> This problem would be much less severe if the military could hire software pros directly at anywhere near fair market value. I think this is a big piece of i

> This problem would be much less severe if the military could hire software pros directly at anywhere near fair market value. I think this is a big piece of it, and we see this at NASA too. It's hard to convince experienced software engineers to start out in gov't service at ~$50k (roughly a GS-9 master's graduate degree level), and there is very little that individual agencies can do to pay more reasonable market rates. Turning to contractor companies is one option, but the overhead tends to be massive.