It sucks by design compared to current markets and our job functional areas. Back in the 70s it was absolutely awesome pay in a region that wasn’t terribly expe

It sucks by design compared to current markets and our job functional areas. Back in the 70s it was absolutely awesome pay in a region that wasn’t terribly expensive, but when the top n% of intelligence community engineers could easily go to a Big Tech company paying twice or three times as much it’s factors like ideology, mismatch of skills, or family that keep people in these jobs. In many other areas of government jobs, private sector pay is abysmal and the government jobs attract the best and brightest. In my indirect experience with Lockheed, their pay wasn’t that much better than being federal (they’re still a huge federal contractor and aren’t exactly boutique). It seems like a lot when you’re used to $80-90k as a senior engineer though for years to bump into $110k on a whim (this is without being particularly special or niche, the over-funded “cyber” contracts get anyone that can read and write shellcode $140k+ which is a ton of people at NSA). The much bigger problem hitting defense as a whole is that smaller contractors that specialized in being nimble and elite are basically being driven out of business due to federal contracting trend shifts post-sequester. Myself and many others have permanently left the IC out of exasperation with contractors now getting oftentimes less than their federal counterparts and a severe drought of technologically interesting contracts that make business sense.