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Comment by giantg2 | Hacker News Reader

"that's at least 500k in salaries even for the lowball public sector"

I'm not sure I agree with the approach, but this seems overstated. At least from an engineer perspective, there are sub-$70k engineer jobs. That four person team could be $250k. Also, they could be pulling that internally instead of external hires.

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Those teams will be tasted with heavy responsibilities (or at least workload) and most of them will want to compensated accordingly. Also, even for low paid jobs you're overlooking benefits, pension contributions etc.

While some of them might be internal hires, to the extent that they were previously productive, those jobs will have to be replaced, and to the extent that they were not, they will be incentivized to make broad decisions whose eventual costs may fall upon the public in terms of lower responsiveness or less effective outcomes or the loss of impartiality.

That GS-8 or whatever making $70k probably costs 50% or double that after benefits

Yeah, with benefits will be higher. Maybe 50% at most for gov jobs.

The US government has standard pay tables. My understanding is that the grades are determined by experience. They couldn't pay skilled workers less than their rate.

Have you looked at the USA jobs gov site? I've seen low paying engineering jobs.

Some of these agencies have IT infrastructure meant to accommodate thousands of people. Many have convoluted structures to protect data; webs of contractor-led programs that are barely connected. You really think an engineer that will accept 70k pay is going to even understand what's going on?

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