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Comment by jvanderbot | Hacker News Reader

I'm responsible for hiring exactly the kind of engineers we're talking about. We can't pay as much on gov dime, and equity is nonexistent, but we have some of the best, domestic engineering teams around doing amazing things.

Our people go on to work at (eg) SpaceX and to found exactly the kind of startups that we're all dog whistling about. (Lars Blackmore?). Lean, focused, fast and providing valuable services to gov and private industries.

This discussion about how 'the government' cannot 'do this' is a vague rorschach blot that reveals people's own motivations only, and ignores the completely different priorities gov has. Do you believe the deep technical expertise that gov-funded experts are surely providing to Ukraine would be posted on Twitter?

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For essential services, the government should be paying competitive salaries with the private industry. Contracting rarely makes things cheaper due to all the grift and lack of persistent oversight.

The government probably needs to build a whole new pay schedule for tech workers because they just don’t fit into the General Schedule. This would require an act of congress and I think they are going to have a hard time making the decision to pay government tech workers more than people like the director of the FBI, secretary of defense, senators, etc.

Look into SETA, HQE, IPA, and SGE. I'm surely missing some.

* SETA: Systems Engineering and Technical Assistance contractor

* HQE: Highly Qualified Expert

* IPA: Intergovernment Personnel Act detail

* SGE: Special Government Employee

> We can't pay as much on gov dime

It's just taxes, we definitely could.

The fact that we don't has a lot more to do with government culture and a post-Reagan idea that the government should be a thin and highly reactive operation than the money not being there.

I know several people working as engineers for government contractors and they all make well over the top of the GS Pay Scale, and that's before other benefits like profit sharing.

Even if Congress corrected for that, they'd still be locked into slow moving pay raises, and they'd probably become a political target at some point, when some anti-spending congressperson begins harping on how there are so many federal employees make a quarter million dollars a year.

Being a military contractor, for better or worse, inoculates you from a lot of politics. So, yes, the government could pay competitively, but I would be leery about accepting such a position.

Contract =/= gov't.

The way to make money working for the gov't is to get an established company to price gouge them through contracts so you can make a living wage.

The gov't is wasting a huge amount of money paying a 100% premium for engineers because they aren't allowed to pay what the market demands.

A "data entry specialist" and PhD scientist are paid off the same pay scale at different levels, which is great for equality but kind of difficult when you are trying to pay $31k (which is what someone with a BS in CompSci would get, GS-5) for someone who is going for $150k.

If you have experience or a master's, they'll pay you $51k.

It's absurdist. The GS scale caps out at $143k at GS-15 and requires a PhD and probably decades of work.

Mathematically, sure. But good luck explaining to a farmer in Iowa why you're paying a 28-year old $250k/yr to "do computers" for the VA. And that's ignoring the legal hurdles to paying some government employees $250k/yr and continuing to pay everyone else around them the same garbage GS wages.

Aren't there already people not on GS anyway? From researching, it seems like other areas have already figured out how to do this: NSA and "some parts of the Navy" are both called out as using non-GS pay scales.

I don't see why they can't have like "Advanced Science" wage table, to compete for the best engineers and scientists rather than hiring either bottom of barrel or end of career people.

I make much more right now with 8 YoE than my boss in the gov't did and he had a PhD with 20 YoE.

Well, why am I paying a farmer in Iowa not to grow potatoes?

exactly, who the hell would want to work for the US government when they can work for spacex? i worked as a contractor to multiple DOD projects in the past, it was incredibly bureaucratic and the quality of engineers that were involved was very low compared to the private sector.

I get that space and defense are apples to oranges, but there is no reason to think it is significantly different.

> who the hell would want to work for the US government when they can work for spacex?

Can a SpaceX employee comment here? Work at SpaceX looks stressful. Elon Musk looks like a workaholic asshole expecting all their employees to do the same, but without getting rich. Maybe government work is boring by comparison, but you get a personal life.

My good friend worked on the landing faring (those strut things that flare out when it gets near the ground) for the Falcon 9. He said it almost killed him. Now he builds decouplers and other mechanisms for planetary rovers and enjoys it just fine.

One of the members of my group just left for SpaceX last year, because he just wanted to work somewhere else for a change. He was one of the better FSW engineers we had seen, and I'm sure he's helping SpaceX do great things!

Another friend of mine went off to Amazon to oversee their warehouse automation.

And we just hired a bunch of really stellar folks from NG who were fed up with their workplace. They seem to love it here.

It's an industry. Changeover is pretty normal.

https://www.teamblind.com/company/SpaceX/

They have an atrocious Work-Life Balance rating and reputation. Like bottom 2%. Expect their mission to become your life’s mission; 50-60 hour weeks.

50-60 hours a week doesnt seem super crazy to me, if you dont have kids

I think you read the opposite of my intended message. I work with the best, and we take from, found, and give to all the best companies as well. It's a point of pride that we compete with them ( as a workplace) with much less pay. Fostering a highly technical workforce for the nation and helping commercial space is part of our mission.

How do you know you work with the best? Wishful thinking?

Why would any smart person want to work long term at a low paying job for a tyrannical government with extremely frustrating bureaucratic processes?

The best leave often apparently, how many of the best engineers actually stay for years?

Ha there's so many assumptions (driven by bad experience -- I'm sorry about that). But I don't know where to begin.

One indication that I work with the best is where they go when their work here is done. In some cases, the finest work e.g. SpaceX has done is done with our alumni in leadership and contributor positions.

Another indication is top tier publications. Or the fact that our tech does what has never been done before by definition.

Another indicator is how many people are willing to work for a pay cut to be here and work on what we do. Speaking of coming from SpaceX and every major aerospace company.

Another indication comes from the partnerships we have where we collaborate as equals with any of those mythical "better" places.

It may not fit your world view or experience, but it is possible for good people with top notch skills to choose a career that does not focus solely on pay. We just work in an unprofitable domain. We don't work with incompetent people.

JPL is such an outlier it's not even worth talking about in this discussion

I meant that there isn't the non-contracted manpower, because in a lot of places 90% of the staffing is contracted to SIs with a skeleton crew of govies for legalities sake. There are a LOT of programs whose project plan is set in stone by the contract, and are simply unable to change course (especially once the SI puts their lobbyists on it).

All to avoid pension liabilities, allow downsizing that can't be blocked by a union, and provide a layer of indirection to coders being paid anything close to market rates. We need a way to hire more full-time govies, but the culture has swung so hard to contracting that there are only small pockets left of in-house talent.

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