds how much nearly anyone is willing to help.

Just giving a frigging UBI for at least the duration of this crisis would solve all of these problems and work much better.

Conversely, if you would choose COBOL in response to being offered $150K, you might well be a worse hire than someone who would do it for $60K.

150-180k total comp isn't that high of a salary for an engineer. It's above average I'd imagine, but probably not even in the top 20th percentile. As such, for 150-180k you should be able get a pretty decent (yet unexceptional) coder.

Especially since NJ has the highest property taxes of any state in the US. $150-180K is a very good salary for where I live (Indiana), but not IMO for NJ:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/property-tax-which-homeowners-a...

I have a pipeline of good to great engineers wasting time in NJ State Universities and Govt agencies moving into my company. Great hunting grounds for people who can grow.

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